How campus protests turned into assassinations and firebombing.
Last Sunday, Mohamed Soliman, a 45-year-old illegal alien from Egypt, lobbed Molotov cocktails into a group of people in Boulder, Colorado. He did so, he later told police, because of his hatred for these “Zionists,” who were peacefully marching to demand the release of Hamas’ hostages in Gaza.
Soliman’s attack follows the murder of Israeli embassy aides Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim two weeks ago, and the April firebombing of Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro’s home by an antisemitic madman. How did we get here? Is there some connection between the broader anti-Israel protest movement, with its encampments and provocative chants, and the violent tumult of the past two months?
Mass protest and attempted murder are, of course, totally distinct at a moral and legal level. But it is nonetheless impossible to observe the last two years of agitation by the “pro-Gaza” movement and not see some connection. The ideas and slogans that the movement advanced are clearly predicates of the violence that Soliman and others carried out. A steadily grinding radicalism ratchet brought us to this moment, and did so consistent with the principles of extremist activism.
Continue reading the entire piece here at The Dispatch (paywall)
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Charles Fain Lehman is a fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor of City Journal
Photo by ELI IMADALI/AFP via Getty Images
