The Democrats has put off elementary political hygiene for too long.
Hours after Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro and his family concluded Passover celebrations this weekend, the governor’s mansion was firebombed.
The security footage paints a harrowing portrait of the attack. The alleged arsonist scaled an exterior perimeter fence, used a hammer to shatter a window, and hurled a Molotov cocktail into the room where the governor and his guests were holding the Seder just hours earlier. The attacker then broke another window, through which he entered the premises and ignited more fires. It was a comprehensive assault, and its ultimate goal was unlikely to end with mere property destruction.
What’s more, we now know the alleged attacker’s motives. According to police, the 38-year-old suspect targeted Shapiro as an act of vengeance for the governor’s pro-Israel politics.
PennLive has the details:
The suspect, Cody Balmer, called 911 following the attack early Sunday, identified himself by name and told operators Shapiro needs to know he “. . . will not take part in his plans for what he wants to do to the Palestinian people,” the search warrant written by police said.
Balmer continued, saying he needed to “stop having my friends killed” and that “. . . our people have been put through too much by that monster,” according to the warrant, which says Balmer’s intonation and cadence sounded like he was possibly reading from a script.
Balmer wasn’t coy in his conversation with a 911 dispatcher. He pledged to stay put and await his arrest, at which point he would “confess to everything,” but not because he was repentant. The suspect appeared to believe that he had meted out a righteous blow for justice, and he seems convinced that the community of pro-Palestinian activists would celebrate his actions and martyrdom.
That’s not an unreasonable bet. It was that incentive structure that convinced Balmer to execute a pro-Palestinian terrorist attack on U.S. soil. What else would you call this event? It is an unexceptional expression of the violent passions that typify anti-Israel activism, whether it takes place in the West Bank, Western Europe’s streets and synagogues, or America’s college campuses.
Democratic politicians have established for themselves an extensive record of claiming that acts of political violence can be traced back to the rhetoric exhibited by their domestic opponents. They should be held to their own standard. Shapiro’s many critics on the left make no bones about the degree to which his support for Israel renders him persona non grata among progressives. That whisper campaign contributed to Kamala Harris’s fateful decision to ditch Shapiro in favor of Tim Walz. The party spent much of the last year contorting itself into pretzels to flatter the anti-Israel activists who so tormented them, and the Harris campaign did its utmost to “validate protester concerns” even in the closing days of the campaign.
The party has put off elementary political hygiene for too long. It has tried to have it both ways — distancing itself from the anti-Israel agitators just enough to plausibly claim mutual animosity while courting the activist fringes at almost every turn. There ought to be a reckoning with the extent to which Shapiro’s party coddled this extreme movement, the fringes of which are inclined to lash out violently at their perceived opponents. They’re not shy about demanding the same thing from Republicans, and with good reason. Now it’s their turn.