When I go to synagogue, I always smile and wave at the armed police officers stationed outside. I want them to know they’re appreciated, but also, at some level, I guess it’s fair to say that I’m trying to ingratiate myself so that the cop will want to put his or her life on the line to save us if a gunman decides to open fire on or torch our congregation, as happened in Pittsburgh (2018), Poway (2019), Miami (2019), Monsey (2019), Halle, Germany (2019), Colleyville (2022), Jerusalem (2023), Djerba, Tunisia (2023), Berlin, Germany (2023), Yerevan, Armenia (2023), Rouen, France (2024), Athens, Greece (2024), Melbourne, Australia (2024), Los Angeles (2024), Manchester, U.K. (2024), and New York (2025).

That list contains only the successful attacks on houses of worship in recent years. It omits the thwarted ones, as well as attacks like the sniper killings of a young engaged couple (one an Israeli diplomat, the other an American citizen employee of the Israeli embassy) who were exiting the Jewish Museum in Washington, D.C., the arson attack on Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro’s home, the desecration of cemeteries, the harassment of Jewish students, the Boulder, Colorado, man who attacked a demonstration calling for the release of hostages with a spray of Molotov cocktails, or of hundreds of menacing threats like the London “pro-Palestine” demonstration.

Antisemitism is a poison like radon, always present below the surface in low doses, but sometimes rising to lethal concentrations. Except that radon, being colorless and odorless, is hard to detect without special equipment. Antisemitism, by contrast, is unsubtle and requires deliberate choices to unsee.

We have whole industries devoted to unseeing antisemitism and other outrages perpetrated by our ideological allies, and those same industries instantly become rage machines ready to exploit every act of violence when committed by ideological foes.

In this competitive atrocity era, no good massacre goes to waste. In the hours after the mass killing of Jewish Australians at Bondi Beach on the first night of Hanukkah, right-wing rage merchants like Sen. Tommy Tuberville called for the mass deportation of all Muslims from the United States. In a characteristically nuanced take, he tweeted: “Stop worrying about offending the pearl clutchers. We’ve got to SEND THEM HOME NOW or we’ll become the United Caliphate of America.”

Sen. Lindsey Graham blamed Obama and Biden. And Rep. Randy Fine weighed in with this analysis: “It is time for a Muslim travel ban, radical deportations of all mainstream Muslim legal and illegal immigrants, and citizenship revocations wherever possible.”

It’s possible that these guys are letting their amygdalas overwhelm their prefrontal cortexes. Violence does excite the fear/anger receptors in our brains and prepare us to respond in kind. When we see blood, we see red.

But people also have judgment and self-control. They aren’t lab rats robotically responding to stimuli. So unless they respond to every episode of violence — say, Dylann Roof’s murders, or the Christchurch massacre — with similar extreme proposals, it’s safe to assume that they are atrocity opportunists.