National Review senior editor Charles C. W. Cooke, on today’s edition of The Editors, argued that the murders of two Israeli Embassy staffers in Washington, D.C., demonstrate what some of the most vicious anti-Israel rhetoric really stands for.

“As usual,” Cooke said, “I would not want to see this heinous crime used as an excuse to quiet people who have political views, even if I find those political views ignorant or repugnant. But I think that there is a difference between concluding from this that we need fewer people arguing that Israel is wrong . . . and people who, for example, say ‘globalize the intifada.’”

Cooke agreed that shouting such phrases should get you “cast out of polite society.” “Why? Because that is what this is. What else could somebody possibly mean by ‘globalize the intifada’ than this?

“If you are saying, ‘globalize the intifada,’ or even as we’ve seen, unfortunately, pop up after this incident, if you are going on Instagram or TikTok or Facebook Live and saying, ‘This was good, we need more of this,’ then yeah, you ought to be lumped in with the killer.” Unfortunately, Cooke said, “there are quite a lot of people at elite institutions, including universities such as Columbia, who do talk like that, who do call for intifada, who do defend this sort of violence.

“I think it’s absolutely reasonable to take those people to task and to make it clear that what they are arguing for is not some abstract political conception, but is this — is bloody violence.”

The Editors podcast is recorded on Tuesdays and Fridays every week and is available wherever you listen to podcasts.