The murderer Elias Rodriguez laid out the reasons for the terror attack on X, which if mimicked will launch in a new era of radical leftist activists mimicking the Islamists and starting to also wage terror attacks against Jewish targets.
By Rachel Avraham
On the evening of May 21, 2025, shortly after 9:00 pm, Elias Rodriguez, 30, of Chicago, Illinois, murdered two Israeli embassy staff members as they were leaving an American Jewish Committee Young Diplomats event at the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington DC. As he was taken into custody, Rodriguez shouted, “Free, free Palestine.” Ever since then, the American Jewish community has been living in grave fear.
My cousin, Ben Goodman, works for the American Jewish Committee and was at the very event where this horrendous terror attack took place. He also is acquainted with Sarah Milgrim, one of the two Israeli Embassy staffers who was murdered in that horrendous Washington, DC terror attack. According to his mother, Emily Goodman, since the night of the terror attack, he is visibly shaken, always trying to reassure himself via statistics of the chances that he has of surviving in case a terrorist tries to murder people at his work place.
Ben is not the only one shaken by this particular terror attack. Soon after this terror attack, I had a nightmare that I was back in Washington, DC, the city where I was born, and was walking down the street near the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, which I visited five times when I lived there, when suddenly a terrorist appeared and started to shoot people randomly in the street. I tried to run, but since I am not that physically fit, I could not run fast enough and lo and behold, there was a big boom. It was at that moment I woke up and realized it was just a dream.
The terror attack in Washington, DC that targeted the two Israeli Embassy staffers outside of the Capitol Jewish Museum really spooked me out, personally, as well. In college, I used to attend parties at the Israeli Embassy in Washington, DC. I had a working relationship with this embassy, even when I was in high school, when the Israeli Embassy in Washington, DC sent over a diplomat to speak about the Jewish state at our high school Near East Club. I remember dining with this diplomat afterwards at a falafel joint, where she encouraged me at age 16 to keep studying and maintain my connection with Israel. She helped to encourage me to be the person that I am today. And now, two workers at this very same embassy were brutally murdered.
However, the Israeli Embassy in Washington, DC was not the only target for Rodriguez. He murdered the two staffers at the Israeli Embassy in front of the Capitol Jewish Museum, which housed an exhibit on the artwork of Avy Ashery, a famous Jewish American artist who was a friend of my family. Personally, I own two original paintings of Ashery. One Ashery gave me as a wedding gift and has a man and wife declaring in Hebrew “I am my beloved and my beloved is mine.” The other painting of Ashery declares in Hebrew “justice, justice, you shall pursue,” complete with a gavel. This painting exists both in my kitchen and another original copy of the same painting was placed in the Capitol Jewish Museum in Washington, DC as part of their Avy Ashery exhibit. I have fond memories meeting Ashery as a child. He was a wonderful man, full of life, joy and laughter. And now, Rodriguez attacked the very museum that housed his paintings. I am simply heart-broken. And I find myself asking, is this the new reality that American Jews must contend with?
According to the Anti-Defamation League, an online manifesto posted on X lays out the reasons for the terror attack, which if mimicked will launch in a new era of radical leftist activists mimicking the Islamists and starting to also wage terror attacks against Jewish targets. Shared under the heading “Escalate For Gaza, Bring The War Home,” Rodriguez’s manifesto stated that non-violent protests against Israel’s actions in Gaza have been insufficient and that the “perpetrators and abettors” of genocide have “forfeited their humanity.” According to the Anti-Defamation League, the author noted that “nonviolent protest in the opening weeks of the genocide seemed to signal some sort of turning point…But thus far the rhetoric has not amounted to much.” It then went on to praise Aaron Bushnell, the 25-year-old active-duty United States Airman who died after setting himself on fire outside the Israeli Embassy in Washington, D.C., on February 25, 2024.
According to the Anti-Defamation League, the manifesto concluded with a section about “the morality of armed demonstration,” in which the author commented that “the action would have been morally justified taken 11 years ago during Protective Edge [Israel’s name for its military operation in the 2014 Gaza war], around the time I personally became acutely aware of our brutal conduct in Palestine,” but acknowledged that such an action would have seemed “illegible” or “insane” to “most Americans” at the time. He concluded that now, in 2025, armed action seems like “the only sane thing to do.” The author signed off with: “Free Palestine, Elias Rodriguez.”
The Anti-Defamation League reported that the Rodriguez manifesto did not occur in a vacuum: “Jewish institutions, including synagogues, community centers and museums, have been the targets of 1,702 antisemitic incidents in 2024, according to ADL’s annual Audit of Antisemitic Incidents in the U.S. Of those incidents, 631 were related to Israel, including 86 which occurred at anti-Israel rallies in the vicinity of those institutions. This is the eighth terrorist plot or attack targeting Jews, Zionists, or Jewish institutions since July 2024.” Furthermore, increasingly, non-Muslims have sought to wage terror attacks against Jewish targets over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Last April on Passover evening, Cody Balmer, another non-Muslim American, broke into Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro’s residence in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, set multiple fires, then called 911 and referred to Shapiro as a “monster” and blamed him for Palestinian deaths in the Gaza war. Last December, the FBI arrested Forrest Pemberton of Gainesville, Florida, another non-Muslim American, and subsequently charged him in a plot to travel to the south Florida offices of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), a pro-Israel advocacy group, with the intent of harming people there, possibly in a suicide attack. According to JNS, he told law enforcement that he aimed to target the pro-Israel group due to its “political influence,” and that he didn’t like the “status quo” and wanted to “see if I could make a change.”
According to the Anti-Defamation League, “Rodriguez was previously affiliated with two prominent anti-Israel organizations, ANSWER Coalition and the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL), and participated in multiple ANSWER and PSL protests in Chicago from late 2017 through early 2018.” While the Party for Socialism and Liberation tried to distance itself from the DC terror attack, there are other anti-Israel groups in America who have glorified what Rodriguez did.
Unity of Fields (formerly Palestine Action U.S.), a far-left anti-Zionist “direct action network” that supports the targeting of “Zionist” individuals and institutions, published a zine of Rodriguez’s alleged manifesto — emphasizing his use of the “Escalate For Gaza, Bring The War Home” language, alongside an image of a gun — and referred to him as a “political prisoner,” as federal authorities investigate the attack.
The Bronx Anti-War Coalition, a radical New York-based anti-Israel group, wrote on X: “What Elias Rodriguez did is the highest expression of anti-Zionism.” In a similar post to its Telegram channel, the group added: “We need more Elias Rodriguez in the world.” According to the Anti-Defamation League, Resistance News Network (RNN) and Palestine News Network (PNN), extreme anti-Zionist groups that also post content praising anti-Israel terror and violence, also expressed support for the shooting. In the popular RNN Telegram channel, hundreds of people reacted with celebratory emojis to the post announcing the attack.
This makes one ponder, does the Rodriguez manifesto threaten the future of American Jewry? After all, if the radical left follows in his footsteps, what have been up till now massive anti-Israel protests in city streets and on college campuses will turn into a full fledge series of terror attacks, resulting in the murder of not just two staffers at the Israeli Embassy but many more innocent Jewish people.
This makes one ponder; will non-Muslim radical leftist activists increasingly join together with Islamists in targeting Jewish and Israeli targets in the United States of America? Already, more than one non-Muslim American has targeted the American Jewish community. Has this now become a trend? Given this, is it safe for American Jews to host conferences, visit Jewish museums and go to synagogues and Jewish Community Centers within the United States of America? And without being able to safely express one’s identity, what kind of future does American Jewry have? There are no easy answers for these questions.
Photo from: KENS 5: Your San Antonio News Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=52Mvzrl7nXY
