DC shooting: Elias Rodriguez's alleged chilling manifesto reveals possible motive, mentions Aaron Bushnell

The table of contents of an alleged pronunciamento of Capital Jewish Museum shooter Elias Rodriguez has been revealed after he was accused of fatally shooting two Israeli Embassy staff members in Washington, D.C. On May 21. The details of the manifesto have been released by Ken Klippenstein, an independent journalist who covers national security and US politics. However, these have not been officially confirmed or reported.

Klippenstein wrote on his website that he has obtained a copy of the alleged manifesto and believes it is authentic due to various reasons, “including the fact that it is signed by Rodriguez and timestamped well before he was named by law enforcement or any media.”

In the alleged manifesto, Rodriguez accused Israel of committing “atrocities” against Palestine. “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,” he wrote, adding, “We who let this happen will never deserve the Palestinians' forgiveness.”

Rodriguez then went on to talk about an “armed action,” claiming it 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,” he wrote.

Rodriguez also mentioned Aaron Bushnell, saying he and others “sacrificed themselves in the hopes of stopping the massacre” and that their “sacrifices were not made in vain.” Bushnell, an US Air Force member, set himself on fire outside the Israeli Embassy in Washington, DC, last year, and later succumbed to his injuries. He shouted “free Palestine” while setting himself ablaze, just as Rodriguez reportedly did after carrying out the shooting.

“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,” Rodriguez wrote.

“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,” he added, concluding by writing, “I love you Mom, Dad, baby sis, the rest of my familia, including you, O*****”. 

Rodriguez was taken into custody after the attack. The victims have been identified as Sarah Milgrim and Yaron Lischinsky.

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