Schultz: Three years later, we must continue to remember Oct. 7

Nine-month-old Mila Cohen was shot dead in her mother’s arms. At another home, terrorists threw a grenade into the shelter where Gil Taasa had taken his two young sons. Taasa was killed. The boys emerged wounded and bloodied. As they pleaded for help, a terrorist helped himself to a drink from their refrigerator.

Seventy-four-year-old Bracha Levinson was killed in her home. Her attackers posted footage of her dying on her own Facebook account, where her grandchildren saw it.

About 1,200 people were murdered, and countless women were raped and brutalized in the Hamas-led attack on Israel.

On this third anniversary of Oct. 7, these stories — representative examples of the barbarity of that day — are painful to revisit. But we need to stare squarely at them. We owe the victims the honesty of remembering what was done to them. And we should reflect on what is driving the current manifestations in our nation of the ancient virus of anti-Jewish hatred.

Since that day, we have seen some try to explain the attackers’ motivations as rooted in poverty or maltreatment by the state of Israel. That is absurd. Millions endure grinding poverty, repression and war without raping and murdering their neighbors. Treating atrocities as a predictable response to hardship is insulting, as though suffering strips people of conscience and choice.

Before and since Oct. 7, we have seen the elevation of antisemitism in the United States. Americans are being attacked at Jewish institutions and events. Last year, two Israeli embassy employees, Sarah Milgrim and Yaron Lischinsky, were shot dead outside Washington’s Capital Jewish Museum. Also last year, an attack on people advocating for Israeli hostages in Boulder, Colo. left 82-year-old Karen Diamond with injuries that killed her.

This March, an armed attacker rammed a vehicle into a Temple Israel outside of Detroit while 140 children were inside. Thankfully, every child survived.

Physical assaults, vandalism and and harassment targeted at Jewish individuals reached a 46-year record high in 2024. We live in a world where every synagogue, Jewish school and community center must have trained security staff for its protection. No other religious or ethnic group in America faces threats to their safety approximating those facing Jews. As my Catholic church reassessed its security needs following the Annunciation shooting, it was to Jewish leaders — much more experienced in thwarting those who would do them harm — that we turned.

Alongside the increase in physical threats to Jews is the mainstreaming in American politics and culture of antisemitism. After the Temple Israel attack, Michigan Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed invoked the phrase “hurt people hurt people” and linked the attack to the assailant’s relatives being killed in Lebanon. That is outrageous. Condemning an attack on Jewish children should not require a detour through grievances against Israel.

A prominent El-Sayed supporter and left-wing streamer Hasan Piker has called some ultra-Orthodox Jews “inbred.” We have become familiar with Minnesota’s Rep. Ilhan Omar’s anti-Jewish sentiments, including in 2019 when she, invoking the stereotypical association of Jews and money, indicated that support for Israel was “all about the Benjamins.” Her subsequent apology was very obviously insincere.