By Noah Rothman
Wednesday, April 16, 2025
Hours after Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro and his
family concluded Passover celebrations this weekend, the governor’s mansion was firebombed.
The security footage paints a harrowing portrait of the
attack. The alleged arsonist scaled an exterior perimeter fence, used a hammer
to shatter a window, and hurled a Molotov cocktail into the room where the
governor and his guests were holding the Seder just hours earlier. The attacker
then broke another window, through which he entered the premises and ignited
more fires. It was a comprehensive assault, and its ultimate goal was unlikely
to end with mere property destruction.
What’s more, we now know the alleged attacker’s motives. According to police, the 38-year-old suspect targeted
Shapiro as an act of vengeance for the governor’s pro-Israel politics.
PennLive has the details:
The suspect, Cody Balmer, called
911 following the attack early Sunday, identified himself by name and told
operators Shapiro needs to know he “. . . will not take part in his plans for
what he wants to do to the Palestinian people,” the search warrant written by
police said.
Balmer continued, saying he
needed to “stop having my friends killed” and that “. . . our people have been
put through too much by that monster,” according to the warrant, which says
Balmer’s intonation and cadence sounded like he was possibly reading from a
script.
Balmer wasn’t coy in his conversation with a 911
dispatcher. He pledged to stay put and await his arrest, at which point he
would “confess to everything,” but not because he was repentant. The suspect
appeared to believe that he had meted out a righteous blow for justice, and he
seems convinced that the community of pro-Palestinian activists would celebrate
his actions and martyrdom.
That’s not an unreasonable bet. It was that incentive
structure that convinced Balmer to execute a pro-Palestinian terrorist attack
on U.S. soil. What else would you call this event? It is an unexceptional
expression of the violent passions that typify anti-Israel activism, whether it
takes place in the West Bank, Western Europe’s streets and synagogues, or
America’s college campuses.
Democratic politicians have established for themselves an
extensive record of claiming that acts of political violence can be traced back
to the rhetoric exhibited by their domestic opponents. They should be held to their own standard. Shapiro’s many
critics on the left make no bones about the degree to which his support for
Israel renders him persona non grata among progressives. That whisper
campaign contributed to Kamala Harris’s fateful decision to ditch Shapiro in favor of Tim Walz. The party spent much of
the last year contorting itself into pretzels to flatter the anti-Israel
activists who so tormented them, and the Harris campaign did its utmost to “validate protester concerns” even in the closing days of
the campaign.
The party has put off elementary political hygiene for
too long. It has tried to have it both ways — distancing itself from the
anti-Israel agitators just enough to plausibly claim mutual animosity while courting the activist fringes at almost every turn. There ought to be a reckoning with the
extent to which Shapiro’s party coddled this extreme movement, the fringes of
which are inclined to lash out violently at their perceived opponents. They’re
not shy about demanding the same thing from Republicans, and with good reason.
Now it’s their turn.
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