Shabbat shalom.
What a horrible week. Just when I thought things couldn’t get much worse, here we are. On Wednesday night, two young Israel embassy staffers in Washington, DC were gunned down outside the Capital Jewish Museum by a man shouting, “I did it for Gaza!”
Let’s not pretend this is an isolated incident. Let’s not delude ourselves into thinking this was just a nut job looking for attention. Let’s call this what it is: the obvious endpoint of 19 months of relentless, institutionalized anti-semitic and anti Israel propaganda perpetuated by the woke left, mainstream media and algorithmic social media platforms. Some sick fuck may have pulled the trigger, but there is a lot of blood on many hands in this latest attack on Jews, Israel and western civilization.
From Clicks to Carnage
Misinformation about Israel isn’t just misguided; it’s dangerous. It transforms moral outrage, however misguided, into murderous conviction. One of the most pernicious and virally repeated lies in recent months is the claim that Israel is committing genocide — specifically, that its military operations are targeting civilians, especially children, with genocidal intent. These claims are not grounded in credible data or legal analysis, but they are emotionally powerful and algorithmically amplified.
Take, for example, a viral re-post by Katie Couric — once one of America’s most trusted news anchors — who shared an unverified claim that “14,000 Gazan babies could be killed in 48 hours” due to the Israeli aide blockade and military actions. The post was not only false, but grotesquely inflammatory. No retraction. No nuance. Just an open accusation that a sovereign nation is planning mass infanticide.
Couric’s post ricocheted through Instagram and X (formerly Twitter), garnering millions of views. It didn’t just misinform — it dehumanized. And when Jews are collectively portrayed as baby killers, it draws on one of the oldest antisemitic tropes: the blood libel. In medieval Europe, that lie led to pogroms. In Washington, D.C., it led to bullets.
Posts like Couric’s are not anomalies. Social media platforms are flooded with doctored images of injured children, videos ripped from context, and slogans like “From the River to the Sea” — which many interpret as a call for the erasure of Israel altogether. These platforms reward emotion over evidence, and outrage over accuracy. In that environment, genocide accusations, apartheid analogies, and Holocaust comparisons become not only common but viral.
And it’s not just influencers or anonymous accounts. Elected officials and academic elites have begun echoing this rhetoric. Terms like “settler colonial state,” “ethnic cleansing,” and “open-air prison” are deployed not to encourage dialogue or reform, but to delegitimize the Jewish state’s very right to exist. Once you do that, violence against its citizens — or Jews anywhere — becomes, in some minds, an act of liberation.
The collapse of rhetorical guardrails — aided by misinformation — blurs the line between opposition to a government and hatred toward an entire people. When campus protests feature chants of “Glory to the Martyrs” or demonstrators mock Jewish students with swastikas and slogans like “Keep the world clean” beside a Star of David, it is no longer political speech. It’s antisemitism masquerading as activism.
The suspect in D.C. reportedly told police he had been “radicalized online” and acted to “defend Palestine.” What was he defending it from? According to his social feed, from genocide, from baby killing, from Nazis in kippahs. These aren’t positions — they’re hallucinations built from viral lies and reinforced by moral cowardice.
Far too often, public figures on the political left who would be first to condemn hate directed at other communities hesitate when the victims are Jewish — especially if they’re Israeli or affiliated with Israel. Representative Ilhan Omar’s initial refusal to condemn the D.C. shooting is part of a pattern: a performative moral relativism that emboldens extremists.
The refusal to draw clear lines — between criticism of policy and incitement, between activism and antisemitism — is no longer an academic concern. It’s a matter of life and death.
The Washington shooting did not happen in a vacuum. It happened in an atmosphere thick with slander, saturated with disinformation, and supercharged by platforms that monetize outrage. Every tweet that falsely accuses Israel of genocide, every influencer post that likens Jews to Nazis, every university president who stays silent as Jewish students are threatened — they all contribute to the same moral collapse.
You don’t need to pull a trigger to be responsible for violence. Sometimes, all it takes is pressing “Share.”
The Radical Left
The last time I can recall such a horrible act of terrorism inspired by misguided morality on the left was way back in the 60’s and 70’s, when The Weather Underground used the Vietnam War protests to ignite their bombs and their communist agenda. It appears that this week’s version of moral stupidity has also been inspired by the left and nurtured by the Pro-Palestinian industrial propaganda complex.
As David Josef Volodzko wrote in his Radicalist Substack, “What is so chilling here is the psychopathic intellectual insulation acts like this, or that of Luigi Mangione, so warmly receive. The woke left simultaneously claims words are violence, even silence is violence, yet justifies the literal slaughter of innocent people so long as the “correct” ethnic group is targeted. Indeed, they are not seen as victims but are blamed even in their death as oppressors….” Volodzko continues,
Make no mistake, just as many moderate Muslims fails to speak out against the horrors perpetrated by their fascistic brothers and sisters in the faith, this act of terrorism was similarly aided by the intellectual left’s failure to confront the ethical cost of its moral confusion and racist hate. This has been a long festering rot and these murders once again reveal the true face of the movement, a movement that has so thoroughly dehumanized Jews that gunning two of them down actually feels to some like a political statement of liberation rather than an echo of the most infamous and brutal oppression the world has ever known. But let’s be even more clear. This was not about Gaza. There were no tanks in downtown Washington. No checkpoints. No troops. There was no “occupation” of this man’s life. This was leftist antisemitism and it happened right in America’s capital. That it was dressed in the language of freedom does not exonerate but rather indicts the culture that gave him moral license.
This ethical collapse, this contagion of borrowed grievance overlaid onto identity politics, is but sociopathy masquerading as social justice. It’s political psychopathy as social contagion, a phenomenon I’ve written about before, but here empathy is parceled out by power dynamics and moral value is indexed to victimhood. This is the psychosis of our age, the idea that the scales of history must be balanced by a pound of flesh while absolving those people with knives by outsourcing blame to systems and structures.
And in that moral outsourcing, the individual loses accountability and what remains is pure will unmoored from truth and aimed at whoever is cast as oppressor. In this case, two young Jews leaving a reception about turning pain into purpose. There is no context that makes the cold-blooded murder of two beautiful young people a matter of debate. Either we recognize this for what it is — a terrorist attack born of ideological rot — or we open the door to more of it. To be sure, we can now expect the left to double-down on their repulsive moral calculus and I fear we can also expect the Trump administration to use this in further targeting pro-Palestinian activists for their speech. But we do not defeat these people by bending on our principles. After all, what makes them our political enemy is precisely that that they chose to take that path in the pursuit of ending oppression. We must not follow in their steps. No ends justify such means. Rather, our means must be an end in themselves.
It’s been a grey and dreary week here in Sharon, MA. But I look out my window at the sun poking through the clouds, and think there will always be sunshine and rays of hope to get us through the tough times. And I can’t help but reflect on the senselessness of it all, and the two precious lives that were destroyed by misguided morality and “idealogical rot”.
Yaron Lischinsky, 30, and Sarah Lynn Milgrim, 26, both Israeli embassy staffers — and an adorable couple engaged to be married. Sarah, an American Jew from Kansas, was reportedly committed to peace building and advancing relations in the Middle East and North Africa while Yaron “always had a smile on his face” and spoke at Wednesday night’s event, sharing “how excited he was to be going back home to spend the Jewish holiday of Shavuot with his family in Israel.”
May their memory be a blessing.
Be careful out there.
Brad out.
Jew News Review 