Analysis | A polarized U.S. responds in horror after shooting with few parallels
It’s a moment many have feared: violence overseas, spilling onto U.S. soil.
The shocking act was reminiscent of a ghastly incident in the same city last year: an active-duty U.S. Air Force service member set himself ablaze outside the Israeli Embassy in Washington, also shouting, “Free Palestine.”
But killing diplomats? Nothing like this has happened here in recent memory.
There was an alleged Iranian plot over a decade ago to kill the Saudi ambassador to the U.S. You’d have to go back several decades, however, to the killing of a former Chilean official in 1976, for anything remotely analogous.
The shootings have provoked a predictably horrified reaction, with the different political parties expressing shock and most U.S. news outlets featuring the story atop their home pages.
The initial headlines, however, took on different tones in different news outlets, reflecting broader societal polarization over the Middle East.
On Fox News, five blood-red headlines led the website topped by, “Pro-Palestinian man accused of murdering Israeli embassy staffers.”
On the left-leaning MSNBC site, it was the third story, in regular black font, with the headline, “Suspect in custody,” keeping the shooting suspect’s politics out of it.
This country, like much of the world, has been cleaved by tension over distant events.
Anger over the war in Gaza shut down several university campuses last year, one of which I visited, George Washington University in the U.S. capital.
There was graffiti there and protest signs calling for the globalization of “the intifada.”
When I asked one professor about the graffiti, she expressed sympathy for it, characterizing violence as a foreseeable reaction to events in Gaza.
These killings now make palpable a fear long felt by many American Jews.
Just one day before the shooting, there were reports that the site of the shooting, the Capital Jewish Museum, had received public funding for security — making it one of numerous Jewish institutions to escalate safety measures following a synagogue massacre in Pittsburgh in 2018 and again following an escalation of antisemitic hate crimes since the start of the Gaza conflict.
