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Joe Biden was visiting Pittsburgh while nearby JVP protesters demanded a ‘ceasefire’ that would save Hamas. One of the protesters was Talya Lubit, a recent college graduate, who told the media, “We’ve been begging and pleading for a ceasefire for six months now.”
Three months later, Lubit, who had been active in anti-Israel rallies and petitions, vandalized a synagogue. Arrested alongside her was Mohamad: a self-described “Hamas operative”.
“I can literally feel myself starting to see Jews as my enemies,” Lubit messaged Mohamad.
The story of Mohamad Hamad and Talya Adira Lubit, a Hamas supporter who practiced building bombs and an anti-Israel leftist who had grown up in the Jewish community, going after a synagogue is also the larger story of the Jewish leftist romance with Islamic terrorism.
Talya Lubit, who came from a traditional pro-Israel Jewish home, had decided to pursue Middle East Studies at a college that specialized in social justice where Israeli hummus had been banned by the Student Senate and where an encampment had been set up for Gaza.
Despite being raised in a conservative Jewish household, Talya abandoned Judaism, adopted veganism and became an animal rights activist. “Sometimes it’s as if we forget that we are animals and we kind of set ourselves above as if we are this higher creature.”
As a Middle East Studies student, Talya became obsessed with Arab Islamic culture. A profile that appears to be hers claimed that she found “Arabic and many aspects of Middle Eastern culture” to be “incredibly beautiful.” Somewhere along the way, Talya met Mohamad.
Mohamad Hamad, according to the indictment, “referred to himself as a ‘Hamas operative,’ sent a picture of himself wearing a headband with the Hamas logo to another associate, and exchanged messages with another individual regarding building an explosive device, including a video of a test detonation.”
Even while Hamad was promoting an Islamic terrorist group, he was also working on the maintenance squad for the Pennsylvania Air National Guard’s 171st Air Refueling Wing until he was “barred from the facility in mid-September” for unknown reasons.
Together, Talya and Mohamad bonded over messages “during which they planned their vandalism activities and specifically discussed selecting Jewish targets.”
“If I join you in doing graffiti on this building it matters to me that it is done in good taste,” Talya Lubit insisted at one point. She worried about “trying to make it ugly and abnoxious” and “like borderline desecration of religious place”.
The “good taste” graffiti that the duo settled on was the red ‘inverted triangle’ used by Hamas and its supporters to mark Jewish targets for death underneath the words ‘Jews 4 Palestine’ .
Lubit described the synagogue vandalism as “a last ditch attempt at staying Jewish.”
The anti-Israel activist who had been raised in a pro-Israel Jewish household before undergoing years of indoctrination on a radical college campus wrote that, “I can literally feel myself starting to see Jews as my enemies”.
Mohamad Hamad bought the spray paint and googled Jewish synagogues to target in the Pittsburgh area. Talya Lubit served as the human shield for the ‘Hamas operative’. And like other anti-Israel protesters of Jewish origins, she still does. Their function is to pretend that Muslim attacks on Jews are not antisemitic, but a political statement about a war.
And yet Lubit’s own text messages showed that it was all about hating Jews.
The partnership so often seen between Hamas and its leftist accomplices, some like Jewish Voice for Peace, If Not Now, T’ruah and J Street claiming to be Jewish, was perfectly represented in the synagogue vandalism that eventually led to the arrest of the hateful duo.
The vandalism combined their dishonest claim that it was possible to support terrorists while being Jewish with a call to murder Jews.
The rally at which Lubit had protested Biden had featured Jewish Voice for Peace activists. JVP’s Pittsburgh chapter had also been very much involved in campus encampments.
Students at nearby college encampments had been chanting “Jews for Palestine” at their anti-Israel rallies. “Jews for Palestine” is an organizing name and hashtag used by various anti-Israel groups who claim to be Jewish including Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP). Some of these groups serve as front groups for Islamist organizations tied to Hamas.
It’s not clear if Talya Lubit had any formal association with the JVP hate group, but she appeared to have taken part in at least one of its rallies and had signed a letter in support of Rep. Summer Lee and against Israel backed by multiple figures from the hate group.
Other signers of the letter beyond Lubit included Allie Levin, who heads the local Jewish Voice for Peace chapter and Alexandra Weiner, a member of the hate group’s local chapter.
Alexandra Weiner, a professor at the University of Pittsburgh’s Department of Mathematics, a transgender man who identifies as a woman and an anti-Israel activist who identifies as Jewish had been accused by a student of saying that he supported “the liberation of Palestine through armed resistance against all of Israel by any means necessary” and “supports the killing of any Israeli or Zionist colonialist.”
Weiner has told the media that he started taking hormones on Oct 7 and that his “transition journey is really intertwined with my Palestine activism journey” with the JVP hate group.
The Pittsburgh JVP chapter posted an ad for a vigil on Oct 7 to “honor our martyrs” which is a term used for Hamas terrorists “honoring the long, ongoing struggle of the Palestinian people.”
This is the kind of ugly atmosphere that may have helped radicalize Lubit into partnering with a ‘Hamas operative’ to vandalize a synagogue.
College campuses have become indoctrination centers where the weak minded can be radicalized into becoming the enemies of everything they were raised to believe in. And Talya Lubit, who according to a community source was suffering from psychological issues, was one of them. Radical leftist politics, beginning with militant animal rights activism, was a gateway to eventually accepting and even participating in violence against Jews by Hamas.
Talya’s story is not just a tragedy: it’s a warning.