A Radicalized Anti-Israel Movement

On Sunday, a man in Boulder, Colorado, threw Molotov cocktails at a group of marchers calling for the release of hostages in Gaza. Eight of them have been hospitalized.

The suspect, Mohamed Soliman, allegedly yelled, “Palestine is free.” The FBI is investigating the incident as an act of terror.

As Charles Fain Lehman notes, this is the third high-profile anti-Semitic attack in the U.S. in recent months—and it comes on the heels of the murder of Israeli embassy aides Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Lynn Milgrim. “The increasing tempo of violence makes the pattern hard to ignore: the American anti-Israel movement has radicalized,” Lehman observes.

Indeed, lighting humans on fire to advance one’s political goals is exactly what an Intifada looks like. “And until we treat it as such, and respond with the full force of the law, it will continue to endanger lives,” Lehman writes.

In collaboration with the Sun Valley Policy Forum (SVPF), several luminaries from the Manhattan Institute will speak at this year’s SVPF Summer Institute, on July 1st and 2nd. This two-day conference retreat will be held in the premier mountain town of Sun Valley, Idaho. Reihan Salam (Manhattan Institute President), Jesse Arm (Manhattan Institute Executive Director of External Affairs & Chief of Staff), Heather Mac Donald (Thomas W. Smith Fellow and Contributing Editor of City Journal), and Senior Fellows Jason Riley and Abigail Shrier will be featured in the programming, along with other notable thought leaders. As a benefit to City Journal readers, Reserve ticket bundle registrations will be upgraded to the Bronze pass level, which includes access to a private cocktail party. For more information on the program, go here; to register with MI benefits, go here.

Former New York City police commissioner Bernard Kerik died last week at 69. In some ways, City Journal editor Brian C. Anderson writes, he “embodied the American archetype of the self-made man.” Kerik was a high school dropout before serving as a military cop. He joined the NYPD in 1986 and worked his way up, serving as Rudy Giuliani’s bodyguard and commissioner of New York City’s Department of Correction before becoming top cop in 2000. 

Kerik would fall from grace amid scandal and imprisonment before picking himself back up and starting again. “I was a better man for having known Bernie,” Giuliani said shortly after his death.

Read Anderson’s remembrance here.

Thirty years ago, MIT’s Nicholas Negroponte famously predicted that our economy would undergo a shift from “atoms to bits”—a transition from a traditional industrial economy of coal, oil, and steel to a digital one. But as Mark Mills shows, the AI revolution has upended that prediction. “All bits exist in physical machines that have real weight and require real energy to build and operate. The astronomical magnitude of bits produced, moved, manipulated, and stored entails truly staggering quantities of hardware,” he writes.

Massive new data centers consume as much energy as cities, and AI’s accelerating adoption means that energy will soon be the technology’s main limiting factor. “We just need power,” as one Nvidia executive bluntly put it. If AI fulfills its promise of a productivity boom, it will boost prosperity—but it will also trigger an insatiable appetite for electricity.

“The next mayor must abandon the one-step-forward, one-step-back approach to transit safety that has defined the Adams-Hochul era,” Nicole Gelinas writes. In the first four months of this year, violent felonies in the New York City subway were nearly 19 percent higher than in 2019. And in April, they were 44 percent higher than in the same month last year.

Read her suggestions for how the next mayor can get tough on subway crime.

On Writers and Writing: Essays by Henry James is a newly published collection of the novelist’s essays, edited by Michael Gorra. “While it is true that James’s fiction battens on the labyrinth of consciousness, his criticism delights in brass tacks,” Edward Short writes. “In this regard, if in no other, he had something in common with the age’s businessmen.” Read his review.

Charles Fain Lehman, Ilya Shapiro, Rob Henderson, and Neetu Arnold discuss the anti-Israel attack in Boulder, Elon Musk and DOGE, and branded products.

“I doubt there’s anyone who honestly believes that if the situation had been reversed, i.e., if Donald Trump had been showing the same signs of dementia as Biden, most of the mainstream media would have hidden the news of Trump’s dementia just as they hid Biden’s dementia.”

Photo credits: ELI IMADALI / Contributor / AFP via Getty Images