This Is What Domestic Terrorism Looks Like Now
- Rick de la Torre
- 5 minutes ago
- 3 min read
If two Black civil rights lawyers had been gunned down outside the Smithsonian’s African American History Museum by someone yelling “White Lives Matter,” or if a flamethrower had been unleashed on a group of elderly Asian Americans rallying for justice, the national reaction would’ve been volcanic. The Justice Department would announce a federal task force before the smoke cleared. Cable news anchors would be broadcasting live from the scene. And every Ivy League president would be on camera issuing statements about hate. But swap the victims for Jews—swap the slogans for “Free Palestine!”—and suddenly the tone shifts. The vocabulary softens. The outrage feels optional.
In the span of two weeks, we’ve seen two acts of raw political violence—one in Washington, D.C., the other in Boulder, Colorado. Both were carried out by individuals shouting the same phrase. In D.C., a gunman approached a group outside the Capital Jewish Museum, where young diplomats had just attended a multifaith panel on humanitarian aid. He murdered two Israeli Embassy staffers, one of whom had just bought an engagement ring and planned to propose in Jerusalem. In Boulder, a man lit elderly Jewish walkers on fire with a makeshift flamethrower during a peaceful march calling for the release of Hamas hostages. One of the victims is a Holocaust survivor.
Authorities now confirm the Boulder attacker, Mohamed Sabry Soliman, was in the country illegally. Let that sink in. We have foreign nationals crossing our borders, radicalized by overseas ideology, and committing terrorist acts against American citizens in broad daylight.
This is not just about antisemitism anymore. This is an attack on the moral spine of Western civilization itself—on the foundational ideas of free speech, pluralism, rule of law, and civil society. These weren’t attacks on armed forces. They weren’t acts of war. They were targeted assaults on civilians participating in peaceful events. If that doesn’t constitute a war against Western values, what does?
The phrase “Free Palestine” now routinely precedes bloodshed. This isn’t protest—it’s weaponized ideology. It’s not dissent—it’s domestic terrorism.
And let’s not pretend it comes out of nowhere. Radicalized anti-Israel groups like Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) were distributing flyers with Hamas paragliders the day after the October 7 massacre. The Party for Socialism and Liberation—yes, the same group that once publicly affiliated with the D.C. shooter—organized anti-Israel rallies that glorified Hamas death squads. College campuses, especially Columbia, became open breeding grounds for this rot. According to a federal civil rights investigation, Columbia administrators ignored harassment, allowed swastika graffiti to go unpunished, and failed to protect Jewish students from a hostile environment—all while accepting hundreds of millions in taxpayer funding.
The federal government finally stepped in. Columbia now faces a potential consent decree, and Harvard has lost its ability to enroll foreign students. It shouldn’t have taken this long. But that’s what happens when universities confuse “academic freedom” with allowing antisemitic mobs to run wild. There’s a difference between unpopular speech and unpunished threats. These campuses erased that line.
None of this is spontaneous. It’s systemic. And it’s metastasizing. The message being absorbed by would-be radicals is clear: If you target Jews, especially under the banner of Gaza, the rules are different. You might get arrested, sure—but you’ll get rationalized, too. You’ll get coverage that hedges, analysts who speculate, and activist lawyers who shift the focus to your mental health. You’ll become a “troubled individual,” not a terrorist.
This is moral failure masquerading as nuance.
It’s also the result of decades of institutional cowardice. Jewish synagogues, schools, and community centers in the U.S. now spend hundreds of thousands annually on private security . Most Jewish events keep their locations private. This isn’t normal. It’s not the mark of a tolerant society. It’s what it looks like when a nation tolerates one form of hate as if it were somehow more palatable than the others.
Credit where it’s due: President Trump called the D.C. killings what they are—acts of antisemitic terror—and pledged full accountability . But most of the professional outrage class? Silent. The same people who treat a misgendered tweet as an existential crisis seem oddly unmoved when elderly Jews are immolated on U.S. soil.
The truth is inconvenient: antisemitism has gone mainstream in the institutions that once fancied themselves moral arbiters. Universities, activist movements, even some corners of Congress are either indifferent or complicit. The slogan has changed, the styling is different, but the disease is the same. You can wrap it in keffiyehs, filter it through Gaza talking points, or preach it from a DEI-funded podium—it’s still hate.
And hate, when normalized, becomes violence.
This is what domestic terrorism looks like now: ideologically charged, selectively excused, and broadcast in the language of “justice.” But if we don’t say what it is—if we continue to play word games while people are dying—then we’re not resisting the tide. We’re riding it.
Enough.