The Murders Begin

By Noah Rothman

Tuesday, November 07, 2023

 

The killing of American Jews began on a Monday.

 

Paul Kessler, a 69-year-old Los Angeleno, joined his wife in the streets of Thousand Oaks for a counter-demonstration over the weekend — a modest show of quiet dissent to the loud, menacing, seemingly ubiquitous displays of opposition to Israel’s effort to bring the executors of the 10/7 slaughter to justice. Kessler held a large Israeli flag aloft when he was confronted by one of those supporters. An “altercation” ensued, according to the Ventura County Sheriff’s Department. Witnesses say the agitated protester struck Kessler in the head with a bullhorn. He fell backward and struck his head on the pavement. He bled for several critical minutes over a hand-written sign demanding Israel “stop bombing babies [and] families” before he was taken to hospital. There, Kessler was pronounced dead.

 

An event that spiraled out of control, perhaps. An accidental homicide, but a homicide, nonetheless. And it’s unlikely to be the last. Hours before Kessler’s death, a 34-year-old Indiana woman rammed her car into what she thought was a school full of Jewish children. “Yes, I did it on purpose,” Ruba Almaghtheh told police. She confessed that she “couldn’t breathe anymore” after watching footage of the war in Gaza on the news, and she sought to strike a blow for “people back in Palestine.” It is only through luck (Almaghtheh managed to kill no one) and stupidity (her target was an institution managed by the Black Hebrew Israelites, which the Anti-Defamation League defines as an antisemitic extremist group) that the would-be killer failed to achieve her goal of killing as many Jewish kids as possible. But that is cold comfort. She will have imitators.

 

Less than one week ago, FBI director Chris Wray warned Congress that spasms of antisemitic violence had reached a fever pitch. “This is a threat that is reaching, in some way, sort of historic levels,” Wray said in a Senate hearing. “The Jewish community is targeted by terrorists really across the spectrum.” In contrast to the Biden administration’s preoccupation with “Islamophobia,” Wray added, the acute menace of “religious-based hate crimes” is a threat disproportionately born by Jews. In the years leading up to the present crisis, episodes of antisemitic violence were already on the rise. A 37 percent increase in recorded anti-Jewish attacks made 2022 the second worst year since the FBI began tracking those incidents in 1991, and 2023 promises to be worse. According to one shocking estimate, “antisemitic incidents in the U.S. have soared by 388% compared to the same period last year.”

 

The inauguration of what has now become murderous violence follows weeks dominated by leading indicators of the bloodshed we’re witnessing. What did we think we were seeing when we watched mobs of masked demonstrators parading down the streets of the world’s most Jewish city calling for a global “Intifada” and insisting “there is only one solution” to the Jewish issue? What were the acts of property destruction, the specifically Hitlerian threats to U.S. lawmakers, the ritualistic vandalism, the gleeful defacement of posters featuring the images of young children who are hostages of a death cult but harbingers? These were not displays of collective spleen-venting. They were hype sessions — rites that summon the demonic psychological will to act on the barbarous intent behind the mob’s slogans. This was an intimidation campaign designed to terrorize those who would dissent against their murderous program into silence. It was a sign of things to come. After all, it never ends with broken windows.

 

It is no accident that the prosecutors of this campaign of domestic terrorization seem primarily composed of young adults. These are members of a generation that gets their news and information from a Chinese-owned, short-form-video application that seems by all accounts to be amplifying the narratives that sent Ruba Almaghtheh into an apoplectic fit of violent rage and led Paul Kessler’s killer to see his victim as little more than a thing in his way. It is the generation that knows nothing about the Holocaust — indeed, 10 percent of whom had never even heard the word. Its members don’t know about the camps, don’t know how many were killed and why, and question the narratives those who are familiar with history attempt to convey. This violence followed years in which visibly Jewish Americans were attacked on the streets in broad daylight. They were years in which media outlets retailed the notion that Israel was prosecuting a campaign of “cultural genocide” by appropriating Palestinian customs. They were years when its most flamboyantly ignorant political celebrities savaged Israel for oppressing the people in territories Israel did not occupy. They were years in which the foundations for mass violence were set.

 

If history is any guide, American Jews won’t sit idly by as they are attacked. They won’t wait forever for politicians who promise augmented police presences and renewed vigilance to make good on their pledges. In response to a mournfully reluctant conclusion that the society in which they placed their trust had failed them, America’s Jews will see to their own defense. That is what more murders will bring, and the cycle that would inaugurate is a terrible one that none should welcome. But the time to prevent that foreseeable outcome is coming to an end.