The full scope of horror and heartache is seldom adequately conveyed in the initial reporting of an incident, which by necessity is a cold, almost mechanical recitation of the facts as they come to be known, as detached and devoid of raw emotion as professionally possible. The more visceral horrors and heartache reveal themselves in the details that emerge as the dust settles.

For instance, a fortnight ago we learned of the gunman in Washington D.C. who shot up the Capitol Jewish Museum, killing two Israeli Embassy staffers. We subsequently learn the victims were Yaron Lischinsky, a 30-year-old Israeli, and Sarah Lynn Milgrim, an American citizen of 26 years of age — a young couple, in the early summer of their lives. They were soon to be engaged; we learn Yaron was planning to ask his young sweetheart to marry him the following week. By the time you are reading this, these two young people would have been joyfully planning their marriage and contemplating their lives together. Instead, a left-wing maniac shouting “free, free Palestine” pumped 21 bullets into them, the last several into Sarah as she desperately tried to crawl away. For no reason, none whatsoever, other than because they were Jewish.

Less than two weeks later, a similar attack takes place here in Colorado, in Boulder. This time the assailant, screaming the same nonsense, goes after a crowd of people walking peacefully in a weekly event called “Run For Their Lives”, held in solidarity for the remaining hostages, some of whom are still alive, in the clutches of Hamas. In this attack, the cretin uses Molotov cocktails and what authorities are describing as a “makeshift flamethrower” to burn his victims. We subsequently learn all of them, 12 at last count, were older people, none younger than 58, the oldest 88. Among the victims burned was a Holocaust survivor. Think about that for a moment.

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We are, of course, seeing a deadly pattern emerge — the attacks here and in D.C., and on the home of Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro back in April. We turn, almost out of a sense of self-protection, away from the heartbreaking details and focus on the broader elements. One that looms large in the Boulder attack, and which the Trump administration has homed closely on, is the fact the terrorist, Mohamed Soliman, is an illegal alien, who ought not to have been in the country in the first place. He overstayed a tourist visa in 2022, was somehow then granted a two-year work authorization, which he also overstayed following its expiration. Whatever one thinks about the breadth of President Donald Trump’s deportation agenda, or whether there have been instances of excess in its execution, surely we can agree this is exactly the type of situation our immigration laws — especially after Sept. 11, 2001 — are ostensibly in place to prevent, and why the dismissive attitude toward those laws — including directives by state and local governments prohibiting cooperation with federal officials charged with enforcing them — is a valid national security concern.

And yet in a sense even this is a somewhat secondary, if critical, consideration — not all of the would-be terrorists are in the country illegally. Of greater concern is the rhetoric which fuels these attacks. The far left, in staging their pro-Hamas protests, is fond of vomiting slogans like “Globalize the Intifada.” We ought to take these mutts at their word — in the last two weeks they have globalized the hell out of the intifada. “Free, free Palestine,” “death to Zionists”, “from the river to the sea” — these are not just garbage cooked up over a few joints; they are messages to the Jewish people, wrapped in the cloak of far-left “liberation” ideology — you are not safe anywhere.

But the problem is even more insidious than that. One can write off the stupid chants of the pro-Hamas crowd as blatantly antisemitic filth. What gives fuel to these fires is every time a politician or the media fails to call Hamas a terrorist group; every time they spout off about Israeli “genocide” in Gaza; every time they equivocate, every time they buy Hamas’ lies, hook, line and sinker; every time the anti-Israel bias that is so prevalent at the United Nations, on the BBC, and among far-left politicians everywhere goes unchallenged, it adds another ounce of motivation to those already predisposed to escalate the rhetoric to violence. 

Many on the left are fond of assigning blame to President Trump for the ignominy of Jan. 6, 2021 — that his irresponsible rhetoric about the election being “stolen” inflamed the situation to where an otherwise fairly typical political rally turned to a storming of the Capitol. And they are absolutely right. Just as irresponsible rhetoric about Israel bears culpability for the horrors and heartaches of the last two weeks, and those surely to come.

Kelly Sloan is a political and public affairs consultant and a recovering journalist based in Denver.