This was an act of international terrorism, and the animating rhetoric is not mere ‘anti-Israel protest.’

Kathryn and Haley have posts up on the cold-blooded murder in Washington, D.C., last night of a pair of young Israel Embassy staffers, Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Lynn Milgrim, allegedly by a 30-year-old Chicago man who was obviously catalyzed by the sharia-supremacist ideology of Hamas. The gunman, identified as Elias Rodriguez, screamed, “Free, free Palestine” while being taken into custody, and reportedly told police where he had discarded the gun used in the assassin-style shooting.

The young staffers, aged 30 and 26, were about to be engaged. They were shot while leaving an event at the Capital Jewish Museum, put on by the American Jewish Committee.

I just add these observations.

First, the Trump Justice Department and the FBI should and presumably will investigate these murders as an act of international terrorism. That term is defined in Section 2331 of the federal penal code. It applies to actions that:

(a) involve violent acts or acts dangerous to human life that are a violation of the criminal laws of the United States or of any State;

(b) that appear intended to (i) intimidate or coerce a civilian population, (ii) influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion, or (iii) affect the conduct of a government by mass destruction, assassination, or kidnapping; and

(c) transcend national boundaries in terms of (i) the means by which they are accomplished, (ii) the persons they appear intended to intimidate of coerce, or (iii) the locale in which the perpetrators operateor seek asylum. [Emphasis added throughout.]

This was an attack in the United States capital patently intended to intimidate Americans and, in particular, Jews, and to influence U.S. government policy regarding the Middle East and the war in Israel — thus transcending international boundaries. (In my 1993-96 terrorism prosecution of the Blind Sheikh’s cell, which bombed the World Trade Center and plotted to bomb other New York City landmarks, all the violent acts and plots — including the 1990 murder of Meir Kahane — were executed in the United States but easily found to have been acts of terrorism that transcended national boundaries.)

I believe the consequences of these terrorist murders will include a stepping up of civil rights investigations of antisemitic violence and intimidation by the Justice Department, as well as a reaffirmation of the administration’s commitment to deport from the United States aliens — even legal aliens — who have participated in pro-Hamas agitation on American campuses and elsewhere.

Finally, it is impossible not to notice that media-Democrat news outlets continue labeling the rhetoric of incitement and intimidation as “anti-Israel protest,” as if it were merely political dissent aimed at Benjamin Netanyahu and the Israeli government. “Free, free Palestine,” which is analogous to jihadist cries of “Allahu Akbar” in the midst of terrorist operations, is a reflection of sharia supremacist doctrine, which is rooted in Islamic scripture, as interpreted by fundamentalist Muslims. It holds that Muslims must rule over all of the territory that is now Israel (“from the river to the sea”), and that this is to be achieved by the extermination of Jews.

That is not mere “anti-Israel protest.”