Wednesday night, May 21, two young employees of the Israeli Embassy, Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Lynn Milgrim, were fatally shot after leaving the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, DC. The suspect, identified by police as 30-year-old Elias Rodriguez of Chicago, allegedly shouted "Free Palestine" as he was being detained.
The next morning, on May 22, U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi gave an update during a news conference. And after Bondi was done addressing reporters, she received a scathing response from Brian Levin, founder of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism and chairman of the California Commission on the State Of Hate.
During a May 22 appearance on CNN, Levin addressed what host Wolf Blitzer described as an "awful, dramatic rise in antisemitism here in the United States."
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Levin told Blitzer, "Let's get straight to what's going on here. Our latest research, the latest one…. shows record anti-Jewish hate crimes in major American cities in 2024 after a previous record the year before. Four consecutive increases. What else do we see? Oftentimes, when there is bigoted rhetoric online and we can measure that, we see, oftentimes, a concomitant increase in hate crime."
Levin argued that policies of the Trump Administration are making it more difficult to combat hate crimes.
"I'm talking to Attorney General Bondi," a frustrated Levin told Blitzer. "Now, you just cut the hate crime training grants and projects for American law enforcement yesterday. So please don't say that you're doing everything you can when you cut those grants. And you also cut the grants related to domestic extremism."
Levin continued, "We have seen something that that has changed, particularly starting in 2019. We had a decrease in 2020, because of the pandemic, in hate crime. But we also saw an increase in anti-Jewish rhetoric online. The social media companies are horrible, and what has been allowed on both sides of the political spectrum has been an ecosystem that allows antisemitism to reign unabated because it serves certain people's political ends. We have to come together in a bipartisan way with regard to religion hate crime, which even as we saw a flattening of hate crime overall, religion hate crime has continued to go up. Anti-Jewish hate crimes are up 12 percent last year, 48 percent the year before."
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Levin also noted an increase in "anti-Muslim hate crimes."
"This is an issue of extraordinary national concern," Levin told Blitzer. "And we are in a new era with respect to anti-Jewish hate crime."
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Watch the full video below or at this link.