Witness to Jihad

The cult has metastasized.

For 25 years, I belonged to a far-left, insular, authoritarian Trotskyist organization. Today I’d prefer not to write about myself and my bizarre past, but about the murders of two young people, Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Lynn Milgrim, outside a Jewish museum in Washington, D.C. last week. I’d like to simply express my shock and sorrow about the killings of these clearly beautiful souls, and my fear about what they bode for America, Israel and the West. And yet it’s impossible for me to write that kind of piece, because of who I am and where I’ve been. I’m gripped with the sense that the deranged sect I left behind is now everywhere, spawning toxic new cells scoring previously unimaginable victories.

I never met Elias Rodriguez, the accused murderer of Lischinsky and Milgrim, but I know his world. I’m quite familiar with the Party for Socialism and Liberation, the radical Maoist organization he once belonged to; my now-ex-comrades supported the PSL’s candidates in the 2024 presidential election and I had many encounters with its predecessor group, the Workers World Party. Before quitting my former group in 2016, I marched countless times in demonstrations organized by ANSWER (Act Now to Stop War and End Racism), another activist group Rodriguez apparently belonged to. His beliefs and delusions were, broadly speaking, mine.

Today they’re shared by a wide swath of liberal society—people who would never shoot a young man and woman in cold blood, but who think there’s a context in which the shootings are, if not justifiable, then at least comprehensible as a response to Israel’s “genocide.” As Time magazine helpfully explains: “The shooting comes amid rising tensions over Israel’s ongoing war in Gaza, which has left an estimated at least 50,000 Palestinians dead and millions more displaced since Oct. 7, 2023.” With so much Palestinian suffering, they imply, what’s a couple of Israeli embassy staffers?

Then there’s the open gloating, enthusing, and calling for more. Social media activist Rebekah Jones posted a video (since deleted) on TikTok. “Want to feel safe?” she smirks. “Don’t commit a genocide.” If you’re attending concerts outside concentration camps or starving tens of thousands of babies, she continues, “maybe you should not feel safe.” Another TikToker, teenager Guy Christensen, hails Rodriguez’s actions to his millions of followers and calls, like a juvenile Che, for “the movement” to respond “with escalation and stronger resistance”—i.e., to murder more Jews. Days after a Jewish couple were publicly executed in the nation’s capital, the zeitgeist is more pogromist than ever.

They’re starting with the Jews, but of course they won’t end there. As Columbia University Apartheid Divest, one of today’s myriad “pro-Palestinian” groups, declared last year with disarming clarity: “We are Westerners fighting for the total eradication of Western civilization.” One may wonder how many of them are really Westerners, but the point remains: Today’s insurgents are actually intent on barbarism against the West.

I witnessed the cancer taking hold. Twentieth-century Marxism had its (totalitarian) problems, but at least in 1989, my comrades and I defended Salman Rushdie against Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa. Twenty years later, we asserted Iran’s right to nuclear weapons and denounced Rushdie as a pro-imperialist stooge. Iran and Rushdie didn’t change—we did, and a large swath of Western society changed with us.

Because the terrorists who flew hijacked passenger planes into the Twin Towers on 9/11 didn’t “only” murder thousands of innocent people: they ushered in a new Dark Age. Lower Manhattan was still shrouded in ash when the tacit message went out: To be a good progressive, you had to see the World Trade Center victims as somehow guilty by virtue of residing in the rapacious West, and the perpetrators as the provoked victims of imperialism. September 11 was simply, as many put it, a case of “the chickens coming home to roost.”

Wanting to believe we were good people, my comrades and I spilled some ink denouncing terrorism and the reactionary nature of radical Islam. Quickly, however, those subjects faded in importance as jihadists emerged as the sole force challenging the hated status quo. Only Western imperialism, and its monstrous crimes, deserved condemnation. When a highly respected party Central Committee member postulated that ISIS is, in fact, worse than U.S. imperialism, shock reverberated within my little group. The comrade was forcefully reminded that nothing is, and could not possibly be, worse than U.S. imperialism. She quickly recanted.

I relate this embarrassing anecdote because what happened in my weird, cultish, Trotskyist organization had its version in society overall. Far-out as my former group sounds to most people, much of its worldview is shared by today’s liberals and progressives. The latter have ditched our hoary language like “imperialism,” “bourgeoisie” and “proletariat,” but when they talk about “neocolonialism” or “the West,” “the oppressed” and “the oppressors,” they mean essentially the same thing. They learned it in the universities, from professors who repackaged Marxism to resonate in our modern age, using the Jews and Israel as their instruments of choice.

But beyond the focus on Jews, this Manichean worldview declares entire classes of people reactionary and evil, and suggests they ultimately must be eliminated for the sake of human betterment. This is the premise of both Communism and fascism. Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Lynn Milgrim, defenders of the Jewish state, were murdered at a Jewish museum by an avowed socialist, but it could just as well have been a modern-day Nazi.

In the last century, Whittaker Chambers described Communism as “the focus of the concentrated evil of our time,” but he also emphasized that Communists were not (necessarily) morally depraved or stupid, but had joined chiefly for moral reasons—responding to a “profound appeal to the human mind.” What he called “man’s second oldest faith” continued to recruit thousands and hold the hearts of millions, despite everything that was known about its crimes and horrors, because in a Godless world, it alone gripped man’s imagination and gave life meaning and purpose. “Human societies, like human beings, live by faith and die when faith dies,” Chambers wrote.

This is every bit as true today. I support all efforts to fight antisemitism, support Israel and bolster Jewish safety (it’s shocking how little security there apparently was at the Washington, D.C. museum), but these alone are insufficient. We must think more broadly and deeply. Our society is in a death spiral because we’ve jettisoned the traditions on which it was built. It’s necessary to heed thinkers like Melanie Phillips, Douglas Murray and Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who point out that abandoning the Judeo-Christian heritage has left a hole that must be filled—and our modern tragedy is that it is being filled by powers dedicated to our destruction.

These forces understand what Chambers knew and we in the West have largely forgotten: that human beings require faith, convictions that can move mountains and men. Western society increasingly provides everything for its citizens, except something to live and die for. May the hideous deaths of these two young people prompt a return to a truer, more fruitful search for meaning.

Kathleen Hayes is the author of ”Antisemitism and the Left: A Memoir.”