Anti-Jewish terrorists inspired by the “Free Palestine” movement allegedly have, over the last few weeks:

-- Tried to burn down the residence of the Jewish governor of Pennsylvania Josh Shapiro on the first night of Passover with his family inside, in defense of Palestinians.

-- Executed a young couple leaving a Jewish museum in D.C., chanting “Free, free Palestine!”

-- An illegal immigrant from Egypt shouting “Free Palestine” reputedly used an incendiary device to set fire to a hostage-support march composed of elderly Jewish people, including a Holocaust survivor, in Colorado on Sunday.

While the New York Times’ coverage has been sufficient in identifying the pro-Palestinian nature of the attackers, one key phrase the paper has previously used to describe supposed right-wing domestic terrorism went missing: The arcane wording “stochastic terrorism,” defined in a Times opinion piece as “violence inspired by incendiary speech whose eruption is predictable even if the specific details are not.”

It’s a term hijacked from leftist academia and conveniently deployed against Donald Trump and other Republicans to smear them in general for previous violent incidents in America, like the attack at House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s home.

Yet it has not been applied to the wave of anti-Semitic attacks on American soil, even though the pro-Palestine slogan “Free Palestine” was shouted twice by two of the actual anti-Jewish terrorists. So far, the paper’s pseudo-sophisticated “stochastic” smear has been applied solely to target the rhetoric of so-called right-wingers.Yet somehow the blame vanishes when left-wing rhetoric somehow appears directly in the mouths of killers.

In October 2022, the Times claimed using the phrase “civil war,” used by right-wing Twitter posters in relation to the investigation into Trump’s handling of classified documents, threatened to unleash “stochastic terrorism.”

The paper's legal reporter Charlie Savage took the concept seriously during Trump’s electoral subversion case in September 2023 (it never went to trial):

….the request for the gag order was as much about so-called stochastic terrorism -- the idea that demonizing someone through mass communication increases the chances that a lone wolf will be inspired to attack the target -- as it was about more traditional concern of keeping a jury from being influenced by statements outside of court.

Max Fisher, in his “Interpreter” column on Pelosi referenced above, loaded up on labels: “Experts in political violence have argued for years that dehumanizing and apocalyptic language by prominent right-wing figures is helping to drive the rise in far-right violence. Federal agencies call far-right terrorism a growing threat.”

And the paper's editorial board in December 2022 was ready to blame “stochastic terrorism” from the right on anything bad that happened to anyone transgender:

The silence from a great majority of Republicans on the demonization of, and lies about, trans people has indeed meant complicity -- complicity in what experts call stochastic terrorism, in which vicious rhetoric increases the likelihood of random violence against the people who are the subject of the abusive language and threats.

So, do the college protesters who’ve spent years shrieking pro-Hamas sloganeering like "Free Palestine!" have similar “complicity” in these new anti-Semitic attacks? Or will the Times refuse to make the connection to protect the left?