Shortly after the FBI killed Malik Faisal Akram and rescued the four hostages he was holding in a Colleyville, Texas synagogue, an agency spokesman made a baffling statement, reminiscent of Barack Obama’s notorious remark about those who would “randomly shoot a bunch of folks in a deli” apropos the bloody jihadist attack on a French kosher grocery store.

“We do believe,” said the FBI agent, that Akram “was singularly focused on one issue, and it was not specifically related to the Jewish community. But we are continuing to work to find motive.” Strictly speaking, the issue motivating Akram—the freeing of a convicted al-Qaeda terrorist—does not relate to the Jewish community in Colleyville or anywhere else. But in Akram’s mind the relationship to the Jewish community is straightforward, as he believed that the Jews control the U.S. government, and that flying to America and attacking the nearest synagogue would be the best way to get their attention. The same anti-Semitic delusion animated the Pittsburgh synagogue shooter. Lahav Harkov comments:

Perhaps at first glance, that issue, the release of Aafia Siddiqui, currently serving an 86-year prison sentence for attempting to murder American troops and FBI agents, does not seem to be “specifically related to the Jewish community.” But Siddiqui was a raving anti-Semite, and that information is readily available.

After Siddiqui was arrested in Afghanistan for her part in plotting al-Qaeda terrorist attacks in the U.S., UK, and Pakistan, shooting at U.S. Army troops as they detained her, she said the case against her was a Jewish conspiracy. Siddiqui dismissed her legal defense team because she said the lawyers were Jewish, and she demanded that jurors in the trial take DNA tests to make sure they were not Israeli or Zionists, in order “to be fair.”

She also wrote a letter to then-president Barack Obama telling him that Jews “have always back-stabbed everyone who has taken pity on them and made the ‘fatal’ error of giving them shelter.” . . . After her conviction, Siddiqui said: “This is a verdict coming from Israel and not from America. That’s where the anger belongs.”

One of the organizations that has been advocating Siddiqui’s release in recent weeks is the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR). In November, CAIR’s Texas chapter and MPower Change, a Muslim activist group, hosted an online event titled “Injustice: Dr. Aafia and the Twenty-Year Legacy of America’s Wars.” In addition, CAIR San Francisco executive director Zahra Billoo told attendees during a speech she gave last November to “know your enemies” [and] “to pay attention to the Zionist synagogues.”

Commenting on the hearings of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce on Tuesday about anti-Semitism on college campuses, and the dismaying testimony of three university presidents, Jonah Goldberg writes:

If some retrograde poltroon called for lynching black people or, heck, if they simply used the wrong adjective to describe black people, the all-seeing panopticon would spot it and deploy whatever resources were required to deal with the problem. If the spark of intolerance flickered even for a moment and offended the transgendered, the Muslim, the neurodivergent, or whomever, the fire-suppression systems would rain down the retardant foams of justice and enlightenment. But calls for liquidating the Jews? Those reside outside the sensory spectrum of the system.

It’s ironic that the term colorblind is “problematic” for these institutions such that the monitoring systems will spot any hint of it, in or out of the classroom (or admissions!). But actual intolerance for Jews is lathered with a kind of stealth paint that renders the same systems Jew-blind.

I can understand the predicament. The receptors on the Islamophobia sensors have been set to 11 for so long, a constituency has built up around it. This constituency—which is multi-ethnic, non-denominational, and well entrenched among students, administrators, and faculty alike—sees Israel and the non-Israeli Jews who tolerate its existence as an affront to their worldview and Muslim “identity.” . . . Blaming the Jews for all manner of evils, including the shortcomings of the people who scapegoat Jews, is protected because, at minimum, it’s a “personal truth,” and for some just the plain truth. But taking offense at such things is evidence of a mulish inability to understand the “context.”

Shocking as all that is, Goldberg goes on to argue, the anti-Semitism is merely a “symptom” of the insidious ideology that has taken over much of the universities as well as an important segment of the hard left. And Jews make the easiest targets.