Those who reject the liberal order deserve only its justice, not its indulgence.
It is manifestly unjust that the American public has to wonder if a terrorist who brazenly guns down an innocent couple in the streets of our capital while shouting about a conflict half a world away will ever receive the punishment his actions demand. For those who don’t already know, two young people, one Israeli and the other American, were shot and killed, allegedly by a “Free Palestine” activist-turned-terrorist, as they were leaving an event at the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, D.C., last night. Those who knew them said the two were soon to be engaged. Yaron Lischinsky, who grew up in Israel and Germany, the son of a Jewish father and Christian mother, was planning to take Sarah Milgrim, a young Jewish woman from Kansas City, to Jerusalem to meet his family and to propose to her. He worked for the Israeli Embassy as a researcher; her work for the embassy was to organize missions to Israel. In short, an American citizen gunned down a young woman from Kansas and a young man living as a guest in our country in the name of “Palestine,” mere yards from the monuments and charters that delineate what we are and what we stand for.
While I am ordinarily opposed to the death penalty because of man’s fallenness and our inherent error, there are times when the death penalty is the only action that can fulfill the debt of justice owed. For one, we have a professing assailant who is acting as a foreign combatant. For another, he evidently targeted his victims because of their association with a particular religion, culture, and country that the killer despised, and because he assumed they were Jews. There is nothing to be done with someone so lost to his hatreds but to impose the death penalty, and do so expeditiously.
To be clear, the killer, whom I will not name, deserves his day in court before a jury of his peers. While, like a barbarian, he rejected the liberal order, its laws, mores, and statutes, he is an American citizen and must be afforded due process and what defense his attorneys can muster. But no more. He should be tried expeditiously, he should eat only bread and water, and then, if and when convicted, he should be put to death. The time for this Palestinian-activism playacting is over. If Hamas thinks it can continue to make inroads here, it will do so at a price more dear than these grad-school agitators and their ilk can bear for long.
Why not life imprisonment? One, activists like this do not become less dangerous in prison. They can just as easily spread their ichorous views among the prison population as they can on the outside, multiplying the hostility to the victim population. Second, it has become clear after the Biden administration’s pardon spree that even convicted killers need only wait until a friendly progressive administration comes to power for them to walk free as heroes of the resistance. Life doesn’t mean life unless that life is taken as payment for its trespass against humanity.
The Trump administration and its Department of Justice should expedite these proceedings and give the victim what he deserves, and in so doing, give the American people and our nation’s guests what they deserve.
God bless and keep the families of the victims, and may their memory be a blessing.