My peaceful hand was met with murder in woke terror attack on Jewish Museum

Late Wednesday, two Israeli embassy staffers — Sarah Milgrim and Yaron Lischinsky, young diplomats in their 20s, soon to be engaged — were brutally shot to death in Washington, DC, after attending an event hosted by the American Jewish Committee for early-career foreign service officers.

I am gutted. That event is one I helped start nearly 20 years ago, when I served as AJC’s regional director.

The goal was simple: to promote understanding and reconciliation among rising diplomats from around the world, even from countries with historical tensions.

It was a model of bridge-building and peaceful coexistence. Now, it’s a crime scene.

Initial reports suggest the alleged assailant is affiliated not with a jihadist network, but with a radical socialist group called the Party for Socialism and Liberation.

It has previously endorsed violent anti-Israel protests and calls for “armed resistance” against what it calls Western imperialism.

This wasn’t an isolated outburst — it was a worldview made flesh.

What we’re witnessing is the deadly consequence of an ideological framework that categorizes people and nations into a rigid binary: oppressors and oppressed.

I warned in my 2022 book “Woke Antisemitism” of a disturbing trend I’d observed in progressive activist spaces. Increasingly in these circles, I saw that Jews — especially Zionist Jews — were being cast as inherently privileged and oppressive.

It didn’t take long for that slander to go from words to threats, as we’ve seen on our college campuses and city streets in the last two years.

Now it’s manifesting as murder.

Since the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks on Israel, the alignment between radical leftist movements and Islamist ideologies — what analysts call the “Red-Green Alliance” — has only deepened.

Together, they’ve created a powerful, combustible narrative: that Israel is the world’s ultimate oppressor, and anything done in resistance against its supposed crimes is justified.

This narrative is both wrong and incredibly dangerous.

And it’s proving especially seductive to America’s young people.

The suspect in Wednesday’s killings was not from the Middle East, not raised in a Muslim country. He was, by all accounts, a radicalized Western activist.

That’s what should chill us most: This ideology is no longer spreading only through extremist mosques or foreign media, but through elite American campuses, social media feeds, and yes — even K-12 classrooms.

Many of our schools now teach frameworks that reduce all of history and society into power hierarchies of domination.

Students, even in elementary grades, are instructed to locate themselves on an oppression matrix — and Jews, by virtue of their success, are often placed on the “oppressor” side of the ledger, even when they’re targeted for violence.

It’s a form of moral inversion that desensitizes students to Jewish suffering and normalizes antisemitic hate as a form of valiant resistance.

If we do not root out this ideology at its source — in our educational institutions, civic discourse and activist spaces — we will continue to see its consequences play out in blood.

Antisemitism doesn’t always wear a swastika. Sometimes it wears a keffiyeh.

Sometimes it chants slogans about “liberation.”

Sometimes it shows up at an interfaith dialogue and pulls out a knife.

The event I started at AJC two decades ago was founded on a belief in diplomacy over dogma, human connection over ideological purity.

What happened Wednesday night is a desecration of that spirit.

It must also be a wake-up call for every educator, every policymaker, and every one of us who values a civil society: The cult of ideological extremism in our institutions has grown out of control.

We must summon the courage now to defund it, expose it and dismantle it — before more blood is spilled in the name of false righteousness.

David Bernstein is the founder and CEO of North American Values Institute and author of “Woke Antisemitism: How a Progressive Ideology Harms Jews.”