Police said a suspect was in custody after the shooting near the Capital Jewish Museum

Police said a suspect was in custody after the shooting near the Capital Jewish Museum

A suspect is in custody after shooting dead two Israeli embassy staff outside a Jewish museum in Washington on Wednesday night.

The gunman, named by police as Elias Rodriguez, 30, of Chicago, approached a group of four people leaving an event at the Capital Jewish Museum and opened fire, killing Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim.

Metropolitan police chief Pamela Smith said the shooter had been pacing outside the museum, which is steps away from the FBI’s field office, before the shooting.

After killing the pair, who officials said were a couple, he walked inside, where event security detained him. The suspect yelled: “Free, free Palestine,” after he was arrested, police said.

    • Optional@lemmy.world
      51·
      1 day ago

      Mr. Lischinsky specialized in Japanese studies and was an outstanding student, according to Professor Otmazgin. “He was an idealist,” he said. “He wanted to build bridges between Israel and other countries, especially in Asia.”

      He grew up in a culturally mixed family with a Jewish father and a Christian mother, and was a practicing Christian, according to Ronen Shoval, the dean of the Argaman Institute for Advanced Studies in Jerusalem, where Mr. Lischinsky participated in a yearlong program in classical liberal conservative thought after earning a master’s degree in government and diplomacy.

      “He was a devout Christian,” Dr. Shoval said, “but he had tied his fate to the people of Israel.”

      In his application to join the program, which Dr. Shoval shared with The New York Times, Mr. Lischinsky described his upbringing in a multicultural family and “the inner struggles” he faced while growing up in a religious household within secular societies in Germany and Israel.

      Hanan Lischinsky said his brother had been considering applying to the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ cadet course to train to be a diplomat. People who worked with Mr. Lischinsky in the embassy said that there, he identified as Jewish.

      . . . Ms. Milgrim had lived abroad in several places, including in Costa Rica, where she spent time working on a master’s degree program, eventually earning master’s degrees in international affairs and in natural resources and sustainable development.

      Like many young Jewish Americans, she and her brother, Jacob, 28, also participated in Birthright Israel, which offers free trips to Israel in an effort to bolster Jewish identity. In Israel, she worked for an organization that connected young Israelis and Palestinians, her father said.

      . . . Mr. Milgrim said that his daughter and Mr. Lischinsky were both concerned about peace in the Middle East, the stability of Israel and the plight of Palestinians.

      “She was doing what she loved, she was doing good,” her father said. Doing good, he added, is “what brought her life to an end.”

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      • xenomor@lemmy.worldBanned from community
        32·
        1 day ago

        Everything here indicates that they were intelligent, well informed and thoughtful. That makes their participation in this outrageously inhuman project that much more egregious.

        • Optional@lemmy.world
          24·
          1 day ago

          I still don’t see their “participation” being very clear at all, and just can’t agree on that point.

          I get people are angry as fuck about the outrageous war crimes and genocide, but I don’t think gunning down random Jews in the streets of the US is really a solid counter-strategy. In fact, in one way of looking at it, it’s just as bad.

          • xenomor@lemmy.worldBanned from community
            32·
            1 day ago

            Violence begets violence and I think we are in agreement that it’s all bad. No reasonable person wants to see people getting gunned down in the street. I will challenge you on your assertions that they were random, and that they were gunned down for being “Jews”. We should interrogate the motivations and methods of this murderer, and if it turns out to be motivated by ethnic hatred, let’s call it out. So far the reporting has not shown that to my knowledge and there is a real danger in conflating hatred of the genocide with hatred of Jewish people.

            • Optional@lemmy.world
              14·
              1 day ago

              I will challenge you on your assertions that they were random, and that they were gunned down for being “Jews”.

              So you think they were specifically targeted for working at the Israeli embassy but not because they were Jewish visitors to a Jewish museum? That’s threading a ridiculous needle. I’m not even sure what a narrative like that would be? Is the gunman a super sleuth who works in IT at a non-profit in his spare time?

              • xenomor@lemmy.worldBanned from community
                41·
                1 day ago

                Well, I don’t think it takes a super sleuth. I suspect he was stalking embassy staff, but let’s see what the investigation turns up. If he was just looking to murder Jewish people, why did he stop with these two? As far as I can tell from the reports, he was hanging out with others in the building for at least ten minutes after the murders, before the police arrived and he turned himself in. Also, the manifesto he provided specifically calls out the genocide and not “Jews”. Again, subject to change if different reporting comes out, but that’s what we have so far.

                • Optional@lemmy.world
                  15·
                  1 day ago

                  That’s wild. That you would think he’s specifically targeting people who support the Israeli occupation of Gaza but specifically not Jews.

                  Wow.

                  • xenomor@lemmy.worldBanned from community
                    3·
                    1 day ago

                    It’s wild, and incredibly antisemitic BTW, that you won’t segment the State of Israel and its incredibly racist and inhumanly violent project, from Jewish people as a whole.

                    Listen, I get it. It’s been a fundamental goal of that fascist state to conflate itself and Judaism holistically. It’s an attempt to somehow rationalize their dishonesty and brutality in the minds of well intentioned people. But, I would implore you to consider how unfair it is to Jewish people worldwide, to equate them with the unimaginable injustice and violence of one colonial nation.