IS COLD-BLOODED MURDER A BAD THING?

Parts of our society are literally discussing whether shooting Jews on the streets of the American capital is reason for celebration or not.

So this is a thing now.

I was already aware that thousands of people (at least) have celebrated the mass murder of Israelis on October 7, 2023. The horrors of 10/7 have been cast as justifiable homicide and the victims have otherwise been dehumanized, with a whole discourse around whether the victims of that day got what they deserved. And yet, given decades listening to the depraved ravings of so-called “pro-Palestinian” activists, even in my outrage I expected that this was somehow limited to an antisemitic fringe that debases Jewish lives. But it’s something larger.

There is often a tension between the universal and the particular when confronting antisemitism. One of my pet peeves is the prevalent idea that Jews are the “canary in the coalmine,” that antisemitism is an early warning signal of a society going off the rails.

It’s a disappointing symptom of a society that has already gone off the rails that the only way to get people to care about attacks on Jews is to extrapolate that, if you don’t nip it in the bud, it might expand to affect people you actually give a damn about.

Relatedly, I sometimes recoil when people use specifically Jewish examples to make a universal point — for example, when an overtly antisemitic violent attack happens and a politician or a police spox makes some anodyne comment about opposing all forms of violence. This is something that happens sometimes when bad things happen to members of other groups. But it happens almost all the time when bad things happen to Jews. It’s premised on a probably subconscious idea that people won’t really care about violence against Jews but they might care a little if we remind them that even Jews are human.

My revulsion to the universalizing of anti-Jewish incidents was challenged recently.

When Luigi Mangione allegedly shot Brian Thompson, the CEO of UnitedHealthcare, last December, I was shocked that Mangione would become a folk hero in some leftist circles. How naïve am I? (For one thing, as a Canadian, I had no idea the extent of rage around corporate healthcare in the United States but, ohmygawd, how does murder ever justify celebration?)

I’ll admit that I’m a little immersed in issues of antisemitism and whenever you’re surrounded by trees you can sometimes wonder where the forest is. But the killing of a non-Jew by a non-Jew woke me to a larger issue.

While it’s possible that people were given license to celebrate the killing of a healthcare CEO by the celebration of the killing of Jews that has become rampant in our society, I don’t think that’s likely. There is a larger disrespect for human life happening here.

Again, though, let’s not be naïve. This is not new. Among the most haunting images I have ever seen are families celebrating at a lynching in the US South. You can almost understand (dare I say it?) attending such a spectacle out of some sort of human attraction-revulsion. But to pack deviled eggs and bring the kids? What is wrong with our species?

This is not as rare as we would hope. Kyle Rittenhouse was acquitted of killing two men in Wisconsin at a rally against police violence five years ago. He became a hero to a segment of extremists.

Decades ago, there was Bernard Goetz, the New York “Subway Vigilante” who, in 1984, shot four young Black men on a subway train after they allegedly tried to rob him. Goetz became an icon for some people who felt threatened amid the violence of 1980s New York City.

But the reaction to the murder last week of Sarah Milgrim and Yaron Lischinsky on the street in Washington, DC, is a sea-change of sorts.

That they worked for the Israeli embassy is a red herring. So, if it needs to be said, is the fact that they were Messianic Jews (people who identify as Jews but also believe Jesus is the messiah). They were murdered not because of where they worked or any other personal characteristics. They were targeted for murder because the perpetrator set out to kill Jews.

And while I said recently that we should hardly have been surprised — segments of our society have been dehumanizing Jews and effectively calling for their murder (“Globalize the intifada!”) for years — these murders have really shone a light on the bloodthirst of certain segments of the Western body politic.

This week, The Free Press ran a story by Frannie Block and Olivia Reingold about how Democratic Socialists of America are arguing over whether the point-blank shooting of two American Jews on the streets of the nation’s capital was a good thing or, well, not so good a thing. (It seems almost no one in the far fringe of the American left has the moral bearings to unequivocally condemn cold-blooded murder.) I won’t summarize the goings-on in the DSA. Read the article if you want. But, like them or don’t, DSA is a movement that sits at the cusp of the political mainstream. They have endorsed more than 200 currently elected officials across the United States, including members of Congress, state legislators, city council members, mayors, and others.

So when a good chunk of their leading figures argue that Jews deserve to be shot in the streets of America, we might want to give that some attention.

Meanwhile, Lischinsky’s body was hardly cold before posters were produced with his smiling face, his birth and death years and an inverted triangle that has become common among violence-celebrating Jew-haters. The red inverted triangle has been used to mark individuals for killing. It represents a targeting reticle, like what you’d see when looking through a rifle scope or drone sight. Atop the poster are the words “Make Zionists Afraid.”

It would be interesting to know what proportion of such posters have been torn down or defaced and compare those statistics with, say, the proportion of the posters depicting Israeli babies and other hostages that have been defaced. But anyways.

All of these horrors made me reflect on the conclusion I came to when I was a teenager that the death penalty is a dangerous phenomenon. Once a society decides that someone is unworthy to live, it opens the door to a discussion about which people are unworthy to live. Whether it is the government that kills or a murderous vigilante is less the point than the public reaction. When a bunch of your neighbors think it’s OK to kill people, you live in a society that is already off-kilter.

It may seem a non-sequitur or a diversion to raise video games here. But I was binge watching a TV show this week. (Overcompensating, if you must know. Meh. Don’t bother.) In the show, the main characters play a video game called Slut Slayer: Berlin. Like everything in the show, it is (I hope) an exaggerated interpretation of campus culture. But it sent me down a rabbit hole.

I can identify the precise day in 1983 when I last played a video game. My nephew was born that day and my brother and I went to a pub and played Pac-Man, which was one of the only times in my life I’ve wasted time in that particular way. Apparently, the technology has advanced somewhat.

And, apparently, the main focus of a huge number of these video games is killing as many people as possible.

Given that 90% of kids waste time on these games, and that 85% of video games contain some form of violence, according to the American Psychological Association, excuse me for being the curmudgeonly old Gramps who points out that young people may be getting inured to people getting gunned down in the streets.

Given that my Substack is about confronting antisemitism, it is interesting to note that, while the celebration of dead Jews is a growing crisis in our society, there are also celebrations of the murder of non-Jews.

I guess that is some sort of progress?