Our lack of nuance plays into the autocrat's hands.

When someone fires a gun repeatedly into a crowd of people in support of a cause, let's call the act what it irrefutably is—murder. When the victims are Jewish, and the murderer expresses support for the Palestinians, let's again call it what it is—murder.

We live in an era in which nuance is neither practiced nor desired, where events—even unspeakable events like cold-blooded murders—must satisfy some political ideology. And so when a simplistic thinker like Donald Trump declared the murder of Sarah Milgrim and Yaron Lischinsky outside the Capital Jewish Museum in D.C. last week an act of anti-Semitism, too many of us echo his words as if they are well-reasoned and considered. They are not. They are, in fact, like most of Trump's pronouncements and opinions: examples of political expediency.

Against our current us-vs-them political backdrop, there is no room for nuance, but that doesn't mean it no longer exists.

In the Jewish Independent Newsletter Forward, we gain a clearer view of the incident. As we read further, we find that the victims were just the kinds of young progressives that Donald Trump would have belittled, espousing causes that Trump would find abhorrent. Yes, Ms. Milgrim was outspoken in her support of Israel, but she also worked to better the lives of Jews in the LGBTQ community and wrote her thesis on the "role of friendships in the peace-building process."

The suspect, Elias Rodriguez of Chicago, shouted "Free, free Palestine" as he was being led away by police, raising the question many have asked for the past 20-odd months: Is the demand to free Palestine an act of hostility to or prejudice against Jewish people, or is it a response to the systematic and public annihilation of a country and its occupants?

Of course, President Trump has used his contrived defense of the Jews as a cudgel to effect a laundry list of illegal activity when, in reality, he has no interest in any religious, ethnic, or social group other than those who can line his pockets. He uses labels like anti-Semitic with the same nonchalance that he does with terms like Venezuelan gang members or Mexican rapists—not to counter the anti-Semitism that does exist in America, but to minimize it as he has diluted the plight of Black Americans by declaring racism over. Neither is true.

Trump has buddied up to Benjamin Netanyahu for years, not out of sympathy for the plight of the Jews but out of admiration for another autocrat, albeit a more ruthless one—though in that area, Trump is gaining ground. Trump has treated the genocide in Gaza as an adjunct to a land deal: when enough people are slaughtered and displaced, he can build a resort.

People like Elias Rodriguez, who commit violence to promote their cause, play into the hands of people like Netanyahu and Trump, providing a soapbox from which to justify yet more inhumanity. A public execution like the one that took those two young lives is simply a catalyst for more hatred and more rationale for the annihilation of Gaza...as well as Trump's dream of greater personal wealth. And declaring it anti-Semitism opens an even wider abyss in an already-divided America.