Unspeakable news out of D.C.—a man named Elias Rodriguez of Chicago yelling “Free, Free Palestine” opened fire at an event at the entrance the Capital Jewish Museum. Two Israeli Embassy officials—a young couple about to be engaged next week in Jerusalem, according to a powerful and teary-voiced statement by Israeli ambassador to the United States Yechiel Leiter—were murdered.
This is a different kind of event from the attacks on synagogues in Pennsylvania and California in 2018, which were the work of white supremacists. It happened at a secular Jewish site, and targeted an event sponsored by the American Jewish Committee for young diplomats. And it was self-evidently an act of anti-Semitic terror in the nation’s capital—which raises similarities to the 2015 attack on the Hyper Casher supermarket in France’s capital, Paris. The only analogue here I can think of was the invasion of the headquarters of the B’nai Brith in D.C. in 1977 by Hanafi Muslims, during which 104 staffers at the Jewish organization—including my wife’s cousin, William Korey, an expert on Soviet Jewry—were held hostage for three days and repeatedly threatened with execution and torture. Two other buildings in DC were invaded as well, and a security guard at one of them was shot in the head and killed.
The terrorist leader was a convert to Islam critical of the Nation of Islam whose family was murdered in 1973—and who chose to blame the “Jewish judge” in charge of the conviction of the Farrakhanites who actually committed the killngs. He also demanded the suppression and burning of a movie called Mohammed, Messenger of God on the grounds that any depiction of the founder of Islam was a sacrilege—an eerie foreshadowing of the killing of the staffers at Charlie Hebdo magazine for publishing cartoons making fun of Muhammad, which took place in Paris two days before the attack on the supermarket in 2015. The leader gave up after three days; Bill Korey told me 30 years later that he still had nightmares about his captivity, a classic case of PTSD.
What we’re going to see over the next couple of days is predictable. Jewish institutions are going to scramble to increase security, as Jews huddle together for comfort. And as the hours and days pass, the shooting will be analyzed by the mainstream with an eye toward “explaining” the root causes of the crime and the criminal’s motivations—which is to say, a search for a way to excuse. We’ll hear that the real danger in the wake of this monstrous act will be a rise in Islamophobia rather than that this event is the culmination of the past 18 months of open anti-Semitic and Jew-hating action in the streets of major cities and on the campuses of our most prestigious academic institutions.
And we Jews will be arming ourselves.
