The cold-blooded murders of Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim—and the obviously premeditated, horrific arson attack of Jews in Boulder yesterday—represent a rubicon in the relentless march of Jew-hatred enveloping the globe.
It was just a little past 9 p.m., on May 21, local time, when Yaron and Sarah decided to leave the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington D.C. They were attending a reception for young diplomats hosted by the American Jewish Committee. The reception was centered on humanitarian diplomacy specifically, and how to improve the delivery of aid to Gaza.
“The event at the Capital Jewish Museum — an annual gathering for young diplomats hosted by the American Jewish Committee — featured a keynote panel discussion with Israeli and American humanitarian leaders,” said a report in the New York Times. “The panelists spoke about their experiences working together for over a year in Gaza and discussed the potential to expand aid delivery pathways into the Palestinian coastal strip.”
As they exited the building, 31-year-old Chicago resident Elias Rodriguez allegedly walked up to the couple and executed them at close range. According to the Times, citing the affidavit released by the FBI, when the couple fell to the ground after being shot, Sarah Milgrim tried to crawl away as Rodriguez followed behind her, emptying the rest of his clip into her.
“During a pause, while it appeared that he was reloading his weapon, Ms. Milgrim sat up…and Mr. Rodriguez fired several more times,” the Times article said. Rodriguez then walked into the museum, where he was detained by security guards and then arrested by law enforcement officials, who later recovered the 9mm handgun and 21 spent casings at the scene. Rodriguez yelled “Free, free Palestine,” as he was taken away, and said, “I did it for Gaza.”
As more information has been released, the story just gets more heartbreaking. Yaron had just purchased an engagement ring and was planning to propose to Sarah in the coming days, according to NBC News. By all accounts, Sarah was deeply passionate about the pursuit of peace in the Middle East. The young couple met each other at the Israeli embassy in D.C., where they worked together.
Then, on June 1—erev Shavuot, a Jewish holiday celebrating the giving of the Torah to Moses on Mount Sinai—a small group of Jews walked quietly from the Boulder Courthouse as they’ve done weekly for more than 18 months to bring awareness to the hostage crisis in Gaza and remind the world that the hostages must not be forgotten. Just before 1:30 p.m., a man identified as 45-year-old Colorado Springs resident Mohamed Soliman attacked them with Molotov cocktails and a homemade flame thrower. Eight elderly Jews were injured, some of whom had to be airlifted to a specialty burn unit care facility in Aurora. One of those who was badly injured is reportedly a Holocaust survivor. Soliman was caught on video ranting about this group being “Zionists” and “baby killers” and shouting “free Palestine.” FBI investigators say he’d been planning this attack for a year.
It’s important to note that this was not a “protest” or a “pro-Israel” rally, as has been reported by numerous media outlets, who are tripping over themselves to avoid the word “Jew” or “antisemitism” in their headlines:
In fact, the victims of the arson attack are part of the Run for Their Lives organization, a group dedicated solely to bringing attention to the hostages still being tortured by Hamas terrorists in Gaza. The organization outlines their non-political principles on the home page of their website:
- Don’t protest!
- Don’t disturb your neighbors. Do it quietly and don’t block roads. Be polite and peaceful.
- Focus on humanity. This is about innocent children, women, the elderly, and other civilians being held by terrorists—not about the war.
- We encourage carrying flags of all countries from which there are hostages.
It could not be more clear what they’re trying to achieve—and avoid—with this demonstration. There isn’t a political stance in advocating for the release of hostages. Yet they were the targets of hate nonetheless, and their Jewishness wasn’t a coincidence. It’s what the attackers sought out.
And what’s sadder is that for anyone paying any attention at all, this was inevitable, and is almost certainly still just the beginning when it comes to the spilling of Jewish blood on American soil. More than 18 months of ratcheting-up propaganda, a steady diet of misinformation flooding professional and social media channels, and more than 2,000 years of cyclical antisemitism (often referred to as “the oldest hatred”), have brought us to this point.
For example, just before the murders of Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim, United Nations Under-Secretary-General Tom Fletcher told BBC Radio on May 20, “There are 14,000 babies that will die in the next 48 hours unless we can reach them.” That was soon walked back by the United Nations, who acknowledged that the timeline in question according to their own research was potentially 11 months, not two days. Make no mistake, the plight of Gazans caught in this war facing food insecurity is certainly cause for concern, and yet it’s also nowhere near the dire warning uttered by Fletcher. But the damage had been done, and social media was awash in vitriol and horror as supposedly credible news outlets simply ran with the soundbite without bothering to do an ounce of due diligence as to the veracity of the claim:
Six years ago, it was the same kind of sludge concoction that lead to the mass murder of 11 Jews as they worshipped on shabbos at L’Simcha Congregation in Pittsburgh on Oct. 27, 2018. Except in that case, it was a far-right extremist, Robert Bowers, who had been radicalized by the misinformation being propagated by the Trump administration in his first term, blaming the GOP’s favorite Jewish Boogeyman George Soros for funding a “migrant caravan” approaching the United States from Latin America.
And this time, it’s leftist extremists with the smoking gun barrels and flamethrowers, driving home the unassailable proof of the existence of the Horsehoe Theory—at least when it comes to antisemitism. I wrote about this very thing more than 3 months before the Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas terrorist attack on Israelis, slaughtering 1,200 people and taking 250 more hostage. In that piece, I dove into the behaviors and attitudes that have only deepened since, ending that column by saying: “And it leads to catastrophic, bloody consequences.” And here we are.
This point needs to be made: Elias Rodriguez didn’t attack the Israeli embassy. He went to an event hosted by a Jewish organization at a Jewish museum and simply attacked two people he saw coming out of the event. He didn’t confront them and ask them who they were, what their beliefs were, whether they were Zionists, or what their opinions on the Gaza war were. He simply pulled out his weapon and snuffed out their lives, unprovoked. To him, there is no daylight between Zionists, Israelis, and Jews. In Boulder, Mohamed Soliman almost certainly did enough advance planning to know who this group was and what they actually stood for—not an anti-Palestinian group, not a pro-Israel, Zionist group—simply a group of Jews standing up for the release of hostages. And to him, that’s more than enough reason to set them ablaze.
And, much like the way the anti-Israel crowd reacted mere hours after the horrific assault on Oct. 7, the uneducated masses are only too excited to justify and rationalize these atrocities that occurred in our nation’s capitol and now in our own backyard here in Colorado. The commentary across social media is nothing short of barbaric, filled with the vilest antisemitic rhetoric. Cyber trolls have even gone so far as to launch a crypto meme coin in Rodriguez’s “honor.” Many media outlets continue to perform acrobatics to avoid calling either attack an act of “antisemitism,” instead painting it as a political “statement” against Israel (but please, do go on about how Jews control the media, right?).
And it won’t stop here. These two attacks are but just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to antisemitic violence in the United States, and they’re far from the only ones since the Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas rampage into Israel. Synagogues have been burned, Jews have been physically attacked, Jewish businesses have been vandalized, Jewish gravesites have been defaced, and Jewish students have been stalked, intimidated and physically attacked in their schools at every level of education.
And yet, the legions of so-called “anti-Zionists” will continue to deny the inextricable link between their violent rhetoric and escalating violence against American Jews. Students for Justice in Palestine, Columbia University Apartheid Divest and Within Our Lifetime and Code Pink and myriad other groups will continue the call to “globalize the intifada!” and demand that violence be visited upon those of us who support the right of Israel to exist as the indigenous homeland of the Jews, regardless of whether or not we also support the right of Palestinians to peacefully co-exist as neighbors enjoying their own self-determination. These groups aren’t interested in peace—they want the utter and total annihilation of the State of Israel. It’s literally what they chant at their pro-terror rallies.
And they’re happy to burn any American Jew they encounter in order to further that goal.
