We were putting up decorations when my friend got the emergency alert. It was my roommate’s birthday, and we had just returned from shopping for drinks and party snacks. My friend works in a physics lab at Brown University, in the building where the shots had been reported. His coworkers were sheltering in their office. He listened to the police scanner with his headphones because we didn’t want to hear it, and we combed social media for reports from accounts that didn’t know much more than we did. The winter’s first snow began to fall as police helicopters churned overhead.

By the end of the night, only a few things were clear: Two students were dead, eight in critical condition; no suspect had been detained. By morning, the police had taken someone in. His name leaked in the afternoon, and the internet dissected his online footprint. But that night he was released, presumably cleared. No new suspect was named.

As the hours passed, the lack of information grew more glaring. In a press conference, Brown President Christina Paxson was caught off guard by a reporter indignant that she still didn’t know what students were doing in the classroom where the shooting happened. Providence Mayor Brett Smiley told the public they could go about their business, continue their holiday shopping, that they had no reason to fear another attack. Still, with minimal knowledge of what had transpired and no idea about the shooter’s motivations, most of the city stayed shut in at home.

Meanwhile, the internet churned to make meaning in the gap where the shooter’s name should be. Absent an official explanation, the loudest voices soon coalesced to reinterpret the shooting through an invented narrative that cast blame elsewhere — not on a society that celebrates violence and arms its disgruntled members with the means to carry it out at random, but on a community particularly likely to be made victims of its genocidal inclinations.

One of the victims, 19-year-old sophomore Ella Cook, was the vice president of the Brown College Republicans. Right-wing commentators quickly speculated that she had been targeted for her political beliefs — another Charlie Kirk. The fact that the shooter had targeted a voluntary study session, one in which there was no way to know who was in attendance, or that he reportedly sprayed bullets at random into the class, or that the other student killed was 18-year-old freshman and Muslim Uzbek immigrant Mukhammad Aziz Umurzokov, did little to slow the inexorable momentum of the conspiracy.

Hours after the shooting at Brown, two gunmen killed 15 people at a Hannukah celebration on Australia’s Bondi Beach. Almost immediately, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu blamed the attack on Australia Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s recent decision to recognize Palestinian statehood, quoting an August letter in which he said he told Albanese the recognition “pours fuel on the antisemitic fire.” As if with one voice, members of the right-wing Zionist commentariat declared that, in Bret Stephens’s words, the shooting was “what ‘Globalize the Intifada’ looks like.” In the wake of the shooting, Jillian Segal, Australia’s special envoy to combat antisemitism, used the momentum to push through her 13 recommendations, which are largely targeted at suppressing the Palestine solidarity movement and had previously languished for months with little political support. The emerging facts that the shooters were reportedly affiliated with ISIS, not the Palestine solidarity movement, or that one of them had been disarmed by a Muslim man who was himself shot, were of little concern.

News of the two shootings mingled in headlines and on timelines. New entries in the right-wing theory of the Providence attack began to form, seemingly informed by the events on the other side of the world. One viral post shared a photo of an elderly man waving a Palestinian flag at a protest, alleging that this was Mayor Smiley’s husband: “Guess we know why they won’t release what the shooter yelled when he entered that classroom and assassinated Ella Cook,” the author wrote. To anyone familiar with Providence’s political scene, this accusation was laughable. Smiley is an ardent Zionist who converted to Judaism in 2024 while aggressively opposing a Jewish-led campaign for city divestment. His husband, one of the wealthiest real estate agents in the city, is not a pro-Palestine solidarity activist. Still, the post was shared nearly 10,000 times.

Soon enough, the conspiracists attached the name of an actual person to their theories: Mustapha Kharbouch, a queer Palestinian first-year Brown student. Right-wing accounts alleged, baselessly, that a “gait analysis” of video of Kharbouch walking in a Palestine protest matched surveillance video police had released of the suspect. Soon, pages containing information about him had been taken down by Brown, adding another puzzle piece to a ludicrous, quickly-emerging conspiracy theory that the mayor and the university worked together to cover up the identity of a queer Palestinian who had assassinated a promising young conservative luminary.

As the conspiracy snowballed, influential right-wing voices jumped on board. The mob trumpeting Kharbouch’s presumed guilt quickly expanded to include not just conspiracy-minded influencers like Laura Loomer, Jack Posobiec, and Naomi Wolf, but also corporate titans like billionaire hedge fund manager Bill Ackman and venture capitalist Shaun Maguire. Soon enough, government officials Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon and Rep. Anna Paulina Luna had joined the fray.

When MIT physicist Nuno Loureiro was murdered in his Boston area home — later revealed as another victim of the same disgruntled former Brown student who police now say carried out the Providence shooting the day before — his killing was instantly wrapped into the narrative; The Daily Mail and the Jerusalem Post reported without evidence that Loureiro had been a supporter of Israel and that anonymous Israeli sources claimed he “may have been assassinated by an Iranian operative.”

Within days, the targeting of Kharbouch had gained enough momentum that the university released a statement condemning the emerging harassment campaign, and later confirmed it had removed the pages featuring his name as a precaution against doxing. Rhode Island Attorney General Peter Neronha also denied any investigation of Kharbouch. “There’s nothing about what we know was perhaps said, that indicates any kind of motive, that is related at all to ethnicity, or political outlook, or culture,” Neronha added.

But the train had already left the station. Images were plastered across social media of Kharbouch smiling in a keffiyeh, attending a protest on campus, sitting in the sunlight outside a student center. In a matter of hours, his life had been transformed by a digital lynch mob. “The past few days have been an unimaginable nightmare,” Kharbouch wrote in a statement released the Friday after the shooting. “Instead of grieving with my community in the aftermath of the horrible shooting, I received non-stop death threats and hate speech.”

Watching this conspiracy morph into a vehicle for anti-Palestinian hate, I was reminded of a different Palestinian Brown student whose name was launched into national headlines by gun violence — Hisham Awartani. In 2023, Awartani was visiting his grandmother in Burlington, Vermont for Thanksgiving, when a man shot him and his two friends after seeing the three young men walk by his porch wearing keffiyehs and speaking in Arabic. All three were injured, and Awartani was left paralyzed from the waist down. The shooting briefly made national news as one of many anti-Palestinian attacks in the U.S. in the wake of October 7. Awartani, born and raised in the West Bank, had escaped the ever-present violence of the Israeli occupation and come to the U.S. for his education, only to be shot here instead. “That frigid autumn night in Burlington, Vt., was not the first time I had stared down the barrel of a gun,” Awartani would later write in a New York Times op-ed about his experience. “It was not even the first time I had been fired at. Half a world away, in the West Bank, it had happened before.”

The cruelty of this reality was not lost on his classmates, who, like many on campuses across the country that school year, were in the middle of a pitched battle with their administration over the university’s refusal to divest from companies backing and profiting from Israel’s genocide. Awartani’s name became a rallying cry. At a vigil after his shooting, Paxson, the school’s president, was unable to deliver her planned remarks, drowned out by chants of “Brown Divest.” “This is how you want to honor your friend?” she scornfully implored the crowd. The answer from students was resounding. A few weeks later, a group of 41 student activists occupied the university’s administrative building for the second time that year, wearing matching shirts that read “Divest for Hisham.” Paxson again rejected their demand, instead working with the Providence mayor to charge the students with criminal trespassing.

In 2025, Awartani returned home to the West Bank for the first time since he was paralyzed. In his remaining time at Brown, he reluctantly embraced his status as a campus hero, lifting up demands for divestment. Given the opportunity to help direct the narrative of his own tragedy — an opportunity not afforded to Umurzokov or Cook — he steered it towards the struggle to end the violent annihilation of his peers in Palestine.

A week before Awartani’s graduation last spring, Mayor Smiley went on a propaganda trip to Israel — his first since his conversion. On the morning of his return, Nakba Day, I joined other organizers with Jewish Voice for Peace Rhode Island at a protest outside his home, directly across the street from the Brown engineering building where the shooting would take place seven months later. In the dreary spring rain, we held signs and chanted, “You’re wining and dining while children are dying.” Just a week before the shooting, the mayor traveled to New Orleans for a conference organized by the Israel lobby group Combat Antisemitism Movement, where he would cite the protest as an example of the antisemitism he faced in Providence.

This backdrop of festering, conspiracy-laden anti-Palestinian racism has made it even more difficult to forget the numbness of pro-Israel leaders like Smiley and Paxson to the deaths of thousands of students in Gaza. As the city and the university ground to a halt over the death of two young people, it was hard not to recall every day that both institutions refused to sacrifice a single dollar to help slow the extermination of Gaza’s children. The words a Brown student shouted at Paxson during Awartani’s vigil still rang true — “If he was in Palestine, you wouldn’t care!”

Awartani himself may have expressed this cruel contrast best: “Instead of settlements, the Oslo Accords or the intifada, the conversation around our shooting involved terms such as ‘gun violence,’ ‘hate crimes’ and ‘right-wing extremism.’ Instead of being maimed in Arab streets, we were shot in small-town America. Instead of being seen as Palestinians, for once, we were seen as people.”

For liberals like Smiley and Paxson, this shooting has nothing to do with Palestine. It is part of the particularly American affliction of the mass shooting. To them, the antidote is simple: gun control. This is true. Australia’s successful gun control policy is part of the reason why the attack at Bondi Beach was so shocking.

But the phenomenon of the mass shooting has become so normalized in the U.S. that this explanation also feels, at times, inadequate. The death toll of the Brown shooting was low enough that the nation would likely have moved on in a matter of hours, had it not taken place at an Ivy League university or had the killer been identified at the scene. These events are virtually routine, the scripts we recite in the aftermath rehearsed to the point of memorization. I, too, blame the guns. But if the guns disappeared tomorrow, would the rot not remain? I don’t think I’m alone in harboring the private suspicion that a society that manifests this form of social contagion must be rotten to its core.

And, of course, it is.

While the manifestations and phases differ, this rot is the same one that killed Ammar Sabah, a 16-year-old Palestinian gunned down by Israeli soldiers in the West Bank the Monday after the shootings in Providence and Sydney.

The moral rot that shot Hisham Awartani in Ramallah is the same one that shot him in Burlington.

It is the long tail of settler-colonial dehumanization lashing out, sometimes at random, at a new generation. In the U.S., it emerges out of a society that has, for centuries, armed its young men and vented their violent impulses and class resentments into genocidal warfare against Indigenous people, first on the so-called frontier and later in imperial wars abroad.

It is this underlying affliction that bred the gun culture we now blame for these shootings. As historian Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz documents, the U.S.’s second amendment enshrines not the right of the people to arm themselves against tyranny, as we are often told, but the right of the settler to arm himself against the native.

“A firearm was regarded as a necessary utensil for the settler’s task,” Dunbar-Ortiz writes. The same is true in Palestine today. Even before Israel’s escalating genocide, far right National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir distributed these utensils freely to settler militias across the West Bank.

Now, as our empire decays and our despair deepens, this cruel legacy erupts in spectacular displays of violence — in schools, at music festivals, in our neighborhoods.

Israeli society is immersed in a different stage of this death-dealing decay, but the forces driving its young men to commit genocidal acts of violence are the same.

The fascist and Zionist right, fueled by this violence, have used fiction to metabolize the shootings at Brown and Bondi into more energy for their own assault.

Meanwhile, our respectable, liberal leaders — people like Smiley and Paxson — mourn the Brown shooting as they enable violence in Palestine. They do not see Mukhammad Aziz Umurzokov and Ammar Sabah as victims of the same decaying system. They see a random tragedy and an unfortunate consequence.

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