On May 21, two staffers for the Israeli Embassy in Washington were gunned down outside a Jewish museum in the American capital. Their names were Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim. They had hopes and dreams. Lischinsky was planning to propose to Milgrim and had already bought the ring. Milgrim’s LinkedIn bio reveals her interests “at the intersection of peacebuilding, religious engagement, and environmental work.” She had a certificate from the United States Institute of Peace. A 31-year-old man named Elias Rodriguez, who held left-wing views, was charged with their murder.
Lischinsky and Milgrim had attended a Young Diplomats Reception put on by the American Jewish Committee at the Capital Jewish Museum. Based on what we know so far, Rodriguez gunned them down in cold blood, shooting them in the back and then firing into their collapsed bodies. When Milgrim tried to crawl away, he followed her and unloaded more bullets into her. The gun clicked. “After a brief moment,” he reloaded, according to the court document. It remains unclear what went through his mind during this moment. Perhaps a brief hesitation. Then he shot her again, repeatedly, until the slide locked.
The shooter then jogged into the Jewish Museum, sat down and chanted “Free Palestine!” Police arrived and took him into custody. Milgrim was pronounced dead 40 minutes after the shooting.
A week and a half later, on the Jewish holiday of Shavuot, an Egyptian immigrant named Mohamed Sabry Soliman reportedly targeted a “Run for Their Lives” event in Boulder, Colorado, which bills itself as a “family-friendly” 1-kilometer walk/run to raise awareness for the hostages currently held by Hamas. Soliman shouted slogans like “Palestine is free!” and attacked the peaceful group with Molotov cocktails and a “makeshift flamethrower.” Initial reports indicated that he injured eight people before police could apprehend him, women and men aged 52 to 88, with the victim count later rising to 12.
It’s important not to dismiss or belittle the feelings of heartbreak and rage over the double murder of a Jewish couple in love and struck down in their prime or the Boulder attack, but reactions from a number of self-styled anti-imperialists have so far missed this point. Following the Jewish Museum massacre, the conspiracy theory blogger Caitlin Johnstone insisted on her website, “The real story here is how the entire western political/media class has expressed more outrage and sympathy over the killing of two Israeli Embassy staffers than tens of thousands of Palestinians in history’s first live-streamed genocide.”
Behind Johnstone’s argument is basic “whataboutism”: a tu quoque fallacy, through which one deflects accountability by insisting the other side does the same thing, only worse. It’s true that conservatives are using these incidents to escalate their rhetoric on the war in Gaza and to further intimidate its critics in the United States. But to play this game that renders murder insignificant or even unreal in light of other “real” murders is to demean the value of individual human life, including the thousands of Palestinians killed by Israel in Gaza. Respect for human life involves moral equivalences, because innocent people do not deserve to die. That means doing the opposite of accepting the deaths of some innocents based on the higher numbers of innocents killed “on the other side.” It means standing up for innocent human life.
A podcast episode released on May 23 by the progressive magazine Jewish Currents does well to reject whataboutism. But the participants in the discussion (a group of four editors and writers for the magazine) stop short of defining the Jewish Museum attack as an antisemitic incident. Instead, as historian Ben Ratskoff says, antisemitic and anti-Zionist violence remain “entangled in ways that are not clear and are not straightforward.” This is a fair point and an uncomfortable reality, particularly when considering legal categories of hate crimes and political violence. Ratskoff asks whether the left can develop an “alternative framework” for discussing antisemitism and war, “without reductively classifying the event as antisemitism.” Yet the podcast interlocutors recognize that it remains difficult to grapple with the ambiguities of the double murder: the fact that this wasn’t an embassy event; the shooter may not have known much, if anything, about his victims; and the event included groups promoting humanitarian aid to Gaza.
Things get even more complicated with the unfolding of the Boulder attack. It is true that an attack on Israelis and Israeli officials (even low-level diplomats) could be misconstrued as an attack against Jews in general, even when the attacker may not hate Jews as a people. But such an attack can also open the door to further violence, like that seen in Boulder, against people who may not even support Israel’s government but merely hope to extend support and sympathy toward Hamas’ victims.
It is far easier to sidestep these complexities by taking the “both sides” approach and asking, “What about Israel’s victims?” than it is to sit with the depravity of burning an 88-year-old civilian in the park. Of course, the world cries out for humanitarian assistance and an end to the horrific war. But refusing to also discuss the harms being done to Jews increasingly feels like a shrug at their targeting with indiscriminate militancy.
This targeting begins with the categorization of Israelis, whether military or civilians, as political subjects instead of people — humans — and it tends to drift toward the same treatment of Jews labeled “Zionist,” a category applied so broadly that it can mean anyone who does not seek Israel’s total destruction. Jews become associated with a symbolic other, dislocated from the beloved community, devalued potential targets for violence. The political scientist Stephen R. Shalom wrote in the leftist journal New Politics, “by targeting a mostly Jewish meeting organized by the American Jewish Committee held in a Jewish space without an explicitly pro-Israel agenda, Rodriguez has blurred what should be a bright line between anti-Jewish and anti-Israel actions.”
If this “blurring” or “entanglement” was not completely clear after the May 21 double murder, the incendiary attack in Boulder made it obvious. But it already existed within the Palestine solidarity movement, and it calls for greater discretion than we are seeing on the radical left.
What strikes me as bizarre about the alleged manifesto released on the social media platform X shortly before the Jewish Museum assassinations is Rodriguez’s attempt not to dehumanize his victims, but rather to humanize them. “Those of us against the genocide take satisfaction in arguing that the perpetrators and abettors have forfeited their humanity,” he wrote. “I sympathize with this viewpoint. … But inhumanity has long since shown itself to be shockingly common, mundane, prosaically human.” A perpetrator, he argues, may be “a loving parent, a filial child, a generous and charitable friend, an amiable stranger, capable of moral strength at times when it suits him and sometimes even when it does not, and yet be a monster all the same.”
There is an important doubling here: On one hand, the victims are humanized, but in the final instance, they must become monsters again in the eyes of the killer. We all know how demonization and dehumanization, including the dehumanization of Palestinians, tend to go hand in hand with murder. But to humanize before killing, as the shooter appears to have done — this opens a channel of perhaps even greater darkness.
Right-wing influencer Jack Posobiec and his co-author Joshua Lisec’s “Unhumans” (2024) reveals just one among the ongoing dehumanization campaigns taking place in the U.S. In the book’s preface, MAGA podcaster and former Trump adviser Steve Bannon writes of progressives: “As they are opposed to humanity itself, they place themselves outside of the category completely, in an entirely new misery-driven subdivision, the unhuman.”
Posobiec and Lisec write about the left, but their message extends to “the unhuman-occupied media.” They insist that “unhumans seek the death of the successful and the desecration of the beautiful.” The authors call for a counterrevolution in opposition both to moderates and conservatives, since both have been infected with “unhuman coding.”
While “Unhumans” stops short of calling for violence, Posobiec and Lisec insist that “We cannot vote our way out of this.” The authors hope this category of unpeople live a despised existence, their intentions demeaned in every way. “So mock the unhumans. Humiliate the unhumans. Ridicule the unhumans. Disgrace, debase, and deride the unhumans.” You get the point.
That sort of geographical, spiritual and political sorting of good from evil, human from unhuman, is the logical end point of the authors’ extreme ideology. Even where violence is not condoned, dehumanization and demonization of the other have always prepared the way for violence. Where a person is denied their humanity, they are deprived of rights. We see it all the time in hate crimes against Muslims and Jews, as well as all other groups targeted for “the victim’s perceived or actual race, color, religion, national origin, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, or disability,” in the language of the U.S. Department of Justice.
With Rodriguez, we see an opposite formulation, though. It is not simply that the human status of the victims would have been irrelevant. No, for him, the victims must be humanized.
The summary of the banality of evil that Rodriguez offers resonates much more clearly with his own thinking and the self-satisfied tone with which he expresses it. Talking to the press in an old Bernie Sanders ball cap, his neighbor John Wayne Fry called Rodriguez and his roommate “very sensitive people.” How surprising that such an “amiable stranger” (to use a phrase from the manifesto) would turn out to be a murderer.
Rodriguez wraps up his manifesto with a cheerful overture to the reader that his “action will be highly legible and, in some funny way, the only sane thing to do,” even adding a dedication to his family with doting condescension, noting “I love you Mom, Dad, baby sis, the rest of my familia, including you, O*****.” He posted these words on his alternate social media account on X shortly before claiming the lives of two people from tragedy-struck families unknown to him.
One can imagine the shooter grappling with the problems of left-wing thought as he resolved to commit his act. Leftists generally insist that dehumanization is wrong, that the other must be respected. Where Rodriguez insists that the repudiation of hate and genocide as “inhuman” is wrong, he is almost following a tradition on the left espoused by the philosopher Slavoj Žižek, who wrote in his book “The Parallax View” (2006), “it is all too simple to dismiss Nazis as inhuman and bestial — what if the problem with the Nazis was precisely that they remained ‘human, all too human’?” In this case, Žižek’s aim is merely to navigate the deepest dilemmas of the human soul in order to wage ideological struggle against fascism. It is not to carry out a massacre.
One of Milgrim’s friends and collaborators on climate initiatives declared, “Sarah truly embodied the Jewish value of tikkun olam — repairing the world.” Ironically, Rodriguez placed a poster in his window that read, “Tikkun Olam means FREE PALESTINE.” How do we repair the chasms between us that we have created, where we have forgotten the meaning of humanity?
Falling into the trap of dehumanizing Rodriguez and Soliman, and Palestinians and leftists writ large, is also wrong. On the one hand, people like Posobiec and Lisec use acts like Rodriguez’s to deny leftists’ humanity. On the other hand, people like Rodriguez pretend to humanize in order to avoid landing on the side of the oppressor. They are not so far apart.
It would be comforting to believe that Rodriguez’s manifesto has fallen on deaf ears among the left, but it has proven more contentious. In an interview viewed 222,000 times for the Useful Idiots podcast, which has 166,000 subscribers on YouTube, anti-Zionist intellectual Norman Finkelstein declared that the manifesto had “quite a high level of sophistication.” Although Finkelstein lambasted Rodriguez’s “crazy project,” his commentary illustrates how the seductive nature of the killer’s erudition disguises the facile nature of his arguments.
To justify himself, Rodriguez presents a confused parallel, obliquely analogizing the two young staffers to Guatemalan death squad genocidaires, and himself to a man who attempted to throw Robert McNamara, U.S. secretary of defense during the Vietnam War, off a ferry boat. The false moral equivalence between low-level staffers and gun-wielding paramilitaries killing innocent and injured civilians is obvious; to compare the murder of those embassy staffers with a rough-and-tumble shove of a top-level U.S. official is ridiculous. The prosaic attempt at disarming repulsion with an obscure anecdote about a humorous dustup is enormously deceitful. And nowhere in the manifesto is there an indication of how Palestine is served by Rodriguez’s attack.
The professed intention of the double murder was to strike terror in the hearts of public officials and those tied to them. “The impunity that representatives of our government feel at abetting this slaughter should be revealed as an illusion,” Rodriguez wrote, arguing for “bringing the war home.” This was the slogan of the Weather Underground and other organizations of the New Left, whose members entered the global anti-imperialist struggle as urban guerrillas in the spirit of Che Guevara and Ho Chi Minh.
In this vein, the killer’s manifesto — which he called an “explication” — should be seen as an ideological testament and the result of a radicalization process. Rodriguez’s radicalization might have been seen online, where he ventured into the cynical and nihilistic “F— You and Die” subforum on the site Something Awful, known for a strange mix of alert, progressive consciousness with outbursts of ignorance and cruelty toward people who users have found “cringey” — like autistic people and “furries” who like to dress up as animals. According to an online trace from Berlin-based software developer Travis Brown, Rodriguez’s early account on X had the handle “habboman88,” an internet troll reference combined with the numerological code for “Heil Hitler.” If this is correct, it further elucidates the profile of an angry and volatile young man with a deeply felt sense of injustice that feeds a growing rancor.
Rodriguez’s dalliance with the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL) and the associated ANSWER Coalition in 2017-2018 may also shed light on his radicalization. Both of these groups function within a larger network of organizations of the authoritarian left known for trafficking in conspiracy theories, promoting the propaganda apparatuses of China, Russia and Iran, and defending various repressive regimes around the world. These fringe organizations, which have sponsored and organized a large number of the protests in the U.S. against Israel’s war in Gaza, advance the slogans of a globalized Intifada and generate resentment, but do not openly advocate any steps that might seem to follow from this.
Friends of Rodriguez who participated with him in a private group chat allege that he upheld a staunch left-wing belief system veering into Stalinism, and made remarks advocating cruelty toward a person with mental illness. Ultimately, Rodriguez grew frustrated with the strangely sectarian politics of the PSL, instead turning to a Maoist-inflected Third Worldist ideology focused on the liberation of the Global South from the imperialist fetters of global capitalism.
On X, Rodriguez shared a post quoting the late Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah in reference to a statement from another account that read, “I will personally never humanize a Zionist by mentioning their names or posting their photos. They are nothing but worthless numbers, a mere statistic counting a group who chose to lead the most deranged lives imaginable.” In Rodriguez’s manifesto, he purports to “sympathize” with this dehumanization. This does raise doubts about his understanding of sympathy and who or what deserves it. What does it mean to “sympathize” with dehumanization but not the victims one has attempted so laboriously to humanize?
While the PSL released a public disavowal of Rodriguez’s act and his past connection to the organization, the activist group Bronx Anti-War Coalition acclaimed it, declaring, “What Elias Rodriguez did is the highest expression of anti-Zionism.” This is nothing new for the Bronx Anti-War Coalition, whose representative declared from the makeshift rostra of a Quds Day rally at Times Square — an event co-sponsored by the PSL — “Glory to the Axis of Resistance!” citing “Iran, Yemen, Hezbollah.” A Bronx Anti-War Coalition rally in Queens in early May featured a speaker announcing that the “resistance groups … are teaching us how liberation is actually carried out in real time — it is through armed struggle.”
While the Bronx Anti-War Coalition can be viewed as setting the stage for violence, hoping to implement Hamas-style armed struggle is a fringe position within the Palestine solidarity movement. Other groups like the Columbia-Palestine Solidarity Coalition take an opposite position, stating last October that they “wholeheartedly disavow any violence” outside of the context of Palestinians in Palestine. The problem is that unpredictable instances of political violence arguably emerge from diffuse movements and their ideas and language, and not one or another formal group or collection of groups that may or may not adequately articulate boundaries around acts of aggression. And where violent rhetoric finds approval and encouragement, it will spread in spite of disavowals from prominent left-liberal figures like Mehdi Hassan or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
Those who promote violence insist that the enemy has left them no other option, on the one hand, while externalizing accountability on the other, placing responsibility with the entire movement for producing “lone wolves.” It is a two-way denial of their own agency beyond the promulgation of a hero myth. Because authorities tend not to be discerning in their meting out of punishment, the whole movement pays the price with heavy-handed repression that can have a further, radicalizing effect. The cycle of violence expands, as appeals to violence increasingly suck the oxygen out of public discourse.
Rodriguez’s manifesto reflects this capacity for ethical disassociation and its strategic implications. For him, punishment, fear and hopelessness are not the only ends in themselves. The proud demonstration of his own ideology becomes equally important. Rodriguez’s manifesto even calls his act “armed demonstration.” He wants to be a hero.
A key problem here is that reducing everything to the level of strategic objectives perpetuates the dehumanization process by eliminating the moral dimension. It’s a problem that’s so widespread that Rodriguez truly had cause to believe not only that killing Israeli officials would be met with widespread acclaim, but that it would be an expression of — and a step toward — the global Intifada. So many who embraced the celebrity of Luigi Mangione also applauded the Oct. 7 Hamas attack, in which some 800 civilians were slaughtered. As the moral dimension is forgotten, the fact that the dedicated peace advocates murdered on Oct. 7 were people like Sarah Milgrim is neatly tucked into the ethical calculus of “bringing the war home.” Yet as the Boulder attack makes painfully obvious, this is hardly the clean, strategic militancy that advocates of armed violence hope to project.
The most disturbing quality of the response from the left to the Washington and Boulder attacks has been the fear that permeates it. Terrorized by dehumanization from the far right and by a presidential administration keen on clashing with the courts over the limits of its repressive potential, the left is forced to defend itself against baseless accusations that these attacks are the real fruit of all of its labors. That Soliman overstayed his visa by two months is manufactured into a justification for the administration’s patently unconstitutional onslaught against immigrants and citizenship rights. At the same time, pressure emerges from some within the left, urging activists to stay silent or deflect from the harms done by violence.
There is something deeply unreflective in articles from right-wing commentators like Jeffrey Blehar in the National Review, who want to blame left-wing activism in general for the unrepresentative actions of this single individual. “So where are the lengthy discussions about how the online left’s currently maximalist rhetoric of panic, siege, and destruction is creating the environment in which the left’s newest celebrity assassins have arisen?” Blehar asks, blithely obscuring the widespread condemnations from public figures and the far more murky political background of alleged killers like Mangione.
Blehar must be taken to task for this blase dismissal of popular panic amid what courts have rebuked as unprecedented power grabs by the Trump administration. Blehar’s observations only skim the surface of an issue that requires not a partisan polemic but an incisive analysis that can get to the sinews of American political life. The political right has been far more violent than the left in the U.S., and for far longer, and it has proven at least as reluctant to hold a public conversation about how to address this problem on an intellectual level.
That we are now all entangled in the same world of fear and violence goes a long way to explaining why it was not at all surprising to find far-right trolls on the anonymous message board 4chan cheering on Rodriguez’s killings — or why Rodriguez’s apparent inclusion of “88” in his original handle was so ironically apropos.The issue lies in anomie, the moral wasteland of modern life — or what Bellingcat founder Eliot Higgins calls “disordered discourse.” In posts on the social media app Bluesky on May 23, Higgins called out the way that “discourse becomes detached from evidence, deliberation, and accountability,” creating a “theater of outrage.” Few people attempt to address daunting root problems, value systems lose internal coherence and opposition to the other becomes the only verifiable way to establish and maintain any group form at all. While Higgins’ thread was directed at far-right politicians, it applies more broadly to the passions of the human soul born of anxiety, loathing and shame, unable to take a leap of faith toward a life of integrity rather than reaction. What is needed is equanimity and sincere deliberation on repairing the world.
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