It’s Tuesday, May 27th, 2025.
I’m Albert Mohler and this is The Briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview.
Part I
Evil Seized an Opportunity in the U.S. Embassy: A Horrific Attack in the Name of ‘Free Palestine’ Leads to the Murder of Two Israeli Diplomats
Some years ago, national security experts ask an interesting question and ominous question, is Jihad eventually going to reach American Shores? You have to keep that in mind when you consider what took place outside an event where two staffers at the Israeli embassy to the United States were shot dead. It is a young man and a young woman who happened also to be a young couple, and we are now told that the young man, Yaron Leshinsky had intended in just coming days to extend a wedding proposal to Sarah Milgram, but now they are both dead killed as they were leaving a Jewish museum. And remember, both of these are staffers in the foreign service of Israel in the United States.
According to the New York Times, upon his arrest, the man said to police officers, “I did it for Palestine, I did it for Gaza.” The suspect also said after his arrest, “Free, free Palestine,” that according to the Financial Times of London, this is a major turning point when you consider the efforts by the United States to fight terrorism. It’s not only a worldwide phenomenon. This has happened in the United States, in Washington DC, and we’re talking about two staffers at the Israeli embassy.
Now, Israel is no stranger to this kind of attack, just consider the history of Israel, but one of the things that was revealed in all of this is that protecting diplomatic personnel like this is very, very difficult. In a city like Washington, there is a great deal of security, but when it comes to moving staffers, for example, out in the community, as the Israeli government said, “There is no way we can have two security officers with every member of the embassy staff at all times as they’re going out in public, as they’re going to the grocery store. It just becomes impossible.”
It shows a vulnerability in free societies. This is one of the big issues that arose in particular when the War on Terror really came to American shores in the attack of September 11, 2001, that left Americans understanding that we are not so well protected as we thought we were, and that’s not so much the fault of police or military or intelligence agencies. It is because as one spokesman for Israel’s security forces said, “We have to get it right every single time. A terrorist only has to get it right once.” That shows the vulnerability of civilization, any civilization.
But when you are a civilization, a society, when you are a state like Israel, which has had enemies, violent enemies from the very beginning when Israel has had to fight for its existence at every second of its history and experience, the reality is that there are unique vulnerabilities that show up here and there’s no easy answer as to how anything like this could be prevented. So immediately you begin to think about things such as maybe embassy staffers shouldn’t go out in the public. Well then that creates an impossible situation. They are there for a public role. They can’t fulfill their role if they’re behind some kind of embassy wall. This is something that was a challenge faced by the United States, at least in historic terms.
Not so much here as a domestic question, but in terms of our own foreign policy and foreign service employees elsewhere around the world. And just think of the Iranian hostage situation. Those were American staffers. They were foreign service officers, in the main, who were taken as hostages by students supposedly there in revolutionary Iran, but held obviously with the complicity of the government with the Islamic regime until they were finally released. You look at this and also recognize there’s a vulnerability in a free society that just comes glaringly to mind when you see something like this.
For instance, the police in Washington DC had noticed, security officials had noticed the man walking around the area, but you know what? In a free society, it is very difficult to remove any questionable person, from every situation, where there might be some kind of threat. It also points to the reality that when you have these intelligence agencies and police forces and they are looking at rules and protocols on the one hand, and they’re also looking at profiles, on the other hand, you look with a particular eye to this kind of behavior, you tie this to another kind of behavior, but as security forces will acknowledge, you can’t be ahead of the mind of most people who are set on this kind of malevolent act.
It’s clear that once again, this has shocked even Israel, as the Financial Times reports, the killing of two young staffers from the country’s embassy in Washington has come as a profound shock and thrown a spotlight on how the country protects its missions overseas at a time when its war with Hamas and Gaza has fueled anger around the world. A senior Israeli diplomat said, “This will crack and shatter the sense of security in DC,” he went on. If it can happen here, then it can happen anywhere. Well, that tells you a great deal about the situation. Evidently, it can happen here. It can happen there because it did.
Now, you can imagine that in the response to this, there is going to be a tightening of security. There’s going to be a new sensitivity on the part of Israeli diplomats and frankly, diplomats of any sort under any flag, they’re likely to pay attention to this. So there are at least two issues here. Number one, we don’t know exactly why this man, the alleged perpetrator, why he did what he did, but we do have the words he said, and those words fit exactly what you would expect of someone who would undertake a murderous attack upon two Israeli staffers, “Free, free Palestine,” or again, as he said, “I did it for Palestine, I did it for Gaza.”
Now we are looking at a situation in which Israel’s been fighting for its existence In the very beginning, it has never been secure unless it has provided its own security, but we understand that nothing is disconnected from anything else when it comes to foreign policy. We are looking at the fact that there are several nations disengaging from Israel, several nations that have been fully supportive of Israel’s initial military action against Hamas are now breaking from it. You also have increasing dissonance within Israel, and so this just adds to the accumulated, you might say, explosive charge, represented by what is happening not only in Israel, not only in Gaza, but now wherever Israel is represented, wherever the Israeli flag flies.
This does show the vulnerability and from a Christian worldview perspective, it reminds us not only of the fact that there’s persistent evil in the world, even deadly evil in the world, but that security staffer got it exactly right. If you’re trying to protect those, who for instance, are serving in the Israeli foreign service, you have to get it right every single time. If you are trying to commit a malevolent evil act, a terrorist act, you only have to get it right once. That is to say that in a fallen world, a dangerous world, evil seizing the opportunity, that’s a good biblical term, seizing the opportunity can often be very effective and very deadly.
By the way, the article in the New York Times had a very interesting twist. The young man, your own Leshinsky was raised with one parent being Jewish, the other parent being Christian, he identified as a Christian. The New York Times says “he was a devout Christian.” This is said by an Israeli, “but he had tied his fate to the people of Israel.” That’s a very powerful statement. He had tied his fate to the people of Israel. Unfortunately, this is the kind of story Israel has had to deal with over and over again.
President Trump, of course expressed deep sorrow at the shooting of the two Israeli staffers, and there is no doubt that American security and police forces will be on higher alert when it comes to any situation such as this. But we come back to the same problem that we have faced from the beginning in terms of the war on terror, and that is, that the forces of disorder have the advantage. The forces of malevolence have the advantage because they do seek to seize the opportunity, and sometimes an opportunity is presented with deadly effect. The legal actions, the court actions, indictments, all that to follow all of it is going to be very interesting and in moral terms, it’ll be very telling. The response to this is going to be very telling.
I’ll tell you right up front that at least part of what you should watch for and listen for is the fact that there will be apologists for violence against Israel who are going to try to rationalize this or at least say that it needs to be understood in its context, but we must understand an attack like this for exactly what it is.
