WhatsappIt’s not just the man suspected of setting fire to the Pennsylvania governor’s Harrisburg home who has lost his mind.
(April 17, 2025 / JNS)
The attack on the home of Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro carries a number of lessons, none sharper and more urgent than the wake-up call for those who are least likely to want to acknowledge it.
Last Saturday night, the Jewish Democratic governor had completed the Passover seder with his family and gone to bed in his official residence when it was firebombed in the small hours. Police roused the family and evacuated them without any injury, but the damage to the house was extensive.
Cody Balmer, a 38-year-old mechanic from Harrisburg, called the authorities on Sunday at 2:50 a.m. and admitted to firebombing the house less than an hour previously. He confessed to 911 operators that he had brought with him homemade Molotov cocktails and that if the governor had confronted him, Balmer would have beaten him with a hammer.
State police said he had targeted Shapiro “based upon perceived injustices to the people of Palestine,” as well as on account of his Jewish faith. So it appears that Balmer’s murderous attack was fueled by his antisemitism and his support for the Palestinian cause.
This attack reveals various things about that cause. For Balmer is not an Islamist. He’s not a neo-Nazi. He’s not a Palestinian Arab. He’s a white-skinned, American Palestinian supporter.
He was reportedly angry with Shapiro over the governor’s position on the war in Gaza. According to a police search warrant, Balmer said he needed to know that Shapiro “will not take part in his plans for what he wants to do to the Palestinian people.”
This is obviously absurd. Shapiro poses no threat to the Palestinians. He has been a strong supporter of Israel during the war with Hamas in the Gaza Strip, backing Israeli government actions, likening some pro-Palestinian protesters to the Ku Klux Klan and supporting efforts to penalize institutions that divest from Israel.
But he has also said that he supports a two-state solution, and wants Palestinian and Jewish people to live in peace.
Moreover, rather than stopping Shapiro from a wholly imaginary attack on Palestinians, Balmer tried to do to Shapiro and his family what the Palestinians have actually done to Jews.
Balmer deliberately set fire to the governor’s mansion, knowing that Shapiro and his family were inside. On Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas-led Palestinians from Gaza burned Israelis alive.
The claim that the Israelis are monsters who are willfully killing Palestinian civilians is a malevolent invention promoted by the Palestinian Arabs and their supporters in the West, who blame Israel for crimes committed by the Palestinians, of which the Israelis are, in fact, the victims.
Balmer was out on bail for attacking his wife and child. In the days leading up to the arson at the governor’s mansion, family members had attempted to have him committed to a psychiatric institution. He is, by all accounts, mentally ill.
While he is therefore not typical of Palestinian supporters, the hysterical incitement against Israel and the Jews since the Oct. 7 massacre has clearly played a significant role in the particular direction Balmer’s derangement has taken him.
In the past 18 months of hate mobs targeting Jews for intimidation, abuse and violent attacks on college campuses and in the streets of major Western cities, demonstrators have chanted “Globalize the intifada!” Well, the attack on Shapiro’s house is what “Globalize the intifada!” looks like.
Nothing has been done to stop this incitement to violence. And now, an unhinged individual has taken this message and run with it.
Shapiro is a senior Democrat who shot to national prominence when he was considered as a vice-presidential running mate for Kamala Harris in last year’s presidential election.
Yet despite this appalling attack on one of their own, the Democrats and their supporters have been remarkably silent. There’s been virtually no shocked outrage from those quarters. In the liberal media, there has been only the most subdued reporting.
The reason for this is as obvious as it is shameful. This attempted murder was committed in support of the Palestine cause. And such is the commitment by liberals to that cause that they can’t bring themselves to react against the terrible deed that was done in its name.
They will be busily telling themselves that Balmer is mentally ill, which seems true. But if a mentally ill neo-Nazi had firebombed a black family, the Democrats and the liberal media would be shouting from the rooftops about the inherent racism of Western society. If a white-skinned thug had tried to burn alive a prominent Muslim family, liberals would have convulsed for days over the nation’s “Islamophobia.”
If Shapiro’s mansion had been firebombed by a member of the Proud Boys screaming about the Great Replacement, the Democrats and liberal media would have erupted with charges of far-right antisemitism, and every conservative patriot would have been tarred with a murderous ideology.
In all these hypothetical instances, the attack would have been seen as politically motivated. But when an attack is mounted in the name of the Palestinians, liberals are suddenly struck dumb.
This is because they cannot bring themselves to acknowledge that such a terrible act has been committed in support of a cause upon which they hang their claim to be moral, compassionate and decent people. To condemn it would be to condemn themselves.
It awakens their deepest fear—that to denounce the motivation for such an act would destroy their moral and political personality. They are terrified that it would turn them into the thing they dread more than anything else—to become “right-wing.” In their minds, this is synonymous with evil.
But the Palestinian cause that they so devoutly support is not moral or decent. It’s motivated by genocidal aspirations and Jew-hatred, and violence is its calling card.
Its supporters in the West—having swallowed the egregious lies on which this cause is based—peddle a grotesque inversion of reality in which Israel is blamed for defending itself against a barbaric and genocidal onslaught in a seven-front war of annihilation. It is these Palestinian supporters who are spreading evil.
Balmer told the police that he believed Shapiro’s stance on the war in Gaza was leading to the deaths of Palestinians. It’s not just mentally ill individuals who believe such a thing about Israel and Diaspora Jews.
Since Oct. 7, liberal media and politicians have been promoting the lie that Israel is purposefully killing Gazan civilians, of whom the majority are women and children. The fact that this is totally untrue hasn’t stopped it from becoming so deeply believed and causing such anger among the public that Jews in the Diaspora are being regularly ostracized and abused for supporting the “killing of Palestinian babies.”
Jews find themselves targeted for collective punishment over the malicious fantasy of the crimes of Israel. Individual Jews in the West are singled out grotesquely as accomplices to these alleged crimes simply by dint of their supporting Israel’s attempt to defend itself against annihilation. They also find themselves accused of bad faith if they call out the rampant Jew-hatred that’s exploded across America and Western nations.
Diaspora Jews are being gaslighted, abused, ostracized, intimidated, threatened and attacked just for standing up as Jews for their people and for truth and justice—and now an attempt has been made to burn one of them alive.
What Balmer’s attack tells the West is that, in supporting the Palestinian cause, it is endorsing an innately murderous, hate-mongering and malevolently mendacious creed.
The Israel-haters can hardly try to excuse Balmer’s attack on Shapiro as the action of a madman, given that the blood libels they themselves perpetrate have now caused countless thousands of people in the West to lose their own minds over Israel and the Jews.
