Washington Jewish Museum Shooter Justified Attack in Hate-Filled Manifesto; Citing Gaza and U.S. Support for Israel

By: Fern Sidman

In a disturbing development following the deadly shooting outside the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday evening, a letter allegedly written by the gunman, Elias Rodriguez, has surfaced online, revealing the extremist ideology that motivated the fatal attack. According to a report that appeared on VIN News, Rodriguez—who gunned down two Israeli Embassy staffers, Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim, penned a final manifesto that framed the murder as a form of political retribution for Israeli military actions in Gaza and American support for the Jewish state.

The letter was published Thursday by American blogger Ken Klippenstein, who claims to have verified its authenticity based on the document’s timestamp and signature. Multiple experts cited in the article and other sources who reviewed the letter agree that it appears to be genuine.

The content of Rodriguez’s letter, which has since been widely circulated online, offers an emotionally charged, ideologically radical, and deeply unsettling glimpse into the mind of a far-left activist turned terrorist. In what VIN News described as a “lengthy and impassioned” message, Rodriguez justified the murder of two innocent diplomats as a response to what he labeled “genocide” by Israel in Gaza, a characterization that has been widely rejected by mainstream observers and legal experts.

“After a few months of rapidly mounting death tolls, Israel had obliterated the capacity to even continue counting the dead, which has served its genocide well,” Rodriguez wrote. He cited inflated and unverifiable casualty numbers, claiming the Gaza Health Ministry had recorded 53,000 deaths—figures that have been widely disputed and are often supplied by Hamas-controlled sources.

Rodriguez’s words suggest a calculated effort to dehumanize not only the state of Israel but also anyone who supports it—framing his victims as “perpetrators and abettors” of crimes, thus stripping them of their humanity and rationalizing their execution.

Rodriguez’s manifesto is laced with moral absolutism and revolutionary rhetoric, emblematic of a growing subset of ideological extremism on the radical left that sees physical violence as a legitimate form of protest, according to the information provided in the VIN News report. In his closing paragraph, Rodriguez chillingly rationalizes his act of murder as a response not only to current events in Gaza but to longstanding grievances stretching back over a decade.

“The action would have been morally justified taken 11 years ago during Protective Edge,” he wrote, referencing Israel’s 2014 military operation in Gaza. “I think to most Americans such an action would have been illegible, would seem insane. I am glad that today at least there are many Americans for which the action will be highly legible and, in some funny way, the only sane thing to do.”

This alarming statement not only reveals the depth of Rodriguez’s radicalization but also suggests that he believed growing anti-Israel sentiment in the U.S. might normalize or even validate his actions—a dangerous reflection of how extremist narratives have taken root in certain activist circles.

This attack, and Rodriguez’s own words, raise critical concerns about the convergence of radical anti-Israel ideology and real-world violence, as was indicated in the VIN News report. The dissemination of rhetoric portraying Israel as a genocidal state and its supporters as complicit monsters has, in this case, translated into deadly action. The implications for the Jewish community, Israeli diplomats, and supporters of Israel in the United States are profound.

This incident also adds weight to ongoing calls for federal and state authorities to treat anti-Semitic violence fueled by anti-Israel activism with the same urgency as other forms of politically motivated terror. The fact that Rodriguez framed his attack not as random violence, but as a targeted, ideologically motivated act of “justice,” underscores the need for a robust response from law enforcement and civil society.

In the wake of the attack and publication of the letter, Jewish institutions across the country have increased security protocols. Israeli embassies and consulates in major cities have likewise coordinated with federal agencies to reassess potential threats. As the VIN News report noted, the clear targeting of Jewish diplomats outside a Jewish museum—after a Jewish community event—marks a dangerous escalation in the blending of political radicalism and anti-Semitic violence.

The Jewish community, both in the U.S. and abroad, continues to mourn the loss of two young lives—professionals dedicated to diplomacy and service to their country. The letter left behind by their killer, rather than offering insight or remorse, serves only as a grim warning of the ideological currents that can justify hatred in the name of activism.

The release of Elias Rodriguez’s final letter has confirmed what many feared: the fatal shooting in Washington was a premeditated act of terror inspired by a distorted worldview that equates support for Israel with moral depravity and sees murder as a form of protest. This tragedy is not merely an isolated incident—it is a stark indicator of the volatile intersection of radical ideology, political violence, and anti-Semitism.

Law enforcement officials continue to investigate the broader context of Rodriguez’s activities, including whether he acted alone or was in contact with like-minded radicals. Meanwhile, Jewish leaders and advocacy groups are calling for greater vigilance and a national reckoning with the dangerous consequences of unchecked hatred masquerading as justice.

Below is the manifesto in its entirety :

Explication

May 20, 2025

Halintar is a word that means something like thunder or lightning. In the wake of an act people look for a text to fix its meaning, so here’s an attempt. The atrocities committed by Israelis against Palestine defy description and defy quantification. Instead of reading descriptions mostly we watch them unfold on video, sometimes live. After a few months of rapidly mounting death tolls Israel had obliterated the capacity to even continue counting the dead, which has served its genocide well. At time of writing the Gaza health ministry records 53,000 killed by traumatic force, at least ten thousand lie under rubble, and who knows how many thousands more dead of preventable disease, hunger, with tens of thousands now at risk of imminent famine due to Israeli blockade, all enabled by Western and Arab government complicity. The Gaza information office includes the ten thousand under the rubble with the dead in their own count. In news reports there have been those “ten thousand” under the rubble for months now, despite the continual making of more rubble and repeated bombing of rubble again and again and the bombing of tents amid the rubble. Like the Yemen death toll which had been frozen at some few thousand for years under Saudi-UK-US bombardment before being belatedly revealed to stand at 500k dead, all of these figures are almost surely a criminal undercount. I have no trouble believing the estimates that put the toll at 100,000 or more. More have been murdered since March of this year than in “Protective Edge” and “Cast Lead” put together. What more at this point can one say about the proportion of mangled and burned and exploded human beings whom were children. We who let this happen will never deserve the Palestinians’ forgiveness. They’ve let us know as much.

An armed action is not necessarily a military action. It usually is not. Usually it is theater and spectacle, a quality it shares with many unarmed actions. Nonviolent protest in the opening weeks of the genocide seemed to signal some sort of turning point. Never before had so many tens of thousands joined the Palestinians in the streets across the West. Never before had so many American politicians been forced to concede that, rhetorically at least, the Palestinians were human beings, too. But thus far the rhetoric has not amounted to much. The Israelis themselves boast about their own shock at the free hand the Americans have given them to exterminate the Palestinians. Public opinion has shifted against the genocidal apartheid state, and the American government has simply shrugged, they’ll do without public opinion then, criminalize it where they can, suffocate it with bland reassurances that they’re doing all they can to restrain Israel where it cannot criminalize protest outright. Aaron Bushnell and others sacrificed themselves in the hopes of stopping the massacre and the state works to make us feel their sacrifice was made in vain, that there is no hope in escalating for Gaza and no point in bringing the war home. We can’t let them succeed. Their sacrifices were not made in vain.

The impunity that representatives of our government feel at abetting this slaughter should be revealed as an illusion, then. The impunity we see is the worst for those of us in immediate proximity to the genocidaires. A surgeon who treated victims of the Mayan genocide by the Guatemalan state recounts an instance in which he was operating on a patient who’d been critically injured during a massacre when, suddenly, armed gunmen entered the room and shot the patient to death on his operating table, laughing as they killed him. The physician said the worst part was seeing the killers, well known to him, openly swagger down local streets in the years after.

Elsewhere a man of conscience once attempted to throw Robert McNamara off a Martha’s Vineyard-bound ferry into the sea, incensed at the same impunity and arrogance he saw in that butcher of Vietnam as he sat in the ferry’s lounge laughing with friends. The man took issue with McNamara’s “very posture, telling you, ‘My history is fine, and I can be slumped over a bar like this with my good friend Ralph here and you’ll have to lump it.'” The man did not succeed in heaving McNamara off a catwalk into the water, the former secretary of state managed to cling to the railing and clamber back to his feet, but the assailant explicated the value of the attempt by saying “Well, I got him outside, just the two of us, and suddenly his history wasn’t so fine, was it?”

A word about the morality of armed demonstration. Those of us against the genocide take satisfaction in arguing that the perpetrators and abettors have forfeited their humanity. I sympathize with this viewpoint and understand its value in soothing the psyche which cannot bear to accept the atrocities it witnesses, even mediated through the screen. But inhumanity has long since shown itself to be shockingly common, mundane, prosaically human. A perpetrator may then 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. Humanity doesn’t exempt one from accountability. The action would have been morally justified taken 11 years ago during Protective Edge, around the time I personally became acutely aware of our brutal conduct in Palestine. But I think to most Americans such an action would have been illegible, would seem insane. I am glad that today at least there are many Americans for which the action will be highly legible and, in some funny way, the only sane thing to do.

I love you Mom, Dad, baby sis, the rest of my familia, including you, O*****

Free Palestine

-Elias Rodriguez