The Washington Free Beacon published exclusive video footage in late October 2023 of two Harvard graduate students accosting an Israeli classmate during an anti-Israel protest. As the Israeli student, Yoav Segev, tried to walk to his dorm, he was surrounded by student protesters who blocked his path and shouted, "Shame! Shame!"
Harvard took no disciplinary action. Rather, one of the malefactors, law student Ibrahim Bharmal, recently received a $65,000 fellowship from the Harvard Law Review that will underwrite his work next year at the anti-Israel outfit CAIR, and Harvard has celebrated Bharmal all over its website and social media platforms. Law enforcement, meanwhile, charged Bharmal and his pal with misdemeanor assault and battery, and they were ultimately let off with 80 hours of community service and required to attend an anger-management course.
It’s a microcosm of how the harassment of Jews on college campuses has been handled by many college administrators and law enforcement officials. Even when the police have been called to campus to deal with window smashers, occupiers, thugs—you know, criminals—they have been treated with kid gloves.
The cold-blooded shooting of two Israeli embassy staffers outside the Jewish museum in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday evening is the natural outgrowth of this behavior. The 30-year-old assailant, steeped in the radical anti-Israel and anti-Western ideology in which our universities are awash, is just past college age. So were his two victims, ages 30 and 26.
The domestic terrorism unleashed in the nation’s capital is just a foretaste of what we can expect if universities and law enforcement, both local and federal, don’t change their approach. Indeed, one of the discontinuities between today’s wave of campus unrest and that of the 1960s has been the absence of widespread political violence across the country.
In the period of peak radicalism from the late 1960s into the 1970s, shootings, bombings, and hijackings perpetrated by leftwing groups were commonplace, with supporters of "Palestine" playing a prominent role. Between 1968 and 1972, 130 American planes were hijacked. Bobby Kennedy was assassinated on the campaign trail by a Palestinian radical. The Weather Underground terror group bombed targets, including the Capitol in 1971 and the State Department in 1975. In 1970 alone, there were over 450 incidents of domestic terrorism.
The terrorist who gunned down the Israeli embassy staffers Wednesday night before shouting "Free Palestine!" and "I did it for Gaza!" has ties to today’s wannabe versions of those groups, Black Lives Matter and the Party for Socialism and Liberation. He also worked at a left-wing nonprofit funded by the Ford and MacArthur foundations, themselves backers of a panoply of fringe political endeavors.
Jews are merely the most prominent targets. Businessmen like United CEO Brian Thompson have also become prey, as have law enforcement officers and janitors. The ultimate target of this movement is America and Western civilization.
Americans of good conscience, including those in the federal government, can act now—pressing for the death penalty in this case and scrutinizing every group with which the perpetrator was affiliated—or live to regret it later. We can’t say we weren’t warned.