That picture is the way part of the Jewish Museum in Washington used to look. It was fifteen minutes across town, and is about the way it looked the last time we saw it in person. The majority of it, in fact, before Lillian and Albert Small made a commitment to move the original synagogue in DC to it’s current location, which is now the elegant current museum:

We liked the old one, since it evoked some of the places we knew in Detroit that were a little down on the heels and hanging on only as long as the generation that ran the shops on the ground floor were still around.

You can see what Lillian and Albert did to the place in term of dressing it up, but Wednesday night is what the turmoil was about with the savage killing of a cute couple whose passing sum up exactly how confused this angry world actually is.

That is the young couple who were savagely murdered outside the Museum.They were participating in an event designed to minimize the unpleasantness being inflicted on the people of Gaza who supported the unprovoked attack on Israel nearly two years ago. He was a Christian Israeli, and there are such people and we have talked to them in Jerusalem. She was a Jew from Kansas, which sums it up short and sweet.

We will not dignify this page with a picture of the man who claims on microphone to have committed the violence, shooting that attractive and personable woman first in the back, then multiple times one the street below.

We mention him since he will likely be the topic of more discussion than the couple he killed in the course of his trial this summer. It should be a short trial since he admitted his guilt on camera. The news part will be about his sentencing. President Trump signed out an Executive Order a week or so ago that would permit the imposition of the Federal Death Penalty for certain despicable crimes.

Which would seem to include this one. Please don’t get us wrong. We think the fat little fellow who committed this atrocious act has a mental problem which should have been caught before this act of terror. So we acknowledge our permissive society has a hand in some collective guilt and traditional means of demonstrating disapproval- the noose or firing squad among them- renders an aspect of drama that may or may not be justified in this particular case.

Some of us used to work at the Central Intelligence Agency, and the turn-in from Rt. 123 at the Main Entrance is where Pakistani assassin Mir Amal Kansi lept from his car and ran through a magazine on his AK-47, killing two male CIA employees in the mid-1990s. It was hard not to have a thought about him waiting for the light to change there, nor to take a certain satisfaction that he was one of the last people executed for his crimes.

We anticipate there will be an argument about this one as well, and we hope it is a short one. Vic just spent three months in the health warehouse over at Woodbine Rehab. Each day lurched from meal to meal, three a day, with little change except for weekends. We think a life sentence accompanied by specified levels of discomfort is an intriguing means of punishment, but too savage for our civilized times. We would just appreciate this monster gets what Mir Amal Kanzi got.

A lethal injection, with a prayer before the plunger goes down.

Copyright 2025 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com