There was a terrorist attack on Wednesday night outside the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, D.C.
The attack occurred outside the Young Diplomats Reception for young Jewish professionals, hosted by the American Jewish Committee. Two staffers, Yaron Lischinsky, 30, a German-Israeli dual citizen and a devout evangelical Christian who had immigrated to Israel at the age of 16 and served in the Israel Defense Forces, and Sarah Milgrim, 26, were shot at close range. Lischinsky had just bought an engagement ring to propose to Milgrim when they got back to Jerusalem.
They were murdered. They were murdered by a man who was shouting, “Free Palestine.” Video shows the man chanting in full campus mode, “Free, free Palestine,” which, by the way, is a good indicator of what the “Free Palestine, Globalize The Intifada” movement is actually about.
This is the pro-Palestinian cause in a nutshell that’s been happening on college campuses across America: Standing for a presumptive terror state with genocidal intentions against Jews and Israelis with the full aid in support of a compliant legacy media.
The shooter was apparently a member of a group known as the Party for Socialism and Liberation. Investigative reporter Ryan Morrow noted that the group is one of 150 pro-terrorism groups he identified as responsible for the anti-Israel protests in his Marching Towards Violence study. The shooter accused Israel of “genocide” in his manifesto.
Let’s look into this lie, because lies have consequences. According to the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, “Genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national at the ethnical, racial, or religious group, such as killing members of the group, causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group, deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part, etc.”
Genocide requires intent to destroy in whole or in part an entire national group.
It simply does not apply under these circumstances. Not even close. First of all, Hamas has an obvious desire to propagate this myth. This is why Hamas was thanking the U.K., France, and Canada for helping to propagate this myth. This is why Hamas deliberately hides behind civilians. The basic logic of Hamas is that they know that the Israelis don’t want to kill civilians, which is the reason they hide behind them. The whole goal is to get as many civilians killed as possible, and then claim that Israel is purposefully killing the civilians when Israel is doing literally everything humanly possible in an urban warfare environment in which terrorists deliberately hide behind their own children, not to kill the children.
By the way, Israel has done a remarkable job of that. Israel has not only not engaged in genocide, Israel has engaged in the most humane war in the history of civilization, in an urban warfare environment in which the enemy has taken hostage 250 of their citizens, is still hiding dozens of those citizens in Gaza terror tunnels today, and deliberately hides its weaponry and its terrorists beneath hospitals, schools, and in mosques. Israel has somehow achieved a civilian casualty to combat ratio of about 1 to 1. Totally unheard of.
As far as humanitarian aid, Israel shipped in literally tons of humanitarian aid into the very same area where the hostages were being held, where civilians were helping to hold the hostages. You may have noticed there’s been no popular movement in the Gaza Strip to free the hostages. None. Zero. It doesn’t exist. Even the protests that are out there against Hamas are not protests to free the hostages.
And yet Israel has been supplying humanitarian aid throughout the war to that exact same population at the expense of its own hostages, because Hamas routinely steals that aid, and then uses it in order to prop itself up.
Lies have consequences. So we understand why the genocide lie is so popular with those who wish to overtly destroy the state of Israel. We get it, obviously, because it means they win the PR war. Countries in the U.N., for example, that are in thrall to their Muslim populations. Yes, I’m looking at you, France and the U.K.
Or countries who might want to please their Chinese paymasters, who are seeking to foster anti-Americanism in the Middle East. Yes, that would be you, Canada, and South Africa.
The real question here is, why has this “genocide” lie become so popular in the West more generally? The answer is because our civilization has fallen in thrall to a Great Conspiracy Theory.
Conspiratorial thinking has become wildly popular on both the Left and the Right. It crosses all political boundaries. Now there are, of course, actual conspiracies in real life. Those conspiracies involve actual planning and implementation by actual human beings.
There’s a difference between a conspiracy, where there’s evidence, and conspiracy theories. These are not the same.
The philosopher Karl Popper spelled out a pretty good definition for this in his book, The Open Society and Its Enemies:
The ‘conspiracy theory of society’ … is the view that an explanation of a social phenomenon consists in the discovery of the men or groups, or interested in the occurrence of this phenomenon (sometimes it’s a hidden interest which has first to be revealed), and who have planned and conspire to bring it about.”
This view … arises, of course, from the mistaken theory that whatever happens in society — especially happenings such as war, unemployment, poverty, shortages, which people as a rule dislike — is the result of direct design by some powerful individuals and groups.
That’s the Great Conspiracy Theory. And that Great Conspiracy Theory has become insanely popular on both the Left and the Right.
Why on the Left? In the left-wing Great Conspiracy Theory, every group disparity is discrimination. If, for example, Black Americans are disproportionately lower income than white Americans, this has to be because of some actual conspiracy: systemic racism, white privilege, or a policy of discrimination without stating the actual policy.
Now again, it is possible to find policies in a wide variety of places and times across the world that do, in fact, victimize particular groups. That’s true. That’s not a conspiracy theory. That’s actual policy.
But if you cannot point to a policy or politician or institution that does the discriminating, you are now operating in the realm of a conspiracy theory. And that’s what the Left does both nationally and internationally. “Crime rates are bad in the black community because all cops are bastards.” “ White supremacy lies behind every corner.” “Racism is clearly the reason for disproportionate poverty.”
When you take that logic to the international stage, you end up with anti-Americanism, because America is disproportionately successful, and there are lots of other places that are not successful.
You also end up siding with Hamas. You end up chanting “Free Palestine.” In fact, support for Hamas is the apex case of the left-wing great conspiracy theory.
If the Palestinians, who collectively as a group, have made every single bad choice it is possible to make as a political body by: embracing and supporting terrorism, rejecting peace agreement after peace agreement; channeling funding toward violence and hatred rather than economic development; educating their own kids that wiping Israel off the map ought to be a lifelong goal; living in a failed state, both in Gaza, Judea, and Samaria; if no other country will take them specifically because they are shot through with enormous support for terrorism, then according to the Left, that’s not their own fault.
That must be the result of the more developed democracy on its borders, even if, by the way, that developed democracy (Israel) is one-fifth Muslim, and if the Muslims in that developed democracy have the highest levels of political and civil freedom of any Muslims anywhere in the world and some of the highest incomes in the region.
If Hamas spends billions of dollars to line its own pockets, live in five-star hotels in Qatar, build terror tunnels; if they fire rockets at Israel for nearly two decades, and then launch a genocidal attack on Jews —an actual genocidal attack by UN definition, designed to exterminate a part of a larger whole for which Hamas seeks mass murder and complete with the taking of hundreds of hostages again, dozens of whom are still, after a year and a half, being held in Gaza — then the Left responds by excusing Hamas, because, after all, the Great Conspiracy Theory suggests they are poor and supposedly browner (which ignores the 45% of Israelis whose parents and grandparents are from Arab countries and are in fact brown and less successful).
This is why there were left-wing protests in solidarity with Hamas before Israel even responded to October 7.
The genocide charge from the Left against Israel is a fig leaf. Israel’s very existence is the problem for the radical Left, just as the existence of America is a problem, because the successful are, by nature, the exploiters, according to the Left.
And then there’s the Right. There is a horseshoe theory of the Right that shares many of the same basic conspiracy theories as the Left.
You can hear it on a wide variety of supposedly right-wing or heterodox podcasts these days. This theory is that there is a group of victims, often lower-income whites or Christians, who are being victimized by a shadowy group of people.
Again, there are absolutely some policies that do victimize white people — we talk about them on the show a lot — through affirmative action on race or anti-Christian anti-discrimination regulations that are directed at the Little Sisters of the Poor or Christian bakers.
Those are all real; they aren’t conspiracy theories.
But what these conspiracy theorists on the Right often do is target a shadowy group whom they say are “running the system.” This shadowy group of people is often characterized as “clannish,” “cosmopolitan,” or “rootless.” And the supposed policy that is somehow consigning the conspiratorial Right to the victim class is either with regard to foreign policy or capitalism.
Thus, on the foreign policy front, you’ll hear these folks claim that American foreign policy is being run by AIPAC, which is an absurd claim. AIPAC is one of the least effective organizations in America. Or, that capitalism is being run by conspiratorial elites (who just so often have these Jewish last names.)
So why is the conspiratorial Right now embracing the “genocide in Gaza” lie, and very often making common cause with Hamas propaganda?
Here’s the thing. The problem for the conspiratorial Right when it comes to Israel is that Israel happens to be the only state in the Middle East where Christians live safely and openly. Israel is also clearly responding to a Muslim genocidal terrorist assault, and those same terrorists hate Americans and hate Christians. Hamas is not a fan of America or Christians.
And this is why the conspiratorial Right, unlike the conspiratorial Left, didn’t immediately start tearing into Israel on October 8; they just went peculiarly silent. None of them had anything to say. They just went totally quiet. Nothing on their Twitter feeds? Nothing. No comment. Nothing.
For a moment.
Then, the minute that Israel responded, they jumped into action. You see, the conspiratorial Right needed a reason for why “the same people who control American foreign policy and capitalism are the actual bad guys in the Middle East, too.”
And that’s why they’re fond of chattering about genocide in Gaza, despite the fact that there is no genocide: if they can claim that Israel is a genocidal state — and the same people on the conspiratorial Right who claim this also tend to claim that Israel is anti-Christian, a giant lie, and spend their days trying to dig up bad translations of the Talmud — then they can maintain their own Great Conspiracy Theory, in which this shadowy group of rootless cosmopolitans is in control of all the bad things in their lives.
The genocide lie is just as valuable to the conspiratorial Right as it is to the conspiratorial Left.
So why does this matter? Because lies have consequences.
This doesn’t mean that we have to buy into the theory of stochastic terrorism that the Left so often promotes. It doesn’t mean that opinions ought to be censored or deplatformed.
Let me say that again for the morons in the room: This does not mean opinions ought to be censored or deplatformed. No one is calling for people not to be on X, YouTube, Facebook, or anything like that. Additionally, this terrorist-murderer is responsible for his own actions, just as the congressional baseball shooter was responsible for his own actions, or the Dallas police shooter back in 2014 was responsible for his own actions.
Just as Hamas is responsible for its own actions.
But lies change the way people think and act. If I have to explain this to you, I would suggest that you’re mentally deficient.
Lies change the way people think and act. That is what they are designed to do. If you keep saying over and over again, for example, that “Donald Trump is Adolf Hitler,” it’s not a giant shock when multiple people try to assassinate Donald Trump.
If you keep saying “all cops are bastards” over and over and over again, it should not be a shock when someone tries to shoot cops.
And if you keep claiming or implying that “the Jews run the world and engage in genocide,” it should not be a shock when someone murders people at a Jewish event in Washington, D.C.
In other words, take some damned responsibility for the things you say and the positions you take. You have responsibility for the things that come out of your mouth.
It is worthwhile to be responsible in how we speak about issues and engage with the world. We focus a lot on rights. And of course we should, because the violation of rights is bad. But — there are also duties such as duties to the truth, to facts, and to speak reality.
Propagating absolute lies about genocide in Gaza and then spewing that out into the world over and over raises the temperature. Vomiting the N-word or “Heil Hitler” in public discourse raises the temperature, as does treating with absolute credulity a variety of specious claims, ranging from Hitler’s “well-intentioned oopses” in Europe to “Israeli genocide” to “conspiratorial Jews” and their Talmud running the banking system and Hollywood.
Stop with “just asking questions.” Just asking questions doesn’t cut it. The whole purpose of a question is to seek an answer. The people you listen to should be seeking answers. Getting answers is better than just asking questions.
If you want to live a better life, if you want to improve yourself and the world, you need actual answers to hard questions.
And responsible people base those answers on evidence. Facts. Reality. They don’t just “ask questions” or ignore actual answers in favor of a pseudo-ignorance masking itself as a sort of semi-retarded profundity: “I don’t know the answers. All I know is what we’ve been told is insufficient.”
Or pretend that answers given by people we trusted a moment ago are now insufficient, because those people aren’t giving us the answers we want: “Dan Bongino must be lying about Jeffrey Epstein because they probably got to him.”
People who do this sort of stuff aren’t just play-actors with teenage cynicism; they are actively misleading you. They are lying to you. They say they want answers when they absolutely, positively do not want answers. In fact, they want to prevent you from getting actual answers because the evidence and the facts and the real answers too often debunk their theories.
Such people, Left and Right, do not want you to have answers. They want you to be satisfied with their leading questions, which all lead to one gigantic false conclusion: that in the world of conspiracy theories, you are a victim.
And by the way, only they, the real askers, can guide you toward the light. Only they can be trusted.
This stuff is demagoguery of the highest order, and it’s ugly. It’s ugly because it is not only a lie, it also makes your life worse. That’s because in the end, their argument is actually really simple. It’s not a question, it’s an argument: “Someone else is responsible for problems that you can solve.”
That argument is bad for you. It makes you dumb.
It makes you useless. It makes you vicious.
It’s bad for your soul. It’s bad for America.
It’s bad for the world.
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