The shooting last Wednesday night of two Israeli diplomats, a couple that were soon to be engaged, was a horrible act of violence. It comes as anti-Semitism in America is exploding on college campuses and elsewhere. An American Jewish Committee survey last year found one-third of Jews in the U.S. were targeted by anti-Semitism in the previous 12 months.
What made last’s week shooting so egregious was that it was on American soil. 30-year-old Israeli citizen Yaron Lischinsky, a Messianic believer, and his fiancée-to-be, 26-year-old Sarah Milgrim of Kansas, were shot in cold blood outside of a Jewish Museum in Washington, D.C.
The alleged shooter, 31-year-old Elias Rodriguez, who has already confessed, told police, “I did it for Palestine. I did it for Gaza.”
America was largely created by Christians for the purpose of religious freedom. People of all religions or even no religion have been afforded sanctuary here.
Jews in particular, who have suffered in various nations around the world, have prospered and flourished here.
Rabbi Daniel Lapin, the founder and director of the American Alliance of Jews and Christians, commented: “No country in the last two thousand years has provided the same haven of tranquility and prosperity for Jews as had the United States of America. And, this is not in spite of Americans being Christian; it is because of it. You might say that America’s Bible belt is the Jewish community’s safety belt.”
Lapin adds, “I fear for life in America if, heaven forbid, we ever find ourselves in a post-Christian society. Because what will come in its place is not a benign neutrality, but a very sinister form of secularism. And it is one in which life will have diminished value.”
We can see what the rabbi warned about on Christian television in the early 2000s coming to fruition on many of our college campuses, with the pro-Palestinian protests.
For example, a month after Oct. 7, some pro-Palestinian protesters at GWU wrote up in big words, “From the River to the Sea.” What does this mean? It means death to the Jews, who live between the River (Jordan) and the Sea (the Mediterranean).
Thankfully, the administration of the school was swift in curbing such protests. One could only wish such was the case with Columbia and Harvard and other Ivy League schools.
But anti-Semitic protests at GWU were ironic, in light of the views of the school’s namesake.
Around the time of our first president’s tenure, there were only a handful of synagogues in America. Just as President George Washington found time to send correspondence to various Christian groups and ecclesiastical societies, he wrote letters of encouragement to some of the Jewish houses of worship.
These missives show how out-of-step anti-Semitism is with the founding of our nation.
For example, on June 14, 1790, President Washington wrote a letter to the Hebrew Congregation in Savannah, Georgia: “Happily the people of the United States of America have, in many instances, exhibited examples worthy of imitation.” America is a land of sanctuary to the Jews and the rest.
Washington continued, “May the same wonder-working Deity, who long since delivering the Hebrews from their Egyptian Oppressors planted them in the promised land – whose providential agency has lately been conspicuous in establishing these United States as an independent nation – still continue to water them with the dews of Heaven and to make the inhabitants of every denomination participate in the temporal and spiritual blessings of that people whose God is Jehovah.” Washington knew his Bible and was grateful for Jews to flourish here in this land.
In his Aug. 18, 1790, letter to the Hebrew Congregation in Rhode Island, he again expresses his gratitude for the United States’ enlightened policy, “worthy of imitation,” allowing “liberty of conscience.” He pens, “For happily the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens, in giving it on all occasions their effectual support.”
And he closes with a summary of his favorite Bible verse, Micah 4:4, which he saw as a picture of what America offers. Here “every one shall sit in safety under his own vine and figtree, and there shall be none to make him afraid.”
The Judeo-Christian views espoused by early Americans like George Washington keep this nation much safer than the radical views voiced by those who labor to kill Jews in America.
When the police arrested the alleged shooter last week in Washington, D.C., the self-confessed killer shouted for all to hear, “Free Palestine!”
All ideas have consequences, and as John Stonestreet of the Colson Center likes to add: Bad ideas have victims.
George Washington renounced anti-Semitism – -so should we.