Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro speaks during a press conference outside of the Governor’s Mansion in Harrisburg after a portion of the property was damaged in an arson fire on April 13. Photo by Matthew Hatcher/Getty Images
Senior Columnist
Rob Eshman
April 18, 2025
Immediately following last weekend’s attack targeting Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, I wrote a column cautioning against jumping to the conclusion that Shapiro was targeted because he is Jewish and a vocal, if often critical, supporter of Israel. Another person who refused to stoke panic with speculation was… Gov. Josh Shapiro.
“I know that there are people out there who want to ascribe their own viewpoints as to what happened here and why,” Shapiro said following the arson attack on his home. “I choose not to participate in that.”
Now, the attacker’s motives are known: Law enforcement authorities revealed that Cody Balmer, 38, called police less than an hour after the incident, telling dispatchers the governor needed to be told that Balmer “will not take part in his plans for what he wants to do to the Palestinian people.”
Balmer said he’d had friends killed, according to police, and that “our people have been put through too much by that monster.”
To be clear: Trying to kill a Jew for supporting Israel is textbook antisemitism.
“When a man obsessed with what he thinks goes on in the Mideast attacks a Jewish governor on Passover,” Anne Wrobel, a historian and teacher, wrote in an email to me, “it may not be good old fashioned antisemitism, but it is Jew-hatred in one of its most corrosive forms, anti-Israelism.”
I first heard of the concept of “anti-Israelism” from Judea Pearl, the UCLA professor and father of slain Wall Street Journal journalist Daniel Pearl.
Back in 2012, Pearl warned that classic antisemitism, which ascribes a kind of supernatural evil to “the Jews,” has shapeshifted to Israel. Instead of blaming Jews for the world’s evils and concocting conspiracies about them, antisemites could just say “Israel” instead. Anti-Israelism, said Pearl, was a new form of racism.
“The spillover of anti-Israel hate to antisemitic intimidation cannot be fought without identifying anti-Israel hate, in itself, as racism on its own merit,” he tweeted recently.
Over the years, I’ve disagreed with Pearl, who is a longtime personal friend, about the lines between vigorous opposition to Israeli policies, opposition to the concept of a Jewish state, and outright antisemitism. But there’s no question he was prescient in understanding how efficiently ignorant hatred of Jews could be transferred to ignorant, blinding hatred of Israel.
The clearest example of that came on Oct. 7, 2023, when Hamas terrorists slaughtered every person they could get their hands on: Jew, Muslim, Thai, peace activist, infant. That these holy souls existed on Israeli soil was enough, in the eyes of Hamas, to damn them.
Far too much of the anti-Israel movement in the United States and Europe buys into the same all-consuming hate. Spend five minutes on X or Reddit and you’ll wonder how the sun can even rise in a world controlled by “Zio-Nazis” and the “IOF” — Israel Offense Forces.
This is the rhetoric that pushed Balmer’s very troubled mind toward violence. He made no distinction between Jew and “Zio-Nazi,” governor and Palestinian baby-killer. It didn’t matter to Balmer that Shapiro has consistently supported a peaceful compromise that recognizes Palestinian rights, and that he has faced vicious pushback for his outreach to the Pennsylvania Muslim community. To Balmer — and to a large segment of the so-called pro-Palestinian movement — the fact that Shapiro supported Israel at all meant he was “Genocide Josh.” And genociders must die.
We know Balmer suffered from mental illness; that he refused medication; that his mother tried in vain to get him help. The failure to get him the treatment he needed is an indictment of our system; mentally ill people are far more often the victims of violence than the perpetrators of it, and we must do better as a society in treating those who suffer from it. But those facts don’t let those who filled Balmer’s mind with poisonous rhetoric off the hook. It only adds to their guilt.
In 2021, a mentally disturbed man who had converted to Islam and latched onto ISIS propaganda shot and killed a guard at the National War Memorial in Ottawa, before being killed as he attempted to storm Canada’s Parliament.
The likely cause, wrote Jeet Heer in The New Yorker, was “the fusion of radical jihadist ideology with other personal problems, whether they be alienation, anomie, or various shades of mental illness.”
Heer said that for a person radicalized by rhetoric, “the fantasy of political violence is a chance to gain agency, make history, and be part of something larger.”
That radicalizing rhetoric can come from the left or right. The man who shot 11 Jews dead at the Tree of Life synagogue in 2018 also had a history of untreated mental illness. In his case, it was anti-immigrant conspiracy theories spewed by right-wing media and politicians that infected his already troubled mind.
The ease with which these messages, from any political perspective, can be converted into violence must alarm us. And those who shout antisemitic and anti-Israel rhetoric at rallies and online must be shown that their words are corrosive and destructive not just to Jews, but to the Palestinian cause.
“Those who choose Israel eradication over peace cheer Hamas,” Wrobel, the historian, wrote to me; in doing so, they contribute to “the awful duration of the carnage.”
All that often justifiable outrage needs to be channeled in ways that don’t flatly demonize Israel and Jews, but rather support the dozens of Israeli-Palestinian peace groups that, as Wrobel wrote, are “struggling to keep it together through grief and loss, committed to ending the lunacy for all their children’s sakes.”
The shift in rhetoric from “Destroy Evil Israel” to “Help Israelis and Palestinians live together” will save lives — there, and here.
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