By CARL CANNON | REAL CLEAR WIRE
It takes severe depravity, not to mention sheer stupidity, to believe that shooting an unarmed couple in the back as they stand at a crosswalk is somehow going to “Free Palestine,” which is what the cowardly killer yelled into the Washington night as he was led away by police.
If they didn’t realize it before, Americans have now learned precisely what kind of demons are being summoned up when pro-Hamas demonstrators on college campuses chant “Globalize the Intifada.” No one in Israel needed to be told. They’ve known for a long time.
The “Second Intifada” was burned into Jewish memory at the dawn of the 21st century by a series of gruesome attacks known in Israel by their place-names: the Dolphinarium discothèque in Tel Aviv, Sbarro Pizza and Café Moment in Jerusalem, Maxim Restaurant in Haifa, the Park Hotel in Netanya.
The Dolphinarium was blown up on June 2, 2001, by a suicide bomber who took the lives of 21 young people – most of them Jewish teenage girls from Russia and Ukraine.
Two months later, seven Palestinian terrorists with ties to Hamas carried out the bombing of the Sbarro pizza parlor. Sixteen people were killed, including three Americans and a pregnant woman. Half the victims were children. One of the Americans, a mother named Chana Nachenberg, spent 22 years in a coma before dying in 2023. Ahlam Tamimi, one of the masterminds of the crime, was released in a 2011 prisoner exchange. She lives freely in Jordan today and is unrepentant – saying in one television interview she’d do it again.
The deadliest single attack of the Intifada, known in Israel as the Passover Massacre, took place on March 27, 2002, at the Park Hotel along the Israeli coast. The killer disguised himself as a woman, and carrying a suitcase bomb entered the hotel dining room, where 250 civilians were celebrating Seder dinner. Thirty people, most of them elderly, were killed, and another five dozen wounded. Some of the victims were Holocaust survivors.
Hamas leaders boasted about the Passover attack, while Israeli government spokesman Gideon Meir spoke for most Israelis when he said, “There is no limit to Palestinian barbarism.” Apparently fearing what did, in fact, later ensue (a fierce IDF crackdown on the West Bank) even Palestinian Authority officials condemned the attack.
By the time the second Intifada waned, more than 1,000 Israelis were dead, most of them civilians.
Two of the terrorist attacks in particular foreshadowed the Wednesday evening murder of Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Lynn Milgrim at the Capital Jewish Museum. The event featured humanitarian organizations that use interfaith dialogue in places like Gaza and Syria to alleviate civilian suffering.
Café Maxim had a similar ethos. Co-owned by Jews and Christian Arabs, the Haifa restaurant was a tangible symbol of peaceful co-existence when a female suicide bomber – a lawyer from Jenin – destroyed the place two days before Yom Kippur in 2003.
Jewish and Arab Israeli customers dined together in that place – and they bled and died there together, too. Twenty-one people perished, including three children and an infant. Among the dead were four Arab employees of the restaurant.
On May 2, 2004, a Jewish social worker named Tali Hatuel who was eight months pregnant, was driving with her four daughters when she was ambushed by two Palestinian gunmen. After it was disabled, the killers walked up to her car and shot the four girls and their mother at close range. Islamic Palestinian groups praised the deed as “heroic.”
That was 22 years ago. But it was only last week that Tzeela Gez, an Israeli mother of three being driven to the hospital to give birth, was shot and killed in the West Bank, a murder lauded by Hamas as a “heroic act.”
That’s what the word “Intifada” signifies. What happened seven days later in Washington is what’s meant by “globalizing the Intifada.”
Typically, segments of the legacy media struggled to find moral clarity, or even simple coherence, in Wednesday’s awful news. X.com was full of such examples, including one confusing passage from an NPR story that seemed to accept the Washington, D.C., killer’s logic. (“Many U.S. and Israeli officials identified the attacks as the latest in a marked rise of antisemitic incidents in recent years — and more notably, as Israel ramps up its offensive in Gaza, where the risk of famine looms for a population ground down by a months-long blockade.”)
Bari Weiss, as usual, cut to the heart of the matter. Writing in The Free Press about the double murder outside an iconic Jewish landmark in the capital city, Weiss unspooled “the culture of lies that created the climate for his murderous rampage.”
She details many of them; I’ll fill in others. The list of culprits is long.
- It starts with college presidents who accepted money from sketchy Arab autocrats who buy peace in their own country by fomenting bigotry and intellectual dishonesty in ours.
- Next are the faculty cadres who spread specious theories such as critical race theory aimed not just at the United States, but at Western culture in general. The apotheosis of this insanity is grafting the dubious “colonizer” label onto Israelis, who occupy a land inhabited by Jews 2,000 years before the advent of Islam.
- Democratic Party politicians who’ve repeated these toxic lies, or at least not objected to them out of fear of alienating the kookiest elements of their progressive base. On Friday, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortes issued a forceful denunciation of antisemitism. Yet last year she was supportive of the pro-Hamas demonstrators at Columbia. “At Columbia University they call for Intifada constantly,” former Columbia student Jonathan Epstein explained on CNN. “They’re not doing it quietly. They’re loud … You can hear it. They make recordings of themselves.”
- Liberals who repeat the spurious slander about “genocide” in Gaza – on behalf of a movement that openly calls for the destruction of Israel and murderous attacks on the Jewish diaspora around the world.
- Islamicists working for the U.N. who aided and abetted the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas atrocities.
- Useful idiots in the Western media who repeat Hamas propaganda uncritically, particularly the deliberately deceptive exaggerations about famine and wartime casualties.
- Performative posers who glamorized political violence by swooning over accused assassin Luigi Mangione.
“Words matter,” we are constantly told. It’s true and it’s a lesson we learned anew this week.
On Tuesday British diplomat Tom Fletcher, U.N. Undersecretary General of Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief, told the BBC that if food trucks didn’t start rolling into Gaza, “14,000 babies would die in the next 48 hours.”
This was nonsense, as Fletcher knew. The report he cited actually claimed that 14,000 children under the age of six would be at risk for malnutrition in the coming 12 months if the situation remained static.
The BBC didn’t check Fletcher’s specious claims. Neither did the British prime minister, nor the hysteric members of the House of Commons who repeated them. His line was regurgitated ad nauseam by the U.S. news media and uncountable numbers of social media “influencers” around the globe.
By Wednesday, the BBC and the U.N. had backed off this assertion. Perhaps it’s unrelated, but by then a man with a pistol and evil intent had boarded a plane from Chicago to Washington and bought a ticket to a humanitarian event attended by Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Lynn Milgrim.
Carl M. Cannon is the Washington bureau chief for RealClearPolitics and executive editor of RealClearMedia Group.
