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And offer real hope to those who need it most. Sign up today at colsoneducators.org. That's colsoneducators.org. Welcome to Breakpoint, a daily look at an ever-changing culture through the lens of unchanging truth for the Colson Center on Johnstone Street. In November of 2022, Anderson Lee Aldrich killed five people and injured twenty-five others in a shooting at Club Q.
An LGBTQ nightclub in Colorado Springs. Aldrich identified as non-binary, used they-them pronouns, had multiple violent encounters with law enforcement, threatened to kill Christians. and dabbled in the gay lifestyle.
However, And a matter of hours after the shooting, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and multiple other news outlets and commentators implicated either directly or indirectly, focus on the family, accusing them of creating a culture that led to this kind of violence. And a few weeks later, the campus of the ministry was vandalized with these words, quote, their blood is on your hands. The false accusation was based on the notion of stochastic violence, the idea that somehow saying the wrong thing about a group or a behavior can create an environment that can lead to violence. Similarly, political conservatives were also accused of stochastic violence when a homeless mentally ill man attacked Nancy Pelosi's husband with a hammer. But so far no one's been accused of stochastic violence after Mohammed Sabri Solomon, an Egyptian-born man living in Colorado Springs illegally, threw Molotov cocktails into a group of peaceful pro-Israel demonstrators while yelling, quote, Free Palestine.
At least 12 people were burned in the attack, including a survivor of the Holocaust. After the attack, the man who'd planned on dying that day calmly and directly revealed that he was a committed anti-Semitic Muslim who had been planning this attack for over a year.
So, the very same voices that were certain that a Christian ministry that had never advocated violence at any point in all of its history was responsible for the attack on Club Q seemed completely lost about related motives or responsibilities in this case. This, even though since October 2023, when Hamas militants killed nearly 1,200 Jews in Israel in a horrific attack, Protesters on American streets and on college campuses have been calling for violence against Jews everywhere. Even in Colorado Springs, in fact, Colorado college students there set up a protest village, refused to go to class, chanted slogans that meant more than they probably realized. But now one of those chants, globalize the intifada, has become a reality. In just the last few weeks, two Israeli embassy workers were murdered on the street in Washington, D.C.
This Molotov cocktail attack was carried out in Boulder and in a story mainstream media outlets largely ignored, a Muslim man in Michigan plotted to massacre kids at a Jewish daycare. Thankfully, that plan was uncovered before the man could inflict any harm. As Ian Hirsi Ali put it in a post on X, quote, anti-Semitism is not just rising, It's metastasizing. and everyone should be concerned. And yet what we're all being told is that what should concern us most is potential negative backlash against Muslims and Arab immigrants.
not targeted violence against Jews. which is clearly on the rise. All of this is a clear example of the critical theory mood. that clouds the thought of secular and religious progressives today. One consequence of this view is that the so called good guys and the so called bad guys of any situation are somehow predetermined.
So if violence happens against the bad guys, well, they somehow deserved it. And if the good guys were the ones committing the violence, they're somehow justified because of how oppressed or mistreated they are. The critical theory mood was already in place at Thomas McLaren School where some of the children of the Boulder Terrorist attended. When Solomon's daughter, recently named one of the best and brightest seniors in Colorado Springs, started an Arab club at the school, school officials allowed the club to make regular announcements to the student body and meet inside, where they discussed the Quran as part of the Muslim faith and also discussed Muslim culture. But when a group of students wanted to open a decision point chapter at the school, a Christian club for students to talk about the Christian faith and the Bible, School officials would not allow them to meet in the building.
Instead, they were forced to meet outside, even in bad weather.
Now, of course, when the critical theory mood leads to the disenfranchising of students, it's wrong and unfair. But the stakes are so much higher when those same bad ideas cloud our collective ability to recognize or to speak truthfully about the dramatic increase of anti-Semitic violence. The reaction to the Boulder attack has been in large part just propaganda. Thaddeus Williams defines propaganda as offering a highly edited history that paints the most damning picture it can of a given people group and gives us a way to blame all of life's troubles on that damnable group and its members. Christians, on the other hand, are called to be discerning and to stand and defend truth anytime it is contested.
But that's especially when lives are at stake. That time clearly is now. For the Colson Center, I'm John Stone Street with Breakpoint. Today's Breakpoint was co-authored by Bob Dittmer. If you're a fan of Breakpoint, leave us a review wherever you download your podcast.
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