The tragic murder of Erin Piacenti on August 31, 2026 had nothing to do with Israel. The 32-year-old Bank of America vice president and new mother, recently returned from maternity leave, was stabbed to death in Times Square in a random, unprovoked attack by a mentally ill woman who stabbed another passerby, as well, and then charged at police while brandishing knives. As the Wall Street Journal noted, the attacker “seems to have had no political message.”
Yet Palestinian-American filmmaker Lexi Alexander exploited the tragedy to attack Israel and Zionists. She responded to Piacenti’s murder with a meme invoking Luigi Mangione, who had become a hero to anti-corporate radicals after killing the CEO of UnitedHealthcare. When the filmmaker’s post drew outrage for appearing to celebrate Piacenti’s killing, Alexander blamed “hasbara bots,” linking the backlash to an earlier campaign to boycott Bank of America over its positive ratings of some Israeli banks. She reposted an item by a woman who claimed she was threatened by “Zionists” after saying she “didn’t care” about Piacenti’s death. The filmmaker declared, “Israel doesn’t care about the woman who got killed, they care about the positive rating BofA gave them in the middle of a genocide. There is huge money at stake.” Later, Alexander said she had deliberately left the meme up because it was “a good opportunity” to remind people to boycott Bank of America. She thus turned a tragic, random murder into a story about Israel, Zionists, and money, invoking one of antisemitism’s oldest themes. As the Wall Street Journal pointed out, the film-maker and like-minded posters on social media are thus indicating what “globalizing the intifada” means.
