Darkness rising.

People disembark from a FlyDubai carrying Israeli passengers who had earlier been aboard another FlyDubai aircraft that made an emergency landing in Saudi Arabia approaches Ben Gurion International Airport near Tel Aviv, Israel, Wednesday, Sept. 30, 2026. (AP Photo/Ariel Schalit)

Here’s what we know about the terrifying incident Wednesday aboard Flydubai flight 1073.

The Boeing 737 was bound from Dubai to Tel Aviv with 174 passengers, most of them Israeli nationals. The airplane’s first officer, an Omani national, attacked the captain by stabbing him, attempted to take over the airplane, and crash it into the Arabian desert. Passengers gained access to the cockpit, subdued the first officer and regained control of the airplane. The flight landed safely in Saudi Arabia and the passengers eventually reached Tel Aviv unharmed.

Officials have not officially arrived at a motive for the attack.

But I’m not bound by the constraints of officialdom and I’m therefore calling it like I see it.

This incident was an act of terrorism driven by antisemitism.

In other words, hatred of Jews.

There can be no doubt that antisemitism around the world is on the rise. What troubles me is that it is on the rise in the United States.

For most of 2,000 years, the story of the Jewish diaspora was the story of finding a home only to then wonder how long that home would remain safe.

Jews established communities across Europe and beyond. They built businesses, synagogues and families. They contributed to the societies around them. But time and again, political winds changed. Restrictions were imposed. Property was taken. Communities were expelled. Pogroms followed.

Ultimately came the Holocaust.

But America was different. Not perfect. But different.

American Jews certainly encountered prejudice, discrimination and exclusion. And during the darkest years of the 20th century this country shamefully turned away Jews desperately trying to escape Europe.

Nevertheless, the American proposition offered something historically extraordinary. Jews weren’t merely tolerated by a king, prince or local majority. They were citizens protected by the U.S. Constitution.

George Washington put it beautifully in 1790 when he told the Jewish congregation at Newport that the government of the United States would give “…to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance.”

For generations that promise largely held. America became not simply another temporary refuge along the Jewish diaspora. It became home.

And that’s why what’s happening now should trouble every American.

When a Dallas synagogue with roots going back nearly 150 years concludes that for the first time in its history it needs a security fence around its property simply because Jews worship there, something has changed.

Idiot college kids (together with their idiot professors) who are openly antisemitic, along with idiot politicians like Abdul el-Sayed, who might become the next U.S. Senator from Michigan, apparently have no historic understanding that antisemitism, in addition to being morally repugnant, helped fuel a war in the 1940s that cost upward of a hundred million lives.

Yet the top leaders of the Democratic Party, which has historically been the political home for American Jews, have offered remarkably little resistance to el-Sayed’s thinly disguised antisemitism.

All to say that this midterm election is about a lot of things. Sad to say then, that rising antisemitism has become one of those things.