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.
Everything here indicates that they were intelligent, well informed and thoughtful. That makes their participation in this outrageously inhuman project that much more egregious.
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.
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.
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?
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.
That’s wild. That you would think he’s specifically targeting people who support the Israeli occupation of Gaza but specifically not Jews.
Wow.
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.
I’d argue that’s exactly what I’m doing.
I’m - not exactly sure what we’re disagreeing about here. Are you saying expecting a Jewish person to support the country of Israel in general is horribly racist?
No.
Point #1: Conflating the idea of ‘support for Israel’ with Judaism is antisemitic. While support for Israel is a thing that many Jewish people do, it is not a characteristic of being Jewish.
Point #2: Conflating violence against supporters of Israel as being necessarily violence against Jewish people depends on and reinforces point #1, and is therefore antisemitic.
Israel and many of its supporters want to make these conflations, because they want to frame any critique of the nation or its actions as a critique of Jewish people. Basically, they want to launder their crimes behind the goodwill that people have toward Jewish people. That is inaccurate, unfair, and dangerous. Unfortunately, it is infused in most of the media coverage of these murders, and being used to provide cover for Israel’s genocide and other crimes. I’m just calling it out when I encounter it.