OPINION:
Not so long ago, homicidal antisemitism in America was widely regarded as peculiar to neo-Nazis, White supremacists and other far-right extremists such as Robert Gregory Bowers, who in 2018 killed 11 worshippers and wounded six more at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh.
Meanwhile, within the American left, antisemitism has been metastasizing. Last week, we saw the results.
A college-educated terrorist fatally shot — “allegedly,” if you insist, but he admitted it and there’s the security footage — Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim.
They were young Israeli Embassy staffers, one Jewish, one Christian, though Elias Rodriguez could not have known such things.
What he did know was that they had just exited the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington after an event hosted by the American Jewish Committee. The event focused on providing humanitarian aid, not least to residents of the Gaza Strip.
He shot both in the back and then fired repeatedly when they fell to the ground. After that, he tossed away his weapon and strolled into the museum. “There was a shooting,” he reportedly announced. “People have been shot! Call 911!” A woman tried to calm him. Another brought him a glass of water.
When the police arrived, he pulled out a red keffiyeh and shouted, “Free, Free Palestine!”
Mr. Rodriguez, 31, is a leftist activist, affiliated with the Party for Socialism and Liberation and the ANSWER (for Act Now to Stop War and End Racism) Coalition.
Both groups hate the West, America, Israel and Jews. Does that qualify as intersectionality?
The Party for Socialism and Liberation and ANSWER reportedly receive funding from Neville Roy Singham, a multimillionaire American citizen who makes his home in Shanghai and is married to Jodie Evans, a co-founder of Code Pink. This wacky-left group delights in boisterously disrupting congressional hearings.
Mr. Rodriguez’s red keffiyeh is associated with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a secular, Marxist-Leninist organization. The group receives financial and military backing from Tehran. One of its spokesmen has referred to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps as “blood brothers” and “comrades.”
Designated as a terrorist organization by the U.S., the European Union, and others, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine supports “armed struggle” in alliance with Islamists. The annihilation of Israel is its primary goal.
A hypocrisy worth your attention: Leftists claim to champion “diversity and inclusion,” yet find it intolerable that one tiny Jewish state exists among the more than 20 Arab states and more than 50 Muslim states stretching from western Africa to eastern Asia.
Note, too, that no one who shouts, “Free Palestine!” means to suggest that people in Gaza and the West Bank should be guaranteed freedom of speech, press, religion and assembly, which are rights enjoyed by Jewish, Christian and Muslim Israelis.
Instead, the phrase is employed to express their demand that Israel be Judenfrei, German for Jew-free, the term the Nazis used to describe areas from which Jews had been eliminated through mass murder and/or forced transfers to concentration camps.
During World War II, Muslims intent on Jewish genocide allied with the Nazis.
The most enthusiastic Nazi fellow traveler was Hajj Amin al-Husseini, the grand mufti of Jerusalem and de facto leader of Palestinian Muslims. They did not, in those days, self-identify as “Palestinians,” as did indigenous Jews of the Holy Land.
He spent the war years in Berlin recruiting Muslims for Adolf Hitler’s Waffen-SS and broadcasting Nazi propaganda into the Middle East.
After the defeat of the Nazis, the anti-Zionist project was adopted by the Soviet Union and the Communist International, aka the Comintern.
They refused to recognize Zionism as the national liberation movement of the Jewish people, who reclaimed part of their ancient homeland that for centuries had been occupied by foreign empires and settler-colonists.
Instead, they denounced Zionism as bourgeois and incompatible with proletarian internationalism.
After the declaration of Israeli independence in 1948, they backed Israel’s enemies. They invented the slanderous meme that “Zionism is racism.”
Other radical leftists followed suit. In the 1970s, the Baader-Meinhof Group, also known as the Red Army Faction, denounced Israel as a tool of the capitalist West.
Red Army Faction members trained with the Party for Socialism and Liberation and, most infamously, collaborated with it in the June 27, 1976, hijacking of an Air France flight. After diverting the plane to Entebbe Airport in Uganda, the hijackers separated the Jewish passengers and held them hostage. On July 4, Israeli commandos launched a mission that freed 102 of 106 hostages. The mission leader, Yonatan Netanyahu, older brother of current Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, was the only Israeli soldier killed during the rescue.
The notorious terrorist Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, better known as Carlos the Jackal, personifies not just the alliance of leftist and Islamist terrorists but also their convergence.
Born in Venezuela in 1949, he studied in Moscow and then trained with the Party for Socialism and Liberation. By his count, 2,000 people were killed in more than 100 bombings, assassinations and other attacks he coordinated. Captured by French agents in Sudan in 1994, he was transferred to France and sentenced to life in prison.
Behind bars, he converted to Islam. In 2003, he published “Revolutionary Islam,” in which he praised the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, as a “lofty feat” and expressed admiration for the Islamic Republic of Iran.
He called on “all revolutionaries, including those of the left, even atheists,” to accept the leadership of jihadis because they represent the only “transnational force capable of standing up against the enslavement of nations” by the West.
Today’s slogan, “Globalize the intifada,” is another way of issuing that same command. Mr. Rodriguez, the (alleged) executioner of a defenseless young woman and an unarmed young man, regards himself as such a revolutionary.
Members of the left/Islamist alliance encourage that delusion.
• Clifford D. May is founder and president of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a columnist for The Washington Times and host of the “Foreign Podicy” podcast.
Please read our comment policy before commenting.