In 2018, 46-year-old Robert Bowers walked into the L’Simcha Congregation synagogue in the Squirrel Hill neighborhood of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania during Shabbat services on Saturday morning. Two other Jewish congregations also rent space to worship there, Dor Hadash, a reconstructionist congregation and New Light, a conservative congregation.
Brandishing a Colt AR-15 semi-automatic rifle and three Glock .357 SIG semi-automatic pistols, Bowers wasted no time as he opened fire on his defenseless victims. He fired first at a window of the synagogue as he approached, then climbed inside to begin his massacre.
“Bowers entered the synagogue through the shattered window and encountered his first two victims: Jerry Rabinowitz of Dor Hadash and Daniel Leger,” reads the account available on Wikipedia. “Both men had a background in medical work. They both ran downstairs from the lobby to investigate the gunshots and check to see if anyone was hurt. Bowers shot Rabinowitz to death at the lower mezzanine before shooting Leger in the abdomen. Leger fell on the stairs and laid there bleeding before being rescued 45 minutes later. Just after Rabinowitz and Leger ran downstairs, Irving Younger and Cecil Rosenthal left the Pervin Chapel and went downstairs to investigate the gunshots. Younger was able to reach the lower mezzanine only to be fatally shot by Bowers. He shouted Rosenthal’s name before dying. Cecil Rosenthal ran back upstairs and tried running into the Pervin Chapel. Bowers quickly followed Rosenthal and shot him to death just as he reached a doorway to the chapel. Just after entering the chapel, Bowers shot Sylvan Simon, who was next to his wife, in the back before leaving the chapel. By 9:54, police began receiving multiple calls from people barricaded in the building and reporting the attack. The first 911 call was made by Sylvan Simon’s wife, Bernice, to report that her husband had been shot at the synagogue.”
By the time Bowers was neutralized with gunshot wounds from police responding to the call, 11 people had been slaughtered and 6 more wounded. It was the deadliest massacre of Jews on American soil in history.
The public outcry was swift to denounce what was later determined to be the act of a disturbed man who had been radicalized by far-right propaganda blaming an influx of asylum-seeking immigrants—referred to at the time as a “migrant caravan” making their way towards the southern U.S. border—on billionaire Jewish leftist George Soros and the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society. President Trump amplified the conspiracy theories, which further stoked Bowers antisemitic fury. Bowers was eventually found guilty and sentenced to death on Aug. 1, 2023.
Long story short: When the perpetrator was a far-right, white, neo-Nazi type, Jews were innocent victims and sympathy overflowed.
Last Sunday, Dec. 14, 2025, heading into the first night of Chanukah, two men, later identified by police as a father-son Islamist duo, opened fire an unsuspecting crowd in Archer Park in Bondi Beach in Sydney, Australia, where a Chanukah celebration was taking place. As of now, the death count stands at 16, including Chabad Rabbis Eli Schlanger and Yaakoc Levitan, a 10-year-old girl named Matilda, and Holocaust survivor Alex Kleytman. The latter died while shielding his wife from the onslaught.
Multiple news outlets have released the identities of the shooters as Sajid Akram, 50, and Naveed Akram, 24. The elder Akram was killed by police on-site; Naveed Akram was wounded and is hospitalized. While official motive hasn’t been released yet, Australian PM Anthony Albanese confirms that the assailants had been motivated by extremist ideology. ABC in Australia reported that “investigators from the Joint Counter Terrorism Team (JCTT), a unit comprised of state and federal agencies, believe the gunmen had pledged allegiance to the (Islamic State) terrorist group. Two IS flags were found in their car at Bondi Beach, according to senior officials speaking on condition of anonymity…A senior JCTT official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said ASIO took an interest in Naveed Akram six years ago after police foiled plans for an IS terrorist attack…Albanese confirmed Naveed Akram first came to ASIO’s attention in October 2019 and was under investigation for a period of six months but there was an assessment he posed no ongoing threat.”
At least one man reportedly stepped in to disarm one of the shooters — an unarmed hero and Muslim man identified as Ahmed al Ahmed, according to the BBC.
This attack comes on the heels of a shooting at Brown University in Rhode Island on Dec. 13, where a lone gunman burst into a classroom, murdered two people and wounded nine others. While the gunman remains at large (a person of interest was detained and then released Monday morning), establishing an official motive remains under investigation. Circumstances, however imply that Jewish hate might have something to do with it, as the Jewish News Syndicate reports: “Rachel Friedberg, teaching professor of economics and faculty associate of the Judaic studies program and of the population studies and training center at Brown, reportedly said that the attack occurred during a review session for her principles of economics class…The professor, whose official Brown biography states that she served, for four years, as an economics professor at Hebrew University of Jerusalem and that her research addresses ‘economics of immigration, specifically econometric analysis of the outcomes and impacts of immigrants in the United States and Israel,’ was reportedly not in the class at the time.”
And just hours after the attack in Sydney, on Sunday night, Dutch police arrested 22 people involved in a protest aiming to disrupt a Chanukah celebration at Concertgebouw Hall in Amsterdam: “Several hundred people gathered near the famous Concertgebouw hall in the evening to protest a performance by Shai Abramson, the Israeli military’s chief cantor…’The police intervened several times to keep the demonstrators at a distance and maintain public order,’ the police said in a statement. Riot police used batons as demonstrators set off smoke bombs, authorities said, adding one officer sustained minor injuries.”
Long story longer: One thing is evident to me this Monday morning as I peruse the social media buzz relating to these attacks, the commentary responding to posts from Jews and those expressing support for the victims of these attacks, and the escalating antisemitism around the world, is that when the perpetrators are not white, far-right, neo-Nazi-types, Jews are to be blamed for all of it.
The murders of students at Brown University and the slaughter of Jews in Sydney and the smoke bombs and melees in Amsterdam are all because Palestine isn’t free yet.
When you target Jews around the world to illustrate how anti-Zionist you are, all you do is remind us why we need Israel in the first place. Whether you’re assaulting Jews in the streets, vandalizing synagogues, desecrating Jewish cemeteries, disrupting Jews at worship, or murdering Jews thousands of miles away from Gaza, it all only drives home the point that we’re safer in our ancestral homeland of Israel than we are elsewhere.
And none of it “frees Palestine.”
