OPINION:
As Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro and his family slept upstairs after celebrating Passover in April, an arsonist broke into the governor’s mansion and set his home on fire, causing millions of dollars in damages and the evacuation of the governor and his family.
Cody A. Balmer, 38, identified himself on a 911 call and said Mr. Shapiro, who is Jewish, “needs to know that he ‘will not take part in his plans for what he wants to do to the Palestinian people,’” according to the search warrant. “You know where to find me. I’m not hiding, and I will confess to everything that I’ve done,” he said at the end of the call. He said that if he had encountered the governor, he would have “beaten him with his hammer.”
A few weeks later, a soon-to-be-engaged couple who worked at the Israeli Embassy in Washington were shot dead outside the Capital Jewish Museum. They had been attending an event hosted by the American Jewish Committee aimed at problem-solving and bringing peace to the Middle East and North Africa regions.
Elias Rodriguez, 31, of Chicago, shouted, “Free, free Palestine,” while police arrested him. After firing 21 rounds at the couple, including executing Sarah Milgrim, 26, after she had fallen and was trying to crawl away, he calmly walked into the museum, sat down and was offered a glass of water. Officials revealed that Mr. Rodriguez had expressed admiration for a U.S. airman who had self-immolated outside the Israeli Embassy in protest of the war in the Gaza Strip. He called the act courageous.
In Boulder, Colorado, on Sunday, Mohamed Sabry Soliman, an Egyptian man in the U.S. illegally, used a flamethrower and Molotov cocktails to set fire to Jewish participants of a Run for Their Lives walk organized to bring attention to the 58 hostages still held captive in Gaza. At least eight were injured, including a Holocaust survivor, according to CNN. The attack was on the eve of the Jewish holiday of Shavuot. Mr. Soliman yelled, “Free Palestine!” as he set seniors ablaze.
Three vicious, antisemitic terrorist attacks on U.S. soil within 90 days. If not firmly dealt with, a rot festering in our culture will lead to America’s decay.
First, the national media must stop fanning the flames of antisemitism and report accurately on the situation in the Middle East. Media repeatedly and often side with pro-Hamas demonstrators and routinely run with the “Gaza Health Ministry” (aka Hamas) narratives without questioning their validity.
On Sunday, The Washington Post reported that Israeli troops had killed more than 31 Palestinians while they tried to pick up aid in Gaza. The Israel Defense Forces had already debunked the claim: “The IDF did not fire at civilians while they were near or within the humanitarian aid distribution site, and reports to this effect are false.” Still, The Post ran with Hamas’ “information” instead.
After the antisemitic terrorist attack in Boulder, NBC News went to great lengths to obscure the fact that the victims were Jewish. It called them “Gaza-hostage-awareness marchers” in its headline.
For years, the American public was warned with a consistent drumbeat about “right-wing extremists” and the threat they posed to the mainland, yet antisemitic attacks get little attention and fade in and out of the headlines quickly. The mainstream media consistently favor “Resist Trump” narratives over actual threats to the homeland.
Second, higher education institutions must be held accountable by the federal government. For far too long, antisemitism has been normalized on U.S. college campuses. A Harvard task force, commissioned by the university, found that Jewish students had “faced bias, suspicion, intimidation, alienation, shunning, contempt, and sometimes effective exclusion from various curricular and co-curricular parts of the University and its community — clear examples of antisemitism and anti-Israeli bias.”
Harvard is not alone. Jewish students stormed out of their graduation ceremony Thursday after a Massachusetts Institute of Technology commencement speaker accused the prestigious institution of being “directly complicit in the ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people.” Mayhem erupted outside Columbia University’s graduation ceremony, where anti-Israel students burned their diplomas, shouted, “Free Palestine,” and booed the school’s president during the commencement speech.
The Trump administration is correct to strip these colleges of federal funds and demand transparency on which foreign students they admit to their campuses. In February, three former Israeli hostages filed a lawsuit alleging Hamas “was in contact and actively coordinating with its affiliates in the media and on college campuses.”
Third, illegal aliens must be arrested and deported. The Department of Homeland Security said the Boulder flame-thrower entered the U.S. in August 2022 on a B-2 visa that expired in February 2023. He had no right to be America, let alone unleash the terror he did on peaceful protesters.
Fourth, Democratic lawmakers must be held in contempt for their complicity in the anti-Israel movement. According to a report by the House Committee on Education and Workforce, Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer reportedly told Columbia University administrators to ignore the backlash from Republicans for the antisemitic protests that erupted on its campus last year.
Text messages in the 300-page report show that Mr. Schumer told then-university President Minouche Shafik that Columbia’s “political problems are really only among Republicans” and said the school’s leaders should just “keep heads down” until the furor subsided.
When a reporter asked Rep. Ilhan Omar about her reaction to the Israeli Embassy staffers’ murders, all she could muster as a response was, “I’m going to go for now.” No Democrats were asked about her failure to condemn the assassination, and she was never held to account.
Democrats may be offering their thoughts and prayers for the victims of these heinous attacks, but their actions — obstructing President Trump’s deportation efforts, suing his administration for stripping federal funds to higher institutions and revoking the visas of foreign students, and reluctance to call out these hate crimes for what they are (and then always equivocating them with some purported rise in Islamophobia) — say otherwise.
• Kelly Sadler is the commentary editor and a columnist for The Washington Times.