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.
Genuinely awful for these two and their families, but the same can be said for ~53,000 dead Palestinians and the rest who are actively starving to death in a Israeli-made famine while aid rots onboard trucks across the border. Both acts are deliberate, and both were avoidable.
And while they were both working for the current extremists in power atm via the diplomatic service, they were a lot more moderate too:
Lischinsky “I’m an ardent believer in the vision that was outlined in the Abraham Accords and believe that expanding the circle of peace with our Arab neighbours and pursuing regional cooperation is in the best interest of the state of Israel and the Middle East as a whole. To this end, I advocate for interfaith dialogue and intercultural understanding.”
Milgrim organised visits and missions to Israel. She was also a volunteer at Tech2Peace, an advocacy group training young Palestinians and Israelis and promoting dialogue between them.
Tech2Peace said Milgrim was an active volunteer who “brought people together with empathy and purpose”.
I mean also…
“In his final post on social media hours before the attack, Lischinsky had shared a post from the Israeli ambassador, Amir Weissbrod, accusing UN officials of engaging in “blood libel” over claims that 14,000 children faced starvation in Gaza.”
Not saying they deserved any violence, but even once moderate Israelis have been driven pretty far right in the last couple years. Accusations of blood libel while the state is actively starving children doesn’t exactly seem to be promoting any positive dialogue.
Yeeeesh, hadn’t seen that reporting…
It’s unbelievably disappointing to see over and over again that Israelis are broadly okay with the death and destruction in Gaza, when a little over a generation ago they were on the cusp of a genuine two-state solution. And now it’s an ethnostate that practices apartheid, and it’s okay because “Bibi keeps us safe”. Almost as if nothing else matters.
It was always an Apartheid state - their own laws from the very start separate Israeli Citizenship from Israeli Nationality, with only Jews being allowed to have the last (in addition to the former) which has additional rights over mere Citizenship - and it had a Genocide already pretty near the time of its formation called the Nakba, only that was “just” displacement and a few murders rather than mass murdering hundreds of thousands of people.
It’s just that for a while their Propaganda was very successful and they might have even be genuinelly considering merelly not taking over the rest of Palestine as giving back that which they had already stolen was never on the table, nor was the return of the Palestinians or a genuinelly equal society for both Jews and Non-Jews.
Israel was always shit since it’s formation (which by the way involved them commiting terrorist attacks), it’s just that now they’ve gone extreme Genocidal on their way to commiting a XXI Century version of the Holocaust.
The context is important. A UN official said 14,000 children would die in 48 hours. As it turns out that was a grossly exaggerated claim.
a report from the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) which stated 14,100 severe cases of acute malnutrition are expected to occur among children aged six to 59 months between April 2025 and March 2026.
The IPC report says this could take place over the course of about a year - not 48 hours
Weissbrod called that out.
Well, as long as 14,000 children die of starvation over a longer time period…
I don’t think I would really consider it a grossly exaggerated claim, more of just a misinterpretation of a report.
“For now let me just say that we know for a fact that there are babies who are in urgent life-saving need of these supplements that need to come in because their mothers are unable to feed themselves.”
“And if they do not get those, they will be in mortal danger,” he said.
I definitely wouldn’t claim that it was a claim based on antisemitism as Weissbrod is accusing. It’s a fact that the Israeli state is starving tens of thousands of people for no justifiable reason. I don’t think a misinterpretation of the timeline is really enough to claim someone is participating in blood libel.
here we go again
So, a jewseum?
So, there’s a lot of things happening in Gaza other than what’s on the nose. Like starvation can cause neurological issues in the brain, in the body. It can even make your hair turn gray. All the stress. During World War I, soldiers came back with a thing called shell shock, and they would just constantly shake all the time. The kids in Gaza are showing symptoms of shell shock. So I could care less about two people getting killed.
The genocide of the Tigray had three times the deaths and only happened two years ago.
The Rwandan genocide and Hutu genocide during the Congo war killed hundreds of thousands in the 1990s.
This is only the most recent events that came to mind.
Oh, well, that makes the genocide OK.
You’re badly underestimating the scale of some of the post WWII genocides. The Khemer Rouge potentially killed more people than the total population of Gaza for example…
It’s rather interesting that I haven’t seen anyone mention that this guy who was shot was almost certainly a spy.
what do you think it means ?
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What I found pretty unsettling when I watched some excerpts from the news was the stark contrast in how the events are portrayed depending on who’s getting murdered. Let me explain:
The media and officials insisted on humanizing the victim; notably mentioning the crushed family life he was building for himself (“He bought the ring and was engaged”).
The problem is that the Palestinian children and families getting crushed in a genocide don’t have the privilege to be treated as human, to be cared about or their dreams and aspiration considered. They are at best unfortunate victims and most of the time walking flesh that needs to be exterminated.
I find that so frustrating how the right or even the mainstream always portray themselves as the superior moral culture while enabling the worse mass extermination to happen, documented before them.
EDIT: they even talked about a “heinous” crime which felt so tone-deaf and laughable.
💯 the default assumption of the media is that these Israelis are relatable humans and this is a tragedy… But what is happening in Gaza is somehow morally ambiguous.
Maybe one could argue the sheer scale of the Gaza genocide makes it difficult for the media to humanize them, so they get reduced to just a number of fatalities with lots of digits. But if the media default was that the Palestinian lives had value they would look through the lives lost like those in 9-11 and tell their stories.
Philosophy Tube has a great video about this topic https://youtu.be/rLfzO7Sbdc4. At 27:20 she starts talking about who’s life is worth grieving and who’s is not, and how this is a government level topic. It hits the nail on the head about the differences in reporting two different people’s deaths can have. At 33:45 they specifically talk about the 2008 Gaza war.
People getting killed in a warzone is different than political murders.
It’s not about who, it’s about context.
News reporting is also about new and unexpected events.
Consider this: People being killed in Sudan or Myanmar gets no attention compared to Gaza.
lol. Describes Gaza as “people getting killed in a warzone”, then has the lack of self-awareness to preach about context.
You sound like an Israeli shill, mate. Dumbing down the language and trying to change the focus to another atrocity.
Gaza isn’t “people getting killed in a warzone”, it’s civilians and children getting bombed in their beds/hospitals/schools/refugee camps and currently being starved to death in the dark by an oppressive fascist regime.
Just as the tide of public opinion was turning against Israel. That guy probably got a few hundred thousand Palestinians killed.
Rodriguez
I don’t think the shooter was Palestinian.
Do you suppose that matters?
You don’t think this would be different if an Arab or a Muslim (not mutually exclusive) did this?
If he yells “free Palestine” while doing it, that means he’s associating himself with others who support a free Palestine. And that means other people won’t want to associate themselves with them.
I feel like this is very obvious but people seem unwilling to acknowledge it. Because they view this guy as on their side. But he’s on the side of narcissists, not people who are effective at saving Palestinian lives. He didn’t think at all about whether this will save or cost Palestinian lives.
I feel like the free Palestine movement in particular needs to understand this: if you want to save Palestinian lives, you need to convince people. And you don’t convince people by shooting at them, or by justifying people who shoot at them. Think about it: do you see Coke murdering Pepsi supporters as part of a marketing campaign? No. Because the people they hire for marketing are paid a lot of money to actually succeed. Instead they associate coke with positive things, by bringing in celebrities, and generally portraying coke drinkers as cool people.
You should try being more like coke. Sorry if this sounds belittling, but I feel like it needs to be said because free Palestine people seem to think the best strategy is to piss off the people you’re trying to convince. And that has never worked once in the history of mankind.
Heartbreaking to see, but sadly it was only a matter of time until something like this happened. This war on Gaza is growing increasingly unpopular and people feel powerless to stop the ongoing genocide being conducted by Israel. I don’t support attacks against random civilians but I’m not surprised somebody saw an opportunity to make a statement. These deaths are on Netanyahu along with the tens-of-thousands of Palestinians killed since the war started.
These deaths are also on the people who demand to globalize the intifada.
not really random, this guy seems on par with the Israelis watching Gaza bombings from a cliff while eating popcorn. He also seems to have a full hard on for Trump, so for him all kinds of humanitarian crimes are probably ok as long as the president supports Israel State’s genocide. So not really random, perhaps more on the same level as Luigi.
It doesn’t look like this was an “attack on random civilians.” Out of all the people they could have killed, they killed people who work for the Israeli Embassy. They worked for the government doing the genocide.
Now did they support it? Who knows, but this shooter was not shooting up a movie theater. It was no more random than the United Healthcare CEO.
Israel is now the primary driver of antisemitism throughout the world.
I mean, it’s not like antisemitism needed help, but here we are.
I don’t blame Jews for what’s happening, I blame Israel. Yes, there are many Jews that support what’s happening, but that’s no different from any other body of people.
Claiming what Israel is doing right now reflects on all Jews is the same as blaming trump on all Americans.
It didn’t need help being proudly adopted by uneducated bigots who believed in space lasers, but it was largely missing the intellectual generally accepting crowd. It sure got 'em now.
Antisemites have always blamed the Jews for Antisemitism.
They said Israel. You said Jews. You’re aware those are separate entities, yes? Or are you playing pedantic word games on purpose…?
Technically the genocide is antisemitic, because Palestinians are semitic.
Antisemitism only has ever meant Jew hatred. Semitic is otherwise a linguistic term.
This argument is asinine.
Looking into this, it turns out all the dictionaries indeed seem to say it’s jew specific, which I think is a failing of the English language, because Jews are a drop in the bucket for semitic populations.
I’ll concede your point, despite the word structure literally implying something bigger.
Edit added references
The term Antisemitism was invented in German, so no inherent limitation of English. Anti comes from Ancient Greek in the first place, so no this isn’t a limitation of English.
There are many terms and words used, which aren’t simply the sum of its parts.
A hammer has nothing to do with ham for example.
I’m referring to the fact that “anti” and “semitism” are existing complete words. Every other example of a word given the “anti” prefix that i can think of is very clearly meaning, the opposite or against the existing definition of the word.
Antidisestablishmentarianism Antisocial Anticlimactic Antiacidemic Antibacterial Antifreeze Antihero Antihistamine
Hammer in your comment is a poor example, because hammer is its own word, despite the first three letters happening to be an existing other word. Antisemitism is clearly anti and semitism.
What’s annoying, is since this term was coined (as you said, in germany), it was purely a dog whistle for jew hatred.
Wikipedia:
The compound word antisemitismus was first used in print in Germany in 1879[19] as a “scientific-sounding term” for Judenhass (lit. ‘Jew-hatred’),[20] and it has since been used to refer to anti-Jewish sentiment alone.[21][22][23] Due to the root word Semite, the term is sometimes subject to an etymological fallacy whereby it is incorrectly assumed to apply to racist hatred directed at “Semitic people”, in spite of this being an obsolete racial concept.[23]
We need to let language do its thing, and adjust the meaning of this word to mean what it appears to mean, not some wink wink nudge nudge version you have to know ahead of time.
Antiair weapons don’t fight or kill the air.
Antisemitism was introduced as a more polite and scientific sounding euphemism for anti-Judaism. It’s just like racists today calling themselves race realists.
“Any attack against a Zionist is antisemitic”
So that means Isreal is a ethnostate?
It was a networking event for Jewish people at a Jewish museum.
And they were two Zionists.
A genocidal apartheid ethno state.
You forgot colonial
I left out a lot of choice words because the powers that be on most sites take offense when you call a spade a spade, or when you compare said spade to spades that plagued the world during the 1930’s and 40’s.
Well, fuck. This moron didn’t help the Palestinians one bit. Just reinforces propaganda about opposition to the genocide being antisemitic.
I think only those who already/still support Israel will see it that way.
Everyone else is sick of their shit and isn’t going to buy the “antisemitic” line because it’s been milked dry. We are well past the point where them doubling-down on calling everything “antisemitic” is going to sway any new people.
Shooting Jews at an event for Jews in a Jewish museum looks kind of antisemitic.
Ya only because idiots will read it that way.
Embassy staff are basically political targets, not ethnic ones, but people will read it that way because anything against Israelis is being anti-jew not anti-israel.
The press will highlight the Jewish Museum part and not the embassy staff part.
Sure but Israel can kill Palestine’s and aid workers from other western countries and nobody cares.
It’s not that no one cares, it’s that people who do care don’t want to be associated with others who care like this guy.
Planned ploy
A woman who attended the event, Katie Kalisher, told CBS News that she encountered the alleged shooter right after hearing gunfire.
“Then this man comes in … but he was covered in rain and just looking really distressed and scared,” Kalisher told “CBS Mornings.” “We were comforting him because we thought that he was just somebody out in the street looking for a safe place to stay because he heard some gunshots.”
She said she talked to him to try to help him relax. “I asked him, ‘So, do you like the museum?’ And he’s kind of playing dumb with me,” she said about the interaction. “He goes, ‘Oh, what kind of museum is this?’ I told him, ‘It’s a Jewish museum.’ He asked, ‘Do you think that’s why they did this attack’ … referring to the rounds that we heard.”
She said she told him she didn’t think so and asked if he was OK. Then, she said, “He reaches into his bag and pulls out a keffiyeh and says, ‘I did it. I did it for Gaza.’ And, just starts shouting, ‘Free Palestine.’”
Lol
