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NYT Assumed Antisemitism in DC Embassy Attack Ari Paul ([link removed])


Ken Klippenstein: The Israel Embassy Shooter Manifesto

Ken Klippenstein (Substack, 5/22/25 ([link removed]) ) published a statement, ostensibly from embassy shooting suspect Elias Rodriguez, "citing the war in Gaza as its central grievance and framing the killings as an act of political protest."

Elias Rodriguez is the suspect in the murder of two Israeli embassy workers in Washington, DC, outside a diplomatic reception at the Capital Jewish Museum. Journalist Ken Klippenstein (Substack, 5/22/25 ([link removed]) ) has posted what he believes to be an authentic manifesto of the alleged shooter, a story that was subsequently reported on in the Jewish and Israeli press (Forward, 5/22/25 ([link removed]) ; Israel Hayom, 5/22/25 ([link removed]) ; Jewish Chronicle, 5/22/25 ([link removed]) ). If the document is authentic, it appears the alleged gunman was violently opposed to the bloodbath in Gaza and the actions of the Israeli government.

Invoking the Palestinian death toll ([link removed]) , the statement said, “The impunity that representatives of our government feel at abetting this slaughter should be revealed as an illusion.” It referenced the 1964 attempt on the life ([link removed]) of Robert McNamara, Defense secretary in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, saying McNamara's attacker was “incensed at the same impunity and arrogance he saw in that butcher of Vietnam.”

Rodriguez (AP, 5/22/25 ([link removed]) ) reportedly told police, “I did it for Palestine, I did it for Gaza.”


** 'Part of global surge'
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Details are still emerging about how and why the shooter chose these two people at this particular event. The Washington Post (5/25/25 ([link removed]) ) noted that the victims were both employees of the Israeli Embassy who had attended the Young Diplomats Reception, an annual event hosted by the American Jewish Committee, a Zionist ([link removed]) organization. There is nothing in the public record that suggests Rodriguez harbored antisemitic sentiments or targeted his victims for being Jews. Rodriguez' reported statements suggest that the assassinations were motivated by opposition to the Israeli invasion of Gaza. The words “Jew” or “Jewish” do not appear in his purported manifesto.

The Jewish Telegraphic Agency (5/22/25 ([link removed]) ) reported that Rodriguez’ Chicago apartment had many political signs, including one that said “‘Tikkun Olam means FREE PALESTINE.’” The wire explained, “Tikkun olam is a Hebrew phrase meaning ‘repair the world’ that has come to reflect a shorthand for social justice.” It's a phrase commonly used by progressive Jews, and dubious decor for an antisemite. (FAIR readers might remember the progressive Jewish magazine Tikkun, which recently closed—Forward, 4/15/24 ([link removed]) ).
NYT: Slaying Outside D.C. Jewish Museum Is Part of Global Surge in Antisemitism

The New York Times (5/22/25 ([link removed]) ) framed the embassy murders as "an extreme example of what law enforcement officials and others call a global surge in antisemitic incidents that emerged after Hamas terrorists killed more than 1,200 people and seized 250 hostages on October 7, 2023."

But a New York Times report (5/22/25 ([link removed]) ) asserted definitively that Rodriguez' violent action was antisemitic and must be understood in the context of global anti-Jewish hate. “Slaying Outside DC Jewish Museum Is Part of Global Surge in Antisemitism,” announced the headline over the piece by White House correspondent Michael Shear ([link removed]) . Its first paragraph implicitly attributed rising antisemitism to the Hamas attack of October 7, describing "a global surge in antisemitic incidents that emerged after Hamas terrorists killed more than 1,200 people and seized 250 hostages on October 7, 2023."

The Times quoted a number of politicians and activists who labeled the shooting antisemitic. Shear wrote, for instance:

The shooting prompted fresh outcries from political leaders around the world, including President Trump and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, both of whom expressed outrage at what they called evidence of antisemitic hatred. Mr. Trump wrote on his social media platform that “these horrible DC killings, based obviously on antisemitism, must end, NOW!”

Another key passage pinned rising antisemitism in the United States on the pro-Palestinian movement:

In the United States, the war and the pro-Palestinian movement have amped up tensions and fears about antisemitism. The shooting at the museum is the type of development that many Jews, as well as some Jewish scholars and activists, have been worried about and warning about. They argue that the explosion of antisemitic language has already led to violent personal attacks.

“You can’t draw a direct line from the campus to the gun,” said David Wolpe, who’s the emeritus rabbi of Sinai Temple in Los Angeles and who was a visiting scholar at Harvard Divinity School as campus protests broke out there last year.

“But the campuses normalized hate and anathematized Jews,” Rabbi Wolpe said. “Against that backdrop, violence is as unsurprising as it is appalling. After all, ‘globalize the intifada’ looks a lot like this.”


** 'Corrosive to America'
------------------------------------------------------------
NY Post: DC antisemitic terror killings channel spirit of the campus protesters

The New York Post (5/22/25 ([link removed]) ) said the embassy shooting was "antisemitic terrorism, as is nearly all 'anti-Zionist' action."

None of these statements were ever countered or questioned in the piece, which more or less presented their viewpoint as unchallenged fact. While the Times prolifically cited those quick to conflate antisemitism and anti-Zionism, it failed to acknowledge that a great many American Jews ([link removed]) have been protesting against the Israeli government’s attacks on civilians in Gaza, or to cite scholarship like that of Yael Feinberg, who has found ([link removed]) that "there is no more important factor in explaining variation in antisemitic hate crimes in this country than Israel being engaged in a particularly violent military operation."

This Times news story fits neatly into the message of the right’s editorials on the shooting. The Wall Street Journal editorial board (5/22/25 ([link removed]) ) said that, in light of the shooting,

anti-Zionism, including enthusiasm for the total destruction of Israel and efforts to ostracize its domestic supporters, is corrosive to America and is stirring up old dangers for Jews.

Calling the killings “antisemitic terrorism,” the New York Post editorial board (5/22/25 ([link removed]) ) said, “Rodriguez did just what all those college protesters have been demanding: ‘Globalize the intifada.’”

The Times jumped in on this Murdoch media rhetoric in a news article by Sharon Otterman (5/23/25 ([link removed]) ), saying the killings

cast a harsh spotlight on the pro-Palestinian movement in the United States and the impact even peaceful protests might be having on attitudes against people connected to Israel.

It included this nugget:

Oren Segal, senior vice president of counter-extremism and intelligence at the Anti-Defamation League, said that while attending a rally or being a member of pro-Palestinian groups does not predict violence, the broader ecosystem being created, particularly online, by groups strongly opposed to Israel, “created an environment that made the tragedy last night more likely.”


** Guilt by association
------------------------------------------------------------
NYT: The Group Behind Project 2025 Has a Plan to Crush the Pro-Palestinian Movement

The New York Times (5/18/25 ([link removed]) ) described the Heritage Foundation's Project Esther as an effort at "branding a broad range of critics of Israel as 'effectively a terrorist support network,' so that they could be deported, defunded, sued, fired, expelled, ostracized and otherwise excluded from what it considered 'open society.'” (It dubiously calls this "an ambitious plan to fight antisemitism.")

The Times' Shear joined the right-wing Post and Journal in framing the attack as an act of antisemitism, as well as building a “guilt by association” narrative, implicating peaceful pro-Palestinian protesters rather than acknowledging any responsibility on the part of Israel's war and its US backers. They suggest that, to stem antisemitism and acts of political violence against Israel, the logical solution is not to end the genocide, but to suppress and punish pro-Palestinian protest—something that the Trump administration will almost certainly use the embassy worker killings to do even more harshly (Jewish Currents, 5/23/25 ([link removed]) ).

His reporting might have been better informed if he had read the piece by his Times colleague Katie J.M. Baker (New York Times, 5/18/25 ([link removed]) ) about the Heritage Foundation’s agenda to destroy pro-Palestine activism. Baker wrote of Heritage's "Project Esther ([link removed]) ":

It singled out anti-Zionist groups that had organized pro-Palestinian protests, such as Jewish Voice for Peace ([link removed]) and Students for Justice ([link removed]) in Palestine, but the intended targets stretched much further. In pitch materials for potential donors, Heritage presented an illustration of a pyramid topped by “progressive ‘elites’ leading the way,” which included Jewish billionaires ([link removed]) such as the philanthropist George Soros and Gov. JB Pritzker of Illinois.

Times columnist Michelle Goldberg (5/19/25 ([link removed]) ) followed up to note that Project Esther targets “the majority of Jewish House Democrats who declined to censure their colleague Rashida Tlaib for anti-Israel language.” It “describes the Jewish congresswoman Jan Schakowsky as part of a ‘Hamas caucus’ in Congress, one that’s also supported by the Jewish senator Bernie Sanders.” Goldberg observed that “there’s something off about Project Esther’s definition of antisemitism,” because it so often “tags Jews as perpetrators.”


** Antisemitic Zionists
------------------------------------------------------------
NPR: Multiple Trump White House officials have ties to antisemitic extremists

Jewish Council for Public Affairs CEO Amy Spitalnick told NPR (5/14/25 ([link removed]) ): "If the administration were serious about countering antisemitism, first and foremost they wouldn't be appointing people with antisemitic and other extremist ties to senior roles within the administration."

These passages in the Times allude to a point pro-Palestine advocates have made for a long time, which is that anti-Zionism not only isn’t antisemitism (many Jews are not Zionists, just as many Zionists are not Jews), but that a large part of the right-wing Zionist movement is inherently antisemitic. It's often rooted in Christian apocalyptic fantasies in which Israel’s creation brings about the End Times.

The book ([link removed]) One Palestine, Complete, by Israeli historian and journalist Tom Segev makes the case that under British rule in Palestine, between World War I and the founding of the Jewish state in 1948, the imperialists sided with Zionist forces against the Arabs not despite their Christian antisemitism, but because of it. In a fiery assessment of the recently deceased Jerry Falwell, journalist Christopher Hitchens told CNN’s Anderson Cooper (Anderson Cooper 360°, 5/15/07 ([link removed]) ) that the minister spent his life “fawning on the worst elements in Israel, with his other hand pumping antisemitic innuendos into American politics,” along with other right-wing evangelists like Pat Robertson and Billy Graham. The white nationalist Richard Spencer admitted that he looked to Israel as a model of the white, gentile Xanadu he desired (Haaretz, 10/19/17
([link removed]) ).

Here at FAIR (5/1/05 ([link removed]) , 6/6/18 ([link removed]) , 11/6/23 ([link removed]) , 8/9/24 ([link removed]) , 2/19/25 ([link removed]) ), we grow tired of having to point out that media, in the allegiance to the Israeli government narrative over Palestinian voices, use the insult of “antisemitism” to discredit criticism of Israel. Rodriguez’ alleged actions, of course, are not criticism but violence—murder is murder. But the Times’ evidence-free assertion that this attack was antisemitic adds to the false narrative that support for Palestine is inherently tied to bigotry against Jews.

In fact, news coverage of Jew-hatred should focus on the growing power of the racist right. The worst recent antisemitic incident in the United States was the Tree of Life synagogue shooting in Pittsburgh (Axios, 6/16/23 ([link removed]) ), carried out by a shooter obsessed with right-wing media tropes about Jews and immigration (FAIR.org, 10/30/18 ([link removed]) ).

That case was often linked to Dylann Roof, the Charleston church killer. While Roof targeted Black Christians, his manifesto “railed against Jews, Hispanics, African-Americans, gays and Muslims”; Roof said that Adolf Hitler would someday "be inducted as a saint” (New York Times, 1/5/17 ([link removed]) ). In short, anti-Jewish vigilantes put antisemitic ideas in their manifestos, which it appears Rodriguez didn’t do.

By contrast, these chilling ideas are widespread on the right. The QAnon movement, a proximate cohort to MAGA Trumpism, is enmeshed with antisemitic conspiracism (Guardian, 8/25/20 ([link removed]) ; Just Security, 9/9/20 ([link removed]) ; Newsweek, 6/28/21 ([link removed]) ). NPR (5/14/25 ([link removed]) ) reported that its investigation “identified three Trump officials with close ties to antisemitic extremists, including a man described by federal prosecutors as a ‘Nazi sympathizer,’ and a prominent Holocaust denier.” Though the Jewish Democratic Council of America (5/21/25
([link removed]) ) lists the numerous antisemitic offenses of the Trump administration, that doesn’t seem to steer the coverage of the politics of antisemitism in the Times the way ADL's spurious equation ([link removed]) of pro-Palestinian with anti-Jewish does.


** 'A much wider smear campaign'
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Guardian: Anti-Muslim hate hits new high in US: Advocacy group

Guardian (10/3/24 ([link removed]) ): "Among the most violent incidents of the last year were the fatal Chicago stabbing of six-year-old Wadea al-Fayoume ([link removed]) and a Vermont shooting ([link removed]) of three Palestinian college students that left one of them, 21-year-old Hisham Awartani, paralyzed."

It’s worth mentioning that anti-Muslim and anti-Arab sentiment has also increased since the October 7 attacks of 2023 (NBC News, 4/13/24 ([link removed]) ; Guardian, 10/3/24 ([link removed]) ; Al Jazeera, 3/11/25 ([link removed]) ). An Illinois man was convicted earlier this year of “fatally stabbing a Palestinian-American child in 2023 and severely wounding his mother,” who reported him saying, “You, as a Muslim, must die” (BBC, 2/28/25 ([link removed]) ). ABC affiliate WLS (5/24/25 ([link removed]) ) reported that in the window of Rodriguez’ home in Chicago, law enforcement found a photo of Wadee Alfayoumi, the
6-year-old victim in this crime.

In New York City, a pro-Israel mob terrorized a random woman mistaken for a pro-ceasefire activist; in addition to hurling rape threats, the crowd was heard chanting “death to Arabs” (PBS, 4/28/25 ([link removed]) ; Battleground, 5/2/25 ([link removed]) ). No arrests have been made at this time (Hell Gate, 5/23/25 ([link removed]) ).

Benjamin Balthaser ([link removed]) , an associate professor of English at Indiana University/South Bend who writes ([link removed]) widely on Jewish subjects, told FAIR:

Over the past year and a half, we have seen an intensification of claims that all criticism and protest against Israel's ongoing war crimes in Gaza are just masked antisemitism, culminating with the deportation of students, the defunding of major universities, and the banning of lawful student organizations. The Heritage Foundation, as part of its “Project 2025,” has gone further, to claim that Palestine solidarity organizations such as Jewish Voice for Peace are directly connected to armed militant organizations such as Hamas, despite JVP's commitment to nonviolence and a peaceful solution to the now nearly century-long conflict between Israel and Palestine.

Equating a lone gunman with campus protest not only lacks evidence, it is part of a much wider smear campaign with the sole intent to criminalize legitimate, legal protest for peace and human rights. It not only runs afoul of cherished American principles of the First Amendment, it also cheapens and hollows out any attempt to hold antisemites, such as in Trump’s cabinet, accountable.

What happened in DC was alarming news that needed to be reported. But Shear’s piece, along with propaganda in the Murdoch press, added to the false Israeli line that all the people condemning genocide in Palestine are violent Jew-haters—or, in the case of Jewish activists for Palestine, self-hating Jews.
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Featured image: Embassy shooting suspect Elias Rodriguez, interviewed by Scripps News (1/23/18 ([link removed]) ) at an anti-Amazon protest in 2018.
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