Op-Ed: Matthew Foldi: Threats to Jews remain clear and present two years after October 7th
The events of October 7th make it clear that the threat is here, the threat is now, and the time to act is before it’s too late.
On October 7th, 2023, the world witnessed unspeakable horrors, proudly filmed by barbarians from Gaza: mass slaughter, rape, abduction of civilians, and the desecration of both Jewish and non-Jewish lives in Israel.
But as the world’s attention slowly drifts, two years later we must not pretend the threat to Jews — here in America, and around the globe — has receded. If anything, it looms closer, darker, and more insidious than ever.
In recent months, the violence has edged into the capitals and neighborhoods that many believed were safe. In Washington, D.C., two staffers of the Israeli Embassy — Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim — were gunned down outside the Capital Jewish Museum. The shooter, Elias Rodriguez, was arrested and later charged with hate crime and murder counts.
He reportedly shouted “free Palestine,” and told investigators “I did it for Gaza.” These cold blooded murders were not a distant echo of conflict abroad; they were striking proof that the war over Jewish life is being waged on American soil.
Nor is this an isolated outburst. In Pennsylvania, the home of a Jewish governor was torched in a brazen act of domestic terror by a pro-Palestinian activist. In Boulder, Colorado, an illegal immigrant from Egypt fire bombed Jews who were peacefully marching in solidarity with their fellow Jews who are wasting away in the tunnels of Gaza.
Jews have been attacked in public, stabbed or shot, and their identities have been marked as targets, rather than as protected minorities. This is not alarmism; it is a daily reality for too many.
And in higher education, campuses have been battlefields for years. During the most recent academic year, American universities reported a record 2,334 antisemitic incidents, from vandalism and threats to calls for genocide.
Even if violent attacks have not spiked, the poison of anti-Semitism is fermenting, emboldened by official indifference or outright hostility in some quarters. There is no confident sign that this will slow; if anything, universities have become incubators of radicalism cloaked in academic legitimacy.
Consider the case of Dearborn, Michigan, a city often held up as emblematic of Arab-American life in the U.S. But sadly, there lies mounting concern. The city regularly hosts massive processions, such as the 2025 Arbaeen march, drawing tens of thousands into its streets, with slogans, religious iconography, and political resonance.
Local mosques and civic associations have ties to groups aligned with Iran or Hezbollah. In city council meetings, residents describing themselves as Christian have been told by the mayor that they are “not welcome here.” The boundaries between religious expression and political radicalism are being blurred, and in some quarters, erased.
What’s more, the Democratic Party, and not just fringe voices, has been infiltrated by political actors sympathetic to Palestinian terrorism. Figures like Reps. Rashida Tlaib (D., Mich.) and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D., N.Y.) continue to celebrate or excuse organizations that wage violence against Jews and Israelis. Their platforms amplify chants of “from the river to the sea,” glorify martyrs, and refuse to call out Hamas and Islamic Jihad in moral clarity. In fact, we at the Washington Reporter reported on the two year anniversary of the barbaric events of October 7th, 2023, that “Democrats commemorate October 7th by citing Hamas’s ‘falsified death toll numbers’ and with silence.”
This is not criticism of Israeli policy; this is an ideological alliance with those who kill Jewish civilians.
A more alarming figure looms: Zohran Mamdani, a socialist who has declined to condemn the slogan “globalize the intifada,” is now knocking on the doors of becoming mayor of New York City, the city home to more Jews than anywhere else in America.
His refusal to denounce calls for violent uprising, and his embrace by progressive coalitions, portend what might come if these vectors of radicalism go unchecked.
When Jewish people are hunted, silenced, demonized, and left undefended by institutions that once promised safety, this is not a gradual erosion of civility. It is a precipitous descent. It signals that anti-Jewish hate has become socially tolerable, even encouraged, in circles of power.
We in the civilized West stand at a threshold. The recent embassy murders, the burning of a Jewish leader’s home, the campus assaults, the murders of Jews in Manchester, the takeover of city public life, the cultivation of radical legislators: all these are more than episodic outrages.
They form a pattern of a blueprint of assault on Jewish life, identity, and belonging. If Jews can be targeted so brazenly, then no minority is safe. The forces of radical Islam make it clear that first they come for the Saturday people, then they come for the Sunday people. How much more evidence do we need?
The groups promoting this ideology are not just a threat to Jews: they threaten Western civilization itself. Their aim is not dialogue, not reform, not even representation; they seek dominance, eradication of democratic norms, and the delegitimization of liberal pluralism. When they win, when they become normalized, free discourse dies. The rule of law gives way to sectarian allegiance. Truth becomes whatever the loudest mob declares.
Two years after the atrocities of October 7th, we must not wait for the next calamity to mobilize. We must declare loudly: Jewish lives matter. Jewish safety matters. Jewish dignity matters. And the continued survival of liberal society depends on defending all of these. We must demand clear moral leadership, real legal protection, and an unwavering alliance against anti-Semitism in every classroom, every town hall, and every government office.
Let us not pretend the threat is distant. The threat is here, the threat is now, and the time to act is before it’s too late.
Matthew Foldi is the Editor-in-Chief of the Washington Reporter.