Bipartisan US lawmakers convened at the Capitol on Tuesday evening, remembering Sarah Milgrim, 26, and Yaron Lischinsky, 30, two young Israeli embassy employees who were murdered in a terrorist attack in Washington, DC, last month.
House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) declared during the vigil, “It’s a dangerous time to be a Jewish American.”
Noting that both the DC shooter and the terrorist who attacked a march for hostages in Boulder, Colorado last week, shouted “Free Palestine” during their attacks, Johnson stated, “‘Free Palestine’ is the chant of a violent movement that has found common cause with Hamas.”
He added, “It’s a movement that has lost hold of the difference between right and wrong, between good and evil, between light and darkness … They proclaim that violence is righteous, that rape is justice and that murder is liberation. They have created a culture of lies that puts a bounty on the heads of peace-loving Jewish Americans.”
Speaker Johnson called their murders "targeted antisemitic terrorism."
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) added, “Antisemitism has been metastasizing like a malignant tumor, and we must all work together to eradicate this cancer.”
He stated that Lischinsky and Milgrim were “victims of the same deadly antisemitism that fueled the attacks in Boulder, the attack at Gov. Josh Shapiro’s home in Pennsylvania, at synagogues, yeshivas, businesses and communities all across America.”
Israeli Ambassador to the US, Yechiel Leiter, stated, “The intifada has been globalized, and like Orwell’s 1984, ‘free Palestine’ means ‘death, death Israel.’ Today we are challenged to act, to honor the fallen, not just with words, but with a renewed commitment to fighting the scourge of hate, fighting the demonization and delegitimization of the State of Israel.”
Leiter said that Milgrim and Lischinsky "represented the unbreakable bond between our two great nations."