RUTHFULLY YOURS

As far as we know, he didn’t grow up in poverty nor had any Jewish person done anything to personally undermine him. In fact, the shooter almost surely interacted with all types of races, ethnicities, and faiths on a daily basis. If reports are correct, the murderer of Lori Gilbert Kaye was from a churchgoing family and good student at Cal State University San Marcos, a university that earns an “A” in diversity.

The shooter’s manifesto makes clear that he didn’t kill because of Donald Trump or some alleged dog whistle or a New York Times cartoon or any concerted ideological cause other than racial hatred. Though we shouldn’t put too much thought into his hateful rantings, the man was clearly a racist who detested Jews and “Zionists” because he saw them as the enemies of white people.

Now, we can “confront” these xenophobic murderers all day long, but they don’t really care about your emotional condemnations or your rallies or your PSAs. It’s unlikely that we can shame them. The shooter’s rhetoric, thankfully, is already unacceptable in American discourse.

The only anti-Semitism still widely used in public discourse is the kind masquerading as “anti-Zionism.” Which is why there was warranted outraged when the New York Times international edition published a Der Sturmer-style cartoon and when members of Congress protected a woman who had persistently smeared Americans Jews as money-grubbing interlopers and when progressive activists marched behind those who embrace the most noxious anti-Semitic notions imaginable.

Now, a Jew-baiting cartoon or an ugly tweet isn’t going to shoot you. But anti-Israel rhetoric doesn’t just hurt feelings, it leads to policy that puts people in danger. It is why, whatever the intentions were behind the Iran deal, many Jews were rightly disturbed when the antagonist Obama administration made a sweetheart agreement and sent pallets of cash to a Holocaust-denying terror state that openly threatens to throw six million Jews into an “inferno.” It’s a bit on-the-nose.

Since Israel is increasingly detested by the American Left—often for the very same reasons the United States is detested—progressives have been increasingly comfortable attacking Jews or defending those who do. And no, these people aren’t merely being “critical of Israel.” The New York Times cartoon depicting Trump as a blind man being led by the Star of David-bedecked Benjamin Netanyahu was a pictorial interpretation of a paranoid grievance that many anti-Israel progressives and paleocons have been peddling for years: that Jews control the US government.

Claiming that Americans are dying to protect Jewish interests isn’t only a lie, it’s a fresh iteration of an old slur. Whereas once there were “bankers” and “money lenders,” today there are “Zionists.” I see this smear every day, and not merely from randos on Twitter. Some progressives, in fact, argue that the concept of “Zionism” is itself a form of white supremacy. Liberal editors of major publications now contend that the democratically elected prime minister of this Jewish State is one of “global anti-semitism’s greatest allies.” Writers for major magazines breezily blame Jews who support Israel for their own massacres. Among them, are a small number of progressives, who defraud the public by falsely using their abandoned Jewish heritage to promote their destructive ideology.

Like many left-wing publications, the Times has obsessively depicted the Jewish State—a nation that is not only the most liberal in the Middle East but perhaps the most liberal nation in all of Asia—as a national manifestation of bigotry. Not Hamas. Not the PLO. Not Iran. Not Qatar. Until recently, not even Saudi Arabia.

And when outlets like the New York Times spend decades normalizing the idea that Zionism is tantamount to fascism and apartheid, it is just a matter of time before some hapless editor at the newspaper—if that’s really what happened—has trouble differentiating between the supposedly “anti-Israel” cartoon and demonstrably anti-Jewish one.

This position has driven them not only to embrace a decades-long bias but has opened them up to publishing strands of ugly propaganda. Just one week before running the cartoon, the Times ran an Easter op-ed identifying Jesus as being “most likely a Palestinian man with dark skin.” Trying to strip a couple thousand years of Jewish (and Christian) history to promote a comforting fantasy for progressives is arguably more anti-Semitic than any dumb cartoon. “Palestine,” of course, was a name given to the land by Romans, who exiled most of the Jews from their homeland more than 600 years before the Arabs showed up.

The frustrating and tragic truth about this weekend’s shooting spree on Passover—a holiday that celebrates the miraculous escape from Egyptian slavery to freedom in Israel—is that there’s little we Jews can do about the presence of the random far-right murderers other than continue to marginalize their ideas and defend ourselves. And nothing seems to aggravate all three varieties of anti-Semites more than the idea of Jews protecting themselves after 1,800 years of being at their mercy. The collective anger over Israel is proof.