Letter IV: On Memorial Day and the Murder of Peacemakers

The death of a soldier is mourned by nations. The death of a peacemaker is mourned by silence.

“The death of a soldier is mourned by nations. The death of a peacemaker is mourned by silence.” —Letters to the Forgetful Republic

Dear Architect of Tomorrow’s Amnesia,

This Republic was not born knowing how to mourn. It had to learn.

It learned, as all young nations must, by burying its sons. It learned amid the ash and anguish of civil strife, when brother slew brother and no village remained untouched by sorrow. From the blood-soaked fields of Gettysburg and Antietam to every hamlet from Maine to Mississippi that bore the black ribbon of loss, Decoration Day sprang forth—born of widows and mothers who, with trembling grace, adorned the graves of the fallen. Soldiers clad in Union blue and Confederate gray were lowered into the same soil, and a battered nation sought to remember not only who had perished, but why.

From this simple rite grew what we now call Memorial Day—a day consecrated not for consumption, nor leisure, but for solemn tribute. Yet memory, like an unused muscle, withers. It yields to convenience. It is sacrificed at the altar of novelty, hashtags, and curated apathy. And so, as it always does, the burden falls to the stubborn few to stretch it again.

Therefore, on this Memorial Day, I ask not only that you remember those who fell in uniform, but also two who fell in a courtyard.

Their names were Sarah Milgrim and Yaron Lischinsky.

Their deaths bore no medals, and no trumpet. Their names will not appear in the rolls of Arlington. And you will not find their faces on a monument. Yet their service, I would contend, was no less noble: the defense of peace in an age of zealotry.

Sarah, 26, was an American citizen from Kansas. Her brief but luminous career was devoted to reconciliation: interfaith dialogue, peacebuilding, environmental justice. She believed—stubbornly and sincerely—that Palestinians and Israelis could live side by side in dignity, and she worked daily to give form to that belief.

Yaron, 30, was an Israeli Christian, raised partly in Germany. He studied Middle East diplomacy, spoke fluent German, served in the Israeli military, and gave his days to the patient work of bridge-building.

They met at the Israeli Embassy. They fell in love. He had just bought an engagement ring. They were to fly to Jerusalem on Sunday. He planned to propose this week.

But they never made it.

Last Wednesday night, as they left an event at the Capital Jewish Museum focused on humanitarian aid to Gaza, they were gunned down by a man shouting, “Free Palestine.” According to police, the alleged killer later told officers: “I did it for Gaza.”

He did not know—or perhaps did not care—that the woman he murdered was laboring for the peace of that very place. He did it, in truth, for nothing. For the intoxication of false righteousness. For the lie that violence sanctifies. Because for those drunk on grievance, peace is treason. Dialogue is capitulation. And killing becomes catechism.

If Memorial Day is to mean anything—anything at all—let it mean this: that sacrifice comes not only in uniform, but also in the quiet, unglamorous labor of those who bridge chasms others prefer to widen. Sarah and Yaron were not combatants. They were citizens of moral imagination. They gave themselves to the fragile hope that justice for one need not entail vengeance upon another, that dialogue still matters, and that peace remains a pursuit worthy of the brave.

They died because someone believed they deserved to.

And that fact should chill the spine of the free.

You will be told this was “an isolated act.” A “deranged outburst.” You will be warned not to “politicize the dead.” You will be instructed not to notice the rancid dogma that allows one to chant for justice while murdering those who work to achieve it. You will be cautioned not to notice the ideology that breeds such acts in dark corners of the discourse.

But what is politics, if not the moral shape we give to our public life? And what is memory, if it cannot name the evil it sees?

When a republic cannot mourn its peacemakers—cannot even name their deaths as a tragedy worthy of national reflection—then Memorial Day becomes mere theater.

In the days that followed, our Republic performed its rituals: tepid condemnation from officials, brief lamentations in the press, and then—forgetting. The news cycle passed them by like mourners too hurried to grieve.

Online, the gutter of commentary overflowed. One prominent agitator, styling himself a tribune of the people, declared the shooting a “false flag”—a claim as obscene as it was idiotic. He was briefly banned from Twitch (a censorship I do not endorse, for even vile speech must remain free). Still, his words were not solitary. They were echoed, applauded, absorbed into the bloodstream that animates so much of today’s radical rhetoric and online activism—merged with a broader culture of denial, the kind that mistakes cruelty for clarity and rage for reason, ever eager to exalt brutality as resistance and to defame the dead as deceivers.

I make no pretense of expertise in Middle Eastern geopolitics. But I know a fanatic when I see one. And I know that what killed Sarah and Yaron in cold blood was not simply a bullet, but an ideology—a man drunk on the romance of revolution, inflamed by the fantasy that violence purifies. He is of that tribe which exalts bloodshed as sacrament and counts peace as betrayal. Such ideology, whether draped in the green of jihad or the red of revolution, is kindred in its contempt for coexistence. And it is an enemy of the Republic upon which America’s foundational philosophy stands.

That is why I write to you—the steward of forgetting, the one who sands off the sharp corners of history and repackages sacrifice as sentiment. You will be tempted to see Sarah and Yaron as merely tragic. Don’t.

See them as American. As Israeli. As young people who understood that justice for one group need not come at the expense of another—that peace is not passivity, but courage: the courage to extend one’s humanity precisely where it is least deserved, least reciprocated, and most at risk.

That is the true revolution. And it takes more bravery than any bullet ever will.

Sarah’s Instagram biography contained a single line: “Justice, justice you shall pursue.” A verse from Deuteronomy. The same ancient text that commands memory, binds remembrance to righteousness, and warns us never to forget what we have seen.

So remember her. And remember him. And remember that peace is not the absence of strife—it is the refusal to surrender our humanity amid it.

And let us say of Sarah Milgrim and Yaron Lischinsky, with reverence and resolve: they lived the values we say we defend. May their memory be not just a blessing, but a warning—to the Republic, and to those who would forget it.

The cost of war is counted in lives.

The cost of forgetting is counted in repetitions.

Do not forget.

Yours in remembrance,
—Thought Criminal

This engraving depicts Pericles, the great Athenian statesman, delivering his iconic Funeral Oration during the Peloponnesian War—a speech immortalized by Thucydides as both a eulogy for the fallen and a stirring defense of Athenian democracy. Standing in classical garb before a rapt assembly of soldiers and citizens, Pericles gestures toward the Acropolis, symbolizing the ideals for which the dead have sacrificed. His address was not merely an act of mourning, but a civic ritual—meant to remind the living of their duty, to elevate memory into moral instruction, and to forge unity in the face of loss. The image captures the gravity of republican remembrance, echoing through centuries to modern democracies still struggling to honor their peacemakers as deeply as their warriors. An illustration of Pericles’ Funeral Oration. Photo: Alamy.