Members of the Presbyterian Church USA’s Israel Palestine Mission Network pose in front of Israel’s security barrier during one of their trips to the Holy Land. The graffiti on the barrier reads “PC (USA) stands with Palestine.” Photo: Twitter.

A would-be assassin arrived at the campaign headquarters of Craig Greenberg, a Democrat running for mayor in Louisville, Kentucky, and tried to kill him.

Luckily, the shooter, a 21-year-old man named Quintez Brown — who was a prominent Black Lives Matter activist — missed his target and ran away after the February 14 attack. He was apprehended by the police, arrested, and charged with attempted murder.

Two days later, activists from BLM posted his bond of $100,000, and sprung him from jail. During subsequent scrutiny of Brown’s social media accounts, Rabbi Shlomo Litvin, chairman of the Kentucky Jewish Council, discovered that Brown had retweeted an image portraying Robert Kraft, the Jewish owner of the New England Patriots, as a “plantation master.” Brown had also posted a tweet suggesting Jewish money ran politics in Kentucky, and an image touting the ideology of the Black Hebrew Israelites, an organization listed by the ADL as one that has promoted antisemitism.

Given Brown’s antisemitic proclivities, it shouldn’t be much of a surprise that he attempted to murder a Jewish politician in cold blood. Jew-hatred is part and parcel of some strong segments of the BLM movement.

One person who should draw a lesson from Greenberg’s attempted murder is Rev. J. Herbert Nelson, the Stated Clerk of the Presbyterian Church USA (PCUSA). Nelson recently declared Israel guilty of “21st century slavery,” and portrayed American Jews as being complicit in this crime against humanity. He did this in a statement issued on Martin Luther King Day in January, and has since doubled down on his hatred.

Nelson works on his wavelength, and Brown works on his, but they broadcast the same message: Jews own slaves.

Brown is described by his friends and family as suffering from mental illness and in need of counseling, not prison. Nelson, on the other hand, is the chief administrative officer of a prominent church headquartered, interestingly enough, in Louisville, Kentucky, where Brown tried to kill a Jew in broad daylight.

You can’t draw a straight line between Nelson’s anti-Israel rhetoric and assaults on American Jews, but it is clear that his statements have contributed to a deterioration of the Jewish condition on the American scene.

On January 21, soon after Nelson made his anti-Israel comments on MLK Day, Rabbi Litvin issued a statement that all but predicted that violence was in the offing.

“Our community does not have the luxury to stay quiet in the face of hate,” Rabbi Litvin declared. “Shameful antisemitic tropes such as these have no place in a modern society. When words of hate are not countered, acts of violence are sure to follow.”

Twenty-four days later, a gunman walked into a Jew’s office and tried to kill him.

Rabbi Litvin called it.

In a blistering letter to Nelson himself, Litvin wrote, “In your haste to attack the Jewish people, you label them slavers, and in doing so you not only defame the People of Israel but besmirch the memory of each one of these heroes, unbound by your hatred, whose commitment to civil rights extended to the Jewish people as well.”

Litvin didn’t pull any punches in his letter to Nelson, declaring, “your false accusation of slavery against the Jewish people is antisemitic. Your use and distortion of Jewish history and oppression in which your church played no small role as a weapon against the Jewish people is antisemitic. Your demand of Jewish influence being used to move the American government is antisemitic.”

Sadly, aside from the reference to the church Nelson leads, the same things could be said to Quintez Brown about his Internet postings.

But will Nelson learn from Rabbi Litvin’s letter? Probably not. Nelson isn’t all that interested in listening to criticism.

“He blocked my email,” Litvin declared in a brief interview.

Dexter Van Zile is Shillman Research Fellow for the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis (CAMERA).