On the menu today: In the grand sweep of history, one brutal murder of a six-year-old in a town in Illinois this weekend will not be widely remembered. And yet, the horrific story of a 71-year-old landlord stabbing a Palestinian-American first-grader to death offers some hard lessons about how extreme events and runaway tensions can radicalize seemingly ordinary people and make them commit unspeakable, shocking acts of violence upon the innocent. That poor kid had nothing to do with Hamas or the events in the Middle East, but he paid the highest price anyway — all because this nutjob landlord decided he wanted to strike back, and any Palestinian Muslim would do.
The Hamas massacre shocked Americans, and the campus radicals coming out of the woodwork to blame Israel and make excuses for terrorists outraged us even more. The one-two punch of a massacre and watching so many young people attempt to justify that massacre quickly turned the country into a tinderbox. The current moment is further evidence for why leaders must not use fear and anger as tools to accumulate power — they’re like nitroglycerin: far too unstable and dangerous to be handled casually or carelessly.
A Tinderbox of Radicalism
When the situation is tense, and public tensions are high, we don’t need somebody coming along and pouring gasoline on the fire.
You may have seen the headline about that man in Illinois who murdered a six-year-old. The details are even more chilling than you imagined:
For the past two years, relatives recalled, Joseph Czuba was kind to the Palestinian mother and her young son who were renting part of his house in Plainfield, Ill., about a half-hour outside of Chicago.
The 71-year-old landlord built the boy a treehouse, let him use a swimming pool and bought him toys, the child’s relatives said. But over the past few days, according to the family, “something changed,” and Czuba had grown hostile to his Arab tenants.
On Saturday, a week after Hamas militants launched a devastating attack on Israel, Czuba allegedly knocked on the Palestinian family’s door just after 11 a.m. When the mother, Hanaan Shahin, answered, Czuba assaulted her with a serrated military-style knife while yelling anti-Muslim statements, forcing her to run to the bathroom to call 911, according to local authorities and the family’s statements at a news conference on Sunday.
When Shahin emerged from the bathroom after calling police, according to the accounts, she found Czuba attacking her 6-year-old son, Wadea Alfayoumi, who later died of his wounds. He had been stabbed 26 times, the Will County Sheriff’s Office said in a statement. Shahin, 32, was stabbed at least a dozen times and remains hospitalized in serious condition, the family said.
By the way, that child was born in the U.S; he was as American as you or me.*
According to the Will County, Ill., Sheriff’s Office, “Czuba was charged with first degree murder, attempted first degree murder, hate crime (2 counts), and aggravated battery with a deadly weapon. Detectives were able to determine that both victims in this brutal attack were targeted by the suspect due to them being Muslim and the on-going Middle Eastern conflict involving Hamas and the Israelis.”
The article above quoted Ahmed Rehab of the Chicago branch of the Council on American-Islamic Relations saying, “This atmosphere has created a monster out of a normal man who once built a treehouse.”
That’s the thing: From what we know so far, this landlord wasn’t always a monster; at one point, he could see that six-year-old boy for who he was — a six-year-old boy, with no connection to the tensions in the Middle East other than that he shared an ethnic heritage and religious faith with people who lived out there. And then, sometime in the past week or so, that 71-year-old man decided that the kid was a legitimate target for his own murderous rage. He stabbed the kid 26 times, and the mother more than a dozen times.
Every human being with even an ounce of empathy or sense of justice is outraged about the Hamas massacre in Israel. Right now, just about everybody feels helpless, outraged, and depressed. There are a lot of people beside themselves with grief and anger — and even rage.
As my colleague Kathryn Jean Lopez observes, we’re watching “never again” happen again: “More Jews were killed on October 7, 2023, than at any time since the Holocaust. Meditate on that. The demon of antisemitism is rearing its hellish hate today more than at any point in the lifetimes of people living today. I know more than a few Jewish mothers in tears these days.”
Last night in his 60 Minutes interview, President Biden said, “Israel is going after a group of people who have engaged in barbarism that is as consequential as the Holocaust.”
Last week, we endured the most gratuitous and shameful insult after the most appalling and heinous injury. At a time when our hearts were broken and our minds were reeling from the shock of large-scale murder and kidnapping of children, parents, and senior citizens, some schmucks, mostly know-nothing college kids, decided that this was the right moment to let us know they stood with the murderers and not with the murdered.
Our Zach Kessel collected many statements from student groups declaring the Israelis are ultimately responsible for the actions of Hamas. (You figure Northwestern University’s Human Rights Club’s contention that the Jews control the media will get a round of applause from the neo-Nazis over at Stormfront.)
Don’t worry, kids, Vivek Ramaswamy is here to argue you shouldn’t be blacklisted for cheering on Hamas.
As John Tillman, CEO of the American Culture Project, writes at NRO today:
On virtually every college campus today, you’ll see people defending and justifying Hamas’s brutal attack on Israel — as clear an assault on human rights as you’ll ever see. Pro-Palestinian and anti-Israel marches are widespread; at Harvard University, more than 30 student groups said Israel is “entirely responsible for all unfolding violence.” And while some university presidents (such as Harvard’s) have condemned Hamas, few have condemned their students for siding with terrorists. (A notable and praiseworthy example is Ben Sasse at the University of Florida.) Even fewer have said they support Israel — a democracy that protects the human rights of Arabs and Jews alike.
The head of the Anti-Defamation League has pointed out this blatant asymmetry. The famous Jewish group proudly stood with colleges and universities in the wake of George Floyd’s death. Yet now, days after Hamas attacked, he still hadn’t heard from a single university president. He asked: “Why is my inbox empty?”
My colleague Maddy Kearns observes that just about every American to the right of Joe Scarborough has been compared to Nazis in the past decades, but the one group that certain progressives are hesitant to judge or denounce is Hamas, a group that does not recognize the right of Jews to exist. Apparently, everybody’s a Nazi except the organization that is murdering as many Jews as it can.
The University of Pennsylvania exhausted the patience of Jon Huntsman, the former governor of Utah and U.S. ambassador to China. Huntsman wrote to Penn president Liz Magill, “The university’s silence in the face of reprehensible and historic Hamas evil against the people of Israel (when the only response should be outright condemnation) is a new low. Silence is antisemitism, and antisemitism is hate, the very thing higher ed was built to obviate. Consequently, Huntsman Foundation will close its checkbook on all future giving to Penn.”
In what I am sure is just a big coincidence, Magill suddenly felt extremely motivated to explicitly denounce antisemitism Sunday morning, and to distance the university from recent events on campus:
At Penn, we are confronting these events in the wake of recent antisemitic acts on campus and individuals, with a public history of speaking out viciously against the Jewish people, appearing on campus as part of the Palestine Writes Literature Festival.
Many have voiced their anger and frustration about this event. Please know that I hear you. I know how painful the presence of these speakers on Penn’s campus was for the Jewish community, especially during the holiest time of the Jewish year, and at a University deeply proud of its long history of being a welcoming place for Jewish people. The University did not, and emphatically does not, endorse these speakers or their views. While we did communicate, we should have moved faster to share our position strongly and more broadly with the Penn community.
I stand, and Penn stands, emphatically against antisemitism. We have a moral responsibility — as an academic institution and a campus community — to combat antisemitism and to educate our community to recognize and reject hate.
Just how much credit does Magill deserve for only offering a full-throated denunciation of antisemitism after deep-pocketed donors say they’re cutting off contributions?
A lot of decent Americans with functioning consciences are looking at the pro-“resistance” crowd — which is excusing or even cheering the Hamas atrocities, joking about killing “hipsters,” and adopting the paraglider as a symbol — and realizing that if, God forbid, some terrorist group executed a similar attack on American soil and killed lots of Americans, this same pro-“resistance” crowd would cheer on those attacks, too. There is a small but loud pro-terrorism demographic in our country. Some of “us” are rooting against “us” — Americans against America.
It’s a dry forest out there, with a lot of tinder lying around. People are on edge, bracing for the worst, wondering who’s out there plotting copycat attacks. The last thing we need is somebody running around playing with matches.
We don’t need any prominent public voice coming out and saying, “This is why the Israelis had it coming.” (Nor was last week a good time to vent one’s spleen about Israeli prime minister Bibi Netanyahu before the television cameras, whining about past grievances. The Israelis are still counting the dead from the initial Hamas attack, now past 1,400. Any responsible leader needs to understand that moments like this are not about him.)
Despite the popularity of Hamas among Palestinians, there are some innocent Palestinians out there; we don’t need anyone else using their platform to argue, “Let’s wipe out the Palestinians.”
We don’t know how many other guys there are out there, ready to turn on their tenant and her child, forgetting about that treehouse they once built for him.
There’s a certain kind of firebrand politician that never goes away but seems to have particularly flourished in the past decade or so — the “fighter,” often populist, almost always incendiary in their rhetoric, provocative, edgy, shameless. These types are always trying to turn the heat up, not down. If they know how to calm down public tensions, they’ve never chosen that path. If they know how to help people channel that anger in a constructive direction, they hide it well. They see a fire and instinctively want to throw buckets of gasoline on it.
The public’s anger and fear are like nitroglycerin — you’re not supposed to play with them. Those emotions can run amok easily.
*I realize you, reader, may not be a U.S. citizen, but most of you are, and I might even argue that if you’re reading this newsletter, you’re already an American in spirit. That said, I would not use that argument with U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.
ADDENDUM: Our Luther Ray Abel makes a compelling argument that it is time for Mike Pence to hang up his spurs and endorse someone else in the GOP presidential primary:
Mike Pence is always Mike Pence: firmly square and laudably consistent in his beliefs and principles. The party needs him to back one of his fellow candidates and cheer that individual on — he’s exceptional at doing that. Pence might not be David, but he could be the king’s armorer. There’s more heroism in producing the best results with what faculties one possesses than there is virtue in refusing to accept the role of supporting cast. Even the best of political leaders, whether kings or presidents, are only ever a necessary evil. America requires Pence’s moral clarity, not his candidacy.