A Symbol of Hate

Last night in DC two Israelis, staffers at the Israel Embassy, were gunned down outside of the Capital Jewish Museum after an event that was meant to foster unity and celebrate Jewish heritage.

The murders are a personal tragedy. The dead will be grieved by family and friends. As with all people who die too young, their deaths will create a hole in the lives of their loved ones that will never be filled.

Their murders are also a larger tragedy in that the victims were a couple about to be engaged; most people understand through personal experience the rite of passage engagement represents, and the meaning of a couple killed just before they started their life together.

Given that tragedy and what this will become, let us mention their names so that we know them first and foremost as fellow human beings, Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim. I did not know them before today, but I wish I did.

Beyond the personal and social tragedy, their murders are also symbols.

As Americans we don’t speak explicitly of symbology much: the idea that people, objects, and events represent a larger meaning. Symbols are a key method of communication, and therefore almost by definition part of a politician’s stock in trade.

Kilmar Abrego Garcia was adopted as a symbol by the Left. He was meant to symbolize the racist brutality of Trump’s deportation policy, to be the loving husband picked off the street and sent to a brutal foreign prison. The truth that he was a wife-beating, human-trafficking gang banger was besides the point. It was what he could be made into that was important to those who wished to use him as a symbol.

We were treated to another episode of symbolism the other day, when Trump berated the South African president for his treatment of his Afrikaner citizens.

The 59 South Africans of Afrikaner descent who came to the US as refugees are symbols. For Trump and the average person, they are people who are fleeing racial terror and persecution that is intended to eliminate their centuries-old presence in South Africa. For Cyril Ramaphosa’s government and its militias as well as the Left in the West, they symbolize the descendants of Apartheid.

For the Left in this country they are not only “settler colonialists” but an international stand-in for MAGA, placed beyond the pale.

The campaign of terror designed to drive them from a place they have lived in for hundreds of years? For the Left, too bad, so sad.

The murder of Lischinsky and Milgrim, besides the great personal and social loss suffered, is also a symbol and one of several facets.

They died because they were Jewish. The murderer, I will not call him a suspect, yelled “Free Palestine” as he was arrested. He went to the Capital Jewish Museum for much the same reason as Willie “That’s Where the Money Is” Sutton robbed banks, because he knew that’s where he would find Jews.

I don’t know if the murderer, this “Elias Rodriguez,” a member of a radical antisemitic group, went to the Museum specifically to kill Israeli Embassy staffers, but the effect is the same.

The effect is that Rodriguez struck at public symbols of Jewish life in America. He chose the Museum as a target, not just because he knew he would find Jews there but because it held a public event. In the future, given the attack and the virulent public antisemitism growing in America, any Jewish group wishing to hold a public event will have to consider whether they will be the target of another Rodriguez.

The murders of Lischinsky and Milgrim will become symbols of a larger degradation of Jewish participation in American public life.

Rodriguez also struck at the official presence of Israel, a country founded specifically to protect Jews after millennia of persecution, in the United States. Israeli embassies have been targets in other countries for just this reason; they are the global public symbols of a state hated by some of the worst people in the world.

Now, even in DC, Israeli Embassy staffers will have to live in trepidation of going out in public.

Because of this attack the public presence of Jews in American life will be lessened, and what remains will have to be fortified.

What can be done?

Well, the specter of domestic terrorism has descended on America, and despite what Merrick Garland would have had you believe, it’s not the parents of school children, or grandmothers walking between velvet ropes in the Capitol Rotunda, who are responsible. Time for the Trump DOJ to investigate and crack down.

The next step?

I don’t like stepping back, I prefer punching back.

I ran into someone with my cart in a supermarket a few months ago. A stranger, a common interest, a conversation ensued. He mentioned that he spent his Sundays standing watch outside of his church during services, as he said keeping the flock safe from wolves.

Given his being in Maryland, not only was he prohibited from open carry, but by state law he was prohibited from even carrying a gun near his church. So the State of Maryland made him, by virtue of protecting the freedom of religion of his fellow congregants, a criminal.

As we learned from the Nicholas Roske affair three years ago, one of the biggest deterrents to an attack is a visible security presence. However, any believer, Christian or Jewish, should not be made by the law to be dependent on expensive paid security to protect themselves.

We need, just as Steve in the supermarket did, to take responsibility for our own security.

With the murders of Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim, we have crossed into a new world and it’s time to choose sides.

The Trump administration should sue any state which prohibits the open carry of firearms by approved civilians at any religiously-identified event. Preferably, given the irrational fear of the Left of them, AR-15s with high-capacity magazines.

A few members of the synagogue in the parking lot with those rifles will do the trick.

As Glenn Reynolds says, a pack not a herd.

“If you prick us, do we not bleed? if you tickle us, do we not laugh? if you poison us, do we not die? and if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?”