Anti-semitic murders and the 5th anniversary of George Floyd riots

By Peter Wolfgang ( bio - articles - email ) | May 24, 2025

This past Wednesday a leftist nut gunned down two young employees of the Israeli Embassy in Washington as they were leaving a reception at the Capital Jewish Museum. And tomorrow is the fifth anniversary of the murder of George Floyd, which “Almost Consumed America in Revolution.” What do you these two things have in common? More than you might think. In fact, I would argue that the young couple murdered this week by a Marxist madman are the latest casualties in the revolution begun by the left’s exploitation of George Floyd’s murder.

When people look back on the summer of the George Floyd riots, what they most remember is being gaslighted by the media. “Mostly peaceful protests” and all that. But the far deeper gaslighting was the attack on America herself. We were told that our country was born not with a Declaration of Independence in 1776 but with the arrival of the first slave in 1619, that we were a nation that was irredeemably, irretrievably racist, guilty to the very marrow of our bones, and that we must face a “reckoning.” Statues of the Founding Fathers and other American heroes were torn down. On the 4th of July in 2020 I woke up, logged onto Facebook, and learned that the statue of Christopher Columbus near our city hall had been decapitated in the dead of night.

Anti-Columbus fanaticism is at the heart of the revolution. Columbus is not only a symbol of Italian-American pride and assimilation. Our civilization in this hemisphere begins with Columbus’ arrival in 1492. No 1492, no 1776. Objections to Columbus are not just about a desire for historical accuracy or a concern for native populations. They are also about delegitimizing the presence of Western Civilization and Christianity in the Americas. And setting us up for a “reckoning.”

This is the popular academic fad of “decolonization.” As an ethnic Jew, I feel the danger of this ideology in my very bones. We have seen this movie before. The idea that there is an entire race of people who bear some sort of eternal blood guilt that can never be expurgated. It doesn’t end well.

And that movie, or at least its opening credits, seems to be playing again. “Muslims have a right to be angry and to kill millions of French people for the massacres of the past,” Malaysia’s former prime minister tweeted a few years ago. Where does that sort of thinking lead? It leads to, well, the gunning down of a beautiful young couple coming out of a reception at the Capital Jewish Museum. And to the horror that preceded it. “In some ways” wrote the Wall Street Journal of that couple and the man who murdered them, “their paths had been converging since Hamas’s attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, unleashing passions far from the Middle East that show no signs of cooling.”

How? Here, to me, is the key thing that ties the murder of the Washington couple and the anniversary of the George Floyd riots together. This tweet by a writer for Teen Vogue celebrating the October 7th massacre got 100,000 likes in 24 hours:

What did y’all think decolonization meant? vibes? papers? essays? losers.

That is the ideology powering both the George Floyd riots of 2020 and the massacre of Israelis three years later and the murder of that young couple this week. America and Israel both deserve destruction, it is claimed, because we are both guilty of “settler colonialism.” Supporters of Israel, such as that couple, likewise deserve death according to that line of reasoning.

As the Wall Street Journal recalled this week:

…consider what the campus fixture Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) did on Oct. 8. ‘Today, we witness a historic win for the Palestinian resistance,’ it told its chapters, and provided them materials for a “Day of Resistance” at colleges. A pamphlet depicted a Hamas paraglider alongside student protesters, all waging one struggle.

We are told now that student protests are in response to a genocide of Palestinians by Israel. But SJP was celebrating the Oct. 7th massacre before the war began. And why not? From their perspective, it was decolonization in action. The murderer of the Washington couple, a former member of SJP, was likewise “globalizing the intifada”—as is often called for—when he murdered them.

Catholic commentary in the U.S. has largely focused on correcting an Evangelical-tinged pro-Israel bent and on educating the faithful as to the suffering of Palestinian Christians. That is understandable. The Catholic Church has a global reach, with adherents of every tribe and tongue, and we ought to be united with our leaders on the ground in the Middle East and in Rome, who have had the same focus.

But good people can and do come down on different sides of the Israel-Gaza War. A recent article in First Things took sharp exception to the claim that Israel was committing genocide. And Yaron Lischinsky, one of the two people murdered, was actually “an Israeli Christian who called Israel ‘the only place in the [Middle East] where Christians can thrive.’” In fact, Lischinsky and the other victim, his girlfriend Sarah Milgrim, were reportedly worshipers at an Anglo-Catholic Episcopal Church where she was soon to be baptized. And they were peace activists, working to build bridges between Israelis and Palestinians.

Catholics need to know about people like them too. And they need to know about—and speak against—a growing anti-Semitism in some of the wackier Catholic corners of the internet. After my last column about this topic for Catholic Culture, I was treated to this:

I’m hardly alone. Catholic apologist Trent Horn—who, like me, is the son of a Jewish man—addressed these topics along with his fellow panelists in the Philos Project’s recent conference on Catholics and Anti-Semitism.

Most of all, though, Catholic commentators—whether pro-Israel or pro-Palestinian—need to give more attention to the “permission structure” (to borrow Bari Weiss’ phrase) that made the cheering for October 7th possible in the first place. Decolonization, globalizing the intifada, racial reckonings and so forth, are not stories about something that already happened or is happening in, say, far away South Africa. As the murders of Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim show, these ideologies are shedding blood right here and right now. How long until those same ideologies target Catholics the way it targeted Jews on October 7th?

Peter Wolfgang is president of Family Institute of Connecticut Action, a Hartford-based advocacy organization whose mission is to encourage and strengthen the family as the foundation of society. His work has appeared in The Hartford Courant, the Waterbury Republican-American, Crisis Magazine, Columbia Magazine, the National Catholic Register, CatholicVote, Catholic World Report, the Stream and Ethika Politika. He lives in Waterbury, Conn., with his wife and their seven children. The views expressed on Catholic Culture are solely his own. See full bio.

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