Washington Examiner chief political correspondent Byron York said recent gun violence across the world raises serious concerns for more attacks, citing recent acts of antisemitism in the United States.
The last few days have seen a terrorist shooting at Bondi Beach, Australia, another shooting at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, and an attack on Jewish men on a subway in New York. The shooter at Brown has yet to be caught, which York said is “really extraordinary” since most mass shootings committed using “a long gun” are usually suicide missions.
Podcast Host Hugh Hewitt asked if “an explosion of antisemitism” bigger than recent acts in the U.S. since Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel could occur, specifically if the U.S. could undergo an attack similar to Bondi Beach.
“Well, you clearly have to worry about such a thing, in part when you look at the kind of antisemitic incidents that you’ve seen in the United States, a lot of it does involve our immigration policies of letting in people without enough vetting from countries in which there’s a lot of hatred of Jews. There’s support for terrorism, and now you have that in the United States,” York said Tuesday on The Hugh Hewitt Show.
Hewitt said he received a letter from Harvard University, revealing that the school will extend Alan Garber’s presidency, and he’s committed to combating antisemitism and anti-Arab discrimination. Hewitt rebuffed the existence of anti-Arab discrimination, to which York said the idea of conflating anti-Arab discrimination with antisemitism is an effort to “confuse” people.
President Donald Trump will address the nation on Wednesday at 9 p.m. ET, which York predicts will see the president discuss “what a great job” his administration has done and provide “a year-end progress report.” This isn’t “a bad move” by Trump, but York said many people don’t share the president’s assessment that the economy is doing very well.
EDITORIAL: THE LESSON OF BONDI BEACH
The Trump administration expanded its travel ban to an additional five countries on Tuesday afternoon, a few days after the Brown University shooting. The expansion adds Burkina Faso, Mali, Niger, South Sudan, and Syria to the travel ban list, and also bars people with Palestinian Authority-issued travel documents from entering the U.S.
The first 12 restrictions from June, which include Afghanistan, Burma, Chad, the Republic of the Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Haiti, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and Yemen, will remain in place.