Fatal DC shooting is grim validation for those who warned of 'Free Palestine' violence [View all]
Two months after Hamas’s October 7, 2023, onslaught in Israel, a man with a gun walked up the steps of a synagogue in Albany, New York, and fired into the air while shouting, “Free Palestine.”
Children were inside the building at the time.
It was, it seemed, nearly a nightmare scenario for those anxious about how protests against Israel’s war in Gaza could lead to antisemitic violence.
....
During nearly 20 months of vociferous protests against Israel, some have increasingly warned that anti-Zionism could motivate the same physical danger as white supremacy or extremist Islamic fundamentalism. On Wednesday night, the shooting offered a cruel validation.
“For those who wondered about the context of whether a particular chant was hate speech or anti-Semitic, this is what it looks like when physically manifested,” Sacha Roytman Dratwa, an Israeli military veteran who is the CEO of the Combat Antisemitism Movement, said in a statement.
"The murderer did not know his victims were Israeli, he just knew they attended a Jewish event,” he added. “When we say that the anti-Semites don’t hate Jews because of Israel, but rather, they hate Israel because it is the Jewish homeland, this is what we mean.”
https://www.timesofisrael.com/fatal-dc-shooting-is-grim-validation-for-those-who-warned-of-free-palestine-violence/
= new reply since forum marked as read