A makeshift flamethrower is just the latest weapon in a spate of attacks against Jews in America. It followed the assassination of an Israeli man and a Jewish woman from Kansas outside the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington. Just five weeks before that shooting, a terrorist attempted to burn down the home of Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, with Mr. Shapiro and his family inside.
Crimes against Jews have long been the dominant religious-based attacks in the United States. In the year before the horrendous attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, crimes against Jews in the United States represented 68% of all religion-based crimes, according to the FBI. Viral videos of batteries on Hasidic Jews in New York became de rigueur, and the Tree of Life Synagogue massacre in Pittsburgh occurred in 2018. However, the rise of anti-Jewish violence has reached a deafening cacophony since the Oct. 7 intifada perpetrated by Hamas. Religious and secular Jews, young and old, Democratic and Republican, have been equal-opportunity victims of hate and violence.
Across American college campuses, self-righteous protesters regularly cosplay as terrorists, adorned with the kaffiyeh, concealing their identities, chanting lyrically “From the River to the Sea” and “Free Palestine.” Protected by radical leftist faculty and spineless administrators, buoyed by a pliant press corps that minimizes the extent of the crimes and pretends not to know the motivation of the perpetrators and heartened by the endless positive feedback loop of their algorithm-driven social media feeds and artisanal coffee shop chatter, the terrorist network and its useful idiots proudly display their moral depravity in their call for the global ethnic cleansing of Jews. Nothing like singing about a “genocide” in the Gaza Strip, whose population has been, contrary to the definition of genocide, ever-growing, while calling for a global religious-based genocide.
Sadly, the specter of a masked, racially hate-filled terrorist group that sees nothing wrong with its system of racial superiority, that has captured major segments of American society, including universities, media, local law enforcement, and federal and state elected officials, and that perpetrates and glorifies violence against those they consider to be lesser humans, precisely because of their identity, is not a new phenomenon in America.
As Timothy Egan describes in his book “A Fever in the Heartland,” the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s portrayed itself as pro-American, Christian and law-and-order. The Klan’s infiltration into mainstream American society gave legitimacy and cover to its reprehensible system of racial and religious violence, xenophobia and corruption. Instead of the swastika, today’s terrorists wear the kaffiyeh. Instead of shouting, “Heil Hitler,” today’s terrorists shout, “Free Palestine.”
However, the parallels between the contemporary Jew-hating terrorist network and the Ku Klux Klan also present a legal road map for its defeat. First, many states used anti-masking statutes to arrest Klan members. Courts have widely upheld such statutes after balancing the right to expression or free exercise against the government’s need to ensure the civil rights of all American citizens. Still, the terrorists cannot hide behind pretextual claims of the First Amendment.
If the great unwashed students can go to class without a kaffiyeh masking their identities but show up at a protest blocking campus access to students based on identity, the government should fully prosecute these terrorist co-conspirators. Additionally, using existing authorized technology to identify these unmasked terrorists should be used to aid the secretary of state in his efforts to deport holders of fraudulent and expired visas, stopping them from wreaking further havoc in the United States.
Second, anti-racketeering statutes can be used, even by private actors, to seek financial recompense and punish the funders behind these terrorists and their sympathizers. Such statutes can be broadly read in co-conspirators under the “hub and spoke” theory to tie together co-conspirators who may have never met one another. The hub of this anti-Jew terrorist network is funding identical tents in campus encampments and providing material support to federally recognized terrorist groups, specifically Hamas. All individuals in furtherance of that conspiracy should be brought to justice.
Finally, fundamental civil rights laws, including Section 1983, should be used to ensure that all Americans, including Jews, have full access to any American university that accepts a single federal tax dollar. These laws should be used so Jews can attend a Jewish museum or synagogue without fear of an assassin in wait. They should be used so Jews can freely walk along public rights of way in Boulder, New York, our nation’s capital or any other place of public accommodation, even if they are reminding the world of the fate of more than 50 hostages Hamas has been holding in Gaza for more than 600 days. Jewish hunting season is over.
Mike Davis is the founder and president of the Article III Project. Martin Sweet is a political commentator and lecturer at Purdue University and has a background as a lawyer, political analyst and campaign professional.
