When demonstrators wave the flags of terrorist organizations and publicly commemorate the martyrdom of terrorist leaders, they’re not throwing the bomb, but their message can light the fuse.
Terrorism doesn’t occur in a vacuum. It depends on the oxygen of rhetoric for sustenance and encouragement. Nearly two years after Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, 2023, the cumulative effect of calls to “Globalize the intifada” and “End Zionists” perhaps inevitably led to the horrific attack yesterday in Boulder, Colorado, where a man yelled “Free Palestine” as he threw an incendiary device at a Jewish gathering in support of the hostages.
Words matter. The protester at Columbia University in 2024 holding a sign labeling Jewish demonstrators who were waving Israeli flags as Al-Qasam’s next targets was dismissed as being hyperbolic. So were the By Any Means Necessary banners carried at demonstrations and the red inverted triangles, similar to those Hamas uses to mark Israeli targets, spray-painted on university buildings, a national monument, and even the apartment building of a museum director. When demonstrators wave the flags of terrorist organizations, wear headbands celebrating those same groups, and publicly commemorate the martyrdom of terrorist leaders such as Hamas’s Yahya Sinwar and Hezbollah’s Hassan Nasrallah, they’re not throwing the bomb, but their message can light the fuse.
In the past six weeks, that fuse has produced a succession of terrorist acts that have threatened the safety and security of America’s Jewish community. That two of the incidents also occurred on Jewish holidays—the arson attack on Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro’s official residence on the first night of Passover and yesterday’s incident in Boulder on the eve of Shavuot—show that Jews in America are not only in some danger, but even more likely to be targeted on specific dates marking religious ritual and observance.
And they won’t be just singled out, but subjected to especially heinous acts of violence. The attacker in Boulder used a homemade flamethrower and Molotov cocktails, resulting in eight people being hospitalized with burns and other injuries. Tragically, among the eight victims, who ranged in age from 52 to 88, the eldest was reportedly a Holocaust survivor.
Yet another example of an especially egregious act of violence was the shooting deaths last month of Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim on the street outside a Jewish museum in Washington, D.
