By Dr. Richard M. Swier, LTC U.S. Army (Ret.)
For anyone with lingering doubts about whether anti-Semitism in America has increased, 26% of the House of Representatives voted Monday night against condemning anti-Semitic terrorism. When the House took its roll call on a resolution (H.Res.488) “Denouncing the antisemitic terrorist attack in Boulder, Colorado,” 113 Democratic members refused to condemn the violence. This disturbing development demonstrates how completely progressive ideology has warped the moral worldview of some American lawmakers, such that they cannot vote to condemn violent, racialized attacks.
On June 1, an Egyptian national, who was in the U.S. illegally, attacked a group of elderly Jews during their weekly march in recognition of the hostages still held by Hamas. Armed with Molotov cocktails and homemade flamethrowers, the man sent eight victims to the hospital with burns as he yelled, “Free Palestine.” The victims were aged 52 to 88, including a Holocaust survivor and certainly played no personal role in Israel’s military campaign against Hamas terrorists in Gaza; the man simply attacked them because they were Jewish.
It’s worth stating the good news, first: a clear bipartisan majority approved the resolution in the House of Representatives — 205 Republicans and 75 Democrats voted to condemn this vulgar terror attack. However, six members (Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene [R-Ga.] and five Democrats) voted “present,” while 33 members, split between both parties, did not vote.
The resolution, introduced by freshman Rep. Gabe Evans (R-Colo.), simply declared, after a modest preamble:
“That the House of Representatives—
“(1) condemns Mohammed Sabry Soliman and his antisemitic terrorist attack on peaceful demonstrators supporting the release of the hostages held by Hamas;
“(2) affirms that free and open communication between State and local law enforcement and their Federal counterparts remains the bedrock of public safety and is necessary in preventing terrorist attacks; and
“(3) expresses gratitude to law enforcement officers, including U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement [ICE] personnel, for protecting the homeland.”
This praise for law enforcement and condemnation of terror was too much for some members to stomach, and 113 Democrats voted against the resolution. (Perhaps these Democrats were thinking of the ongoing L.A. riots and did not want to support either ICE or cooperation between federal and state law enforcement — clever of Evans to include that.)
For his trouble, Evans earned only mockery from House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.). “Who is this guy? He’s not seriously concerned with combating anti-Semitism in America. This is not a serious effort. This guy’s going to be a one-term member of Congress. He’s a complete and total embarrassment,” Jeffries jeered. In answer to his first question (yes, he intended it rhetorically), Evans is a former Army Black Hawk pilot and former police officer.
Some Democrats criticized Evans’s resolution because they preferred a different resolution condemning the Boulder attack offered by Rep. Joe Neguse (D-Colo.), in whose adjacent district the attack occurred. But the House only voted on one resolution — that offered by Evans — and even Neguse chose to vote for it.
The reason why most members, even a significant number of Democrats, supported the resolution is because the moral position is clear. Violent acts of terrorism against innocent civilians are always condemnable, whether committed by Hamas operatives against Israelis at the Nova music festival or by an Islamist radical in Boulder, Colo.
To underscore this point, Hamas is still an evil terrorist organization holding onto dozens of kidnapped civilians, which it cynically uses as bargaining chips to extract ever greater concessions out of Israel. The Boulder terror victims were attacked while attempting to remind an indifferent world of this fact.
“Our life turned upside down,” said Ilan Dalal, father of hostage Guy Dalal. “Me and my wife, we had two jobs each. We provided our family with dignity. And since then, we stopped working. We are unable to do anything except fight to bring them back.”
During a recent meeting at Family Research Council headquarters, Dalal took pains to remind Americans that hostages like Guy, and Guy’s lifelong friend Evyatar David, are human beings, just like everybody else. “They both had dreams, he said. “Guy just finished his education in computer science before he was abducted. He managed to work for a new company for two months, and he taught himself to speak and write Japanese because his dream was to go to Japan and travel and see the world. Evyatar also had a dream to become a music producer.”
The young men were 22 when captured, and now they are 24. “They both have already [had] two birthdays in captivity,” Dalal declared, “two birthdays in the tunnels, without their friends, without their family, without their love.”
For a while, the families held onto hope that at least their sons were still alive. But after the release of Tal Shoham, an older man who shared their captivity, they were shocked by the barbarous conditions. “We didn’t think that their conditions of captivity [were] so harsh,” Dalal reflected. “We really thought that they [were] treating them [with] more dignity. But when Tal was released, we found the truth.”
“The tunnel that they are held in is booby trapped with explosives, which the terrorists threatened to set off if the IDF is approaching. And, since we don’t know the quality of the explosives, it might go off accidentally and kill them. And one of the guards can go crazy … and he can kill them, or they just die from the bad condition they are in,” he related. “They are beaten, starved, and abused on a daily basis. And the last sign of life … was three months ago.”
To hear such accounts and conclude, “Actually, I’ll side with terrorists,” reveals a terribly warped moral compass. Ninety years ago, Adolf Hitler and his Nazi party targeted Jews for extinction because his racial ideology viewed them as impure, inhuman. Today, a new racial ideology — a Marxist one — holds sway in leftist circles, and once again Jews find themselves the target. This time, the Left accuses the Jews of colonialism for returning to their homeland, siding with the interloping Arabs merely because — they suppose — Jews have white skin, and Arabs have brown skin — an imaginary distinction that pays little heed to the facts.
But a person’s moral character is revealed through his actions, not his skin color. To say otherwise is to descend into total moral relativism — with a sturdy dose of racism to boot.
Earlier this month, a cadre of diehard progressives determined to prove their morally backward hypothesis of Israel’s supposed evil by launching a so-called “freedom flotilla” to bring humanitarian aid from Sicily to Gaza, hoping somehow to break Israel’s naval blockade. But Israel called out the ship for what it was, a “selfie yacht” carrying less aid than a single truck entering Gaza from Israel. In fact, when Israel boarded the vessel, they came bearing food and water.
Israel offered a solution to the Left’s self-deception about the morality of their war with Hamas. They invited — nay, compelled — the activists (including the nearly forgotten Greta Thunberg) to watch a 43-minute film depicting the atrocities committed by Hamas against Israeli civilians on October 7, 2023.
Of course, unbelief is often a matter of the will, not the mind (Isaiah 6:9-10); the truth can only change the minds of those willing to accept it. Reportedly, the activists simply refused to watch the film.
“These anti-Semitic flotilla activists closed their eyes to the truth and once again proved they prefer the murderers over the victims,” Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz said. “They continue to ignore the atrocities committed by Hamas against Jewish and Israeli women, the elderly, and children.” So, too, it seems, does a quarter of the House of Representatives.
AUTHOR
Joshua Arnold is a senior writer at The Washington Stand.
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EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2025 Family Research Council.
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