Details are continuing to emerge in the wake of the D.C. shooting last night that left two Israeli embassy staffers dead.
Yaron Lischinsky, 30, and Sarah Lynn Milgrim, 26, were killed on Wednesday evening following an event for young diplomats held at the Capital Jewish Museum in downtown D.C.
According to the Israeli ambassador to the U.S., the two were a couple, and about to become engaged.
The 31-year-old suspect, a man from Illinois, has been charged with murder and other crimes. He admitted to the shooting to a police officer saying, "I did it for Palestine, I did it for Gaza," according to an affidavit quoting a witness.
The killing of the young couple comes amid a record number of antisemitic incidents in the United States, according to the Anti-Defamation League, or ADL.
Daniel Shapiro, a distinguished fellow at the Atlantic Council who served as U.S. ambassador to Israel under the Obama administration, joined All Things Considered to discuss what he called "an era of an explosion of antisemitism" with host Mary Louise Kelly.
This interview has been edited lightly for length and clarity.
Interview Highlights:
Mary Louise Kelly: Does it feel fundamentally different to you — the safety, the security of Jews in the U.S. and worldwide, does it feel fundamentally different since the start of the war?
Daniel Shapiro: Certainly [over] that period of time we've seen more intensification of those kinds of events. But let's call it what it is. It's hatred. It's antisemitism. This was an antisemitic hate crime, for sure, but it was also an act of terrorism.
Terrorism is the use of violence to advance a political agenda. And we now see people expressing themselves, not just with outrageous chants — chants that call for violence and terror against anyone who's Jewish or Israeli.
Kelly: I will inject that the FBI says they are investigating this shooting as an act of targeted violence. I will also note: this couple, they were leaving an event organized by the young professional group of the American Jewish Committee, which is a pro-Israel advocacy group that confronts antisemitism. How should we think about confronting antisemitism in a moment like this?
Shapiro: The community itself will need to harden security of our institutions and law enforcement will need to be more attentive and will need funding for those security requirements.
But we really need moral clarity and strong political and communal leadership from within and without the Jewish community that completely rejects antisemitism and political violence of any kind. We need education to our young people of the history and the insidiousness of this persistent hatred which just has no place in our society.
Then, of course, the Jewish community, we need to be strong and resilient and proud, and we need to double down on our commitments to our involvement in Jewish communal life and strengthen our ties to allies of all faiths. I strongly believe that the vast majority of Americans utterly reject this hateful violence.
Kelly: We are now seeing this uptick in antisemitic incidents. Last year, a majority of those incidents were related to Israel or Zionism, for the first time since the ADL has started tracking this kind of thing. Understanding an event like last night is categorically horrific, how do you think about the act of protest against the state of Israel or its political leaders, the sort of protest that is part of a healthy democracy while rejecting antisemitism?
Shapiro: If someone wants to peacefully protest Israeli policy or U.S. policy toward the Middle East, obviously that's permissible and acceptable.
I personally strongly disagree with many policies of the current Israeli government. So do many Israelis, by the way.
And I, of course, support finding a path for Palestinians to achieve a state of their own. But, you know, far too often Jews are being harassed and intimidated, now even attacked, in the name of some cause related to the Palestinians. And nothing does more to undermine and really delegitimize that cause than to tie it to antisemitism and violence.
So peaceful protest, expressing oneself about policy views, always allowed. Tying it to these ancient and persistent hatreds and obviously any expression of it through violence, completely unacceptable.
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