Words have consequences. Deadly words have deadly consequences.
Two staff members of the Israeli Embassy in Washington, Sarah Milgrim, 26, and Yaron Lischinsky, 30, who were attending an American Jewish Committee event on Middle East cooperation, were assassinated on Wednesday because of deadly words.
The alleged murderer, American-born Elias Rodriguez, shouted, “Free, free Palestine.” The two young people were planning to go to Israel in a week for their engagement.
Instead, they will be buried amidst untold grief, sorrow, loss, and anger.
What does “Free, free Palestine” mean? It sure isn’t a cry for peace or coexistence. Rather, it’s a call for the annihilation or expulsion of nearly 10 million Israelis, who live in a land associated with the Jewish people since time immemorial.
How to achieve annihilation? The chants that surely inspired Rodriguez — a left-wing extremist without clear links to Islam and the Middle East — and his fellow travelers, tell the story: “Globalize the intifada,” “We are all Hamas,” “F–k the Zionists,” and “By any means necessary.”
Those are unmistakable calls to hatred, incitement, and violence.
They already led to the murder, in 2023, of Paul Kessler, 69, a pro-Israel demonstrator in Los Angeles, not to mention subway riders in New York being told by masked mobs to leave the train if they were Zionists, Jewish students at Cooper Union barricaded in the school’s library while a frenzied mob hovered just outside, Jewish students at Columbia University being told to study from home if they felt unsafe on campus, Jewish houses of worship desecrated and Jewish businesses spray painted and boycotted.
The list is long and growing.
Hamas, a terrorist group according to the United States and European Union, attacked Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, resulting in the deadliest day for the Jewish people since the Holocaust — 1,200 killed, 251 kidnapped.
In proportional American terms, the fatalities would have numbered 42,000, with more than 8,000 kidnapped.
Yet Hamas and its global network of supporters — whether in governments, the United Nations, nongovernmental organizations, the media, or on campuses — flipped the script. They managed to portray Israel, the victim, as the perpetrator and claim that Israel, the target of a genocidal assault, was, in fact, responsible for genocide by the sheer act of defending itself and seeking the hostages’ rescue.
And in doing so, they repackaged Hamas, arguably the most regressive social movement on the planet, as a “progressive” cause.
That has led to bizarre images of left-wing politicians, not to mention LGBTQ and women’s groups, embracing a cause that opposes everything they purportedly stand for.
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So what happens next? If past is prologue, there’s a flurry of statements voicing “thoughts and prayers,” including from some, like New York politicians Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Zohran Mamdani, who helped peddle the lies about Israel and its friends, but now count on popular amnesia.
And then there are grandiose statements that “Nothing will ever be the same again” and “The memories of the slain victims can never be forgotten.” But I’ll bet that, within days, it may all be the same again, and only a few will recall the lives lost in an act of sheer terror.
But that mustn’t be the end of the story. The stakes are way too high.
Sarah and Yaron lost their young lives because, since Oct. 7, and even before, too many things went wrong. And more innocent people may meet the same fate of political violence in America unless decisive action is taken.
•Free speech is one thing, a hallowed tradition. But when free speech becomes violent speech, when it seeks to incite, when it says some people, like Israelis and Zionists, have no right to live, it has crossed a line, pure and simple, that can’t be ignored or intellectualized away.
•When instigators march around with their faces covered to hide their identity, this must be stopped. In fact, it should have ended long ago. Would anyone today allow the Ku Klux Klan to get away with this at Columbia or Cooper Union?
•When foreign governments, most notably Iran and Qatar, seek to interfere in American domestic affairs and empower the maniacal haters, they must be exposed and confronted. The data is there; it needs to be acted on, not filed away.
•When it comes to antisemitism, the monitoring must be swivel-headed, not partisan. The murders in Washington are another reminder that there are three main sources — far left, far right and jihadist.
•Antisemitism has a long and lethal history. It must never be minimized, rationalized or lumped together with every other “ism” or “phobia” under the sun to diminish its significance and specificity.
•Many university leaders need spinal transplants. They need to stop coddling those who menace other students, incite, disrupt learning, deny passage to Jews crossing the quad or take over buildings.
•And they must stop pretending that faculty members who celebrated the Oct. 7 massacre and seek to indoctrinate their students are fulfilling their responsibilities in the classrooms.
•Appeasing the mob isn’t a strategy; it’s an act of abject cowardice. And that applies as well to too many elected leaders, including, notably, local district attorneys.
Nothing can bring Sarah Milgrim and Yaron Lischinsky back to life. But unless things change, and rapidly, in taking on the elaborate ecosystem in which their alleged assassin was incubated, more lives will be lost and, alas, “thoughts and prayers” will be heard again and again.
David Harris is executive vice chair of the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy (ISGAP).
This story originally appeared on NYPost
