The barbarism of the live-streamed genocide in Gaza has inflicted moral injury on a scale untold, says John Wight. This is how Aaron Bushnell’s self-immolation and this abhorrent double murder should be understood.
Police tape cordons off the Capital Jewish Museum after shooting deaths of two Israeli embassy employees following an event there on Wednesday night. (Sdkb /Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 4.0)
By John Wight
Special to Consortium News
Days after the deed, we can only but wonder what are the thoughts now occupying the mind of 30-year-old Elias Rodriguez of Chicago.
As he languishes in his jail cell contemplating life and fate, is he still satisfied that he did the right thing? Or has he awoken to the totality of what he now faces in consequence, up to and including a possible death sentence?
With the murder of Israeli embassy staff members Yaron Lischinksy and Sarah Milgrim as they emerged from an event at the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, what Rodriguez has done in truth is hand Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his supporters across America and beyond a most prized gift.
They are rinsing every last morsel out of this assassination/murder in a determined attempt to occupy a moral high ground in the midst of the ongoing holocaust in Gaza, one they most certainly have zero right to occupy and never have.
In the process of being detained at the scene, Rodriguez made a point of calling out “Free Palestine!” multiple times. In response, Netanyahu, who is wanted by the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity in Gaza, wasted no time in declaring that the chant “Free Palestine,” is today’s equivalent of “Heil Hitler.”
What has Elias Rodriguez really achieved with the shooting dead of these diplomats? This is the question. Apart from extinguishing their lives, and also by extension his own, it is an act of individual terror which does nothing — nothing — to advance the righteous cause of anti-Zionism and Palestinian liberation.
But then, was Rodriguez’s motivation really political at all? Or was his deed driven by a momentary lapse into insanity over an ongoing live-streamed genocide that the world has proved powerless to stop?
[Journalist Ken Klippenstein has published what he is calling Rodriguez’s “alleged manifesto,” as it has not yet been confirmed as authentic.]
The moral injury inflicted on all of us in consequence has been untold. How could it not when as in a never-ending procession, we have been showered with the images and footage of the unrelenting slaughter that has and continues to be visited on a poor indigenous people? Said slaughter and carnage has been undertaken in the name not of security or self-defence, as tirelessly claimed, but in the name of ethno-fascism. This is the fine point of it.
Reduced to Bearing Witness
Vigil on Feb. 26, 2024, organized by Code Pink at the Israeli embassy in Washington, D.C., the site of U. S. Airman Aaron Bushnell’s self sacrifice for peace the day before. (Elvert Barnes, Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0)
Throughout, we have been reduced to the role of bearing witness, which is where the self-immolation of Aaron Bushnell and now the double murder committed by Rodriguez should be understood. For both men, bearing witness gave way to a bursting desire to “do something” — to place themselves in the gears in a futile attempt to somehow stop this Israeli machine of mass murder from grinding on and on.
In the aftermath of Rodriguez’s act, much has been made of his link to the U.S. Marxist-Leninist Party of Socialism and Liberation (PSL). At this writing, you can guarantee that the F.B.I. and other branches of U.S. law enforcement will be poring over the organization’s website, emails and the speeches made by its leading lights at various conferences and demonstrations with anti-terrorism legislation in mind.
It can also likely look forward to having its offices raided in a chilling echo of the war that was waged against the Black Panther Party by U.S. law enforcement in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
In some quarters, the claim that Rodriguez’s killing of this couple belongs in the category of a false flag is being argued. Such claims should be summarily dismissed. The denial of agency to “regular people” and the assumption that “power” is behind every single event has sown dragon’s teeth when it comes to making sense of a world that to large extent has lost its mind.
The Shaping of Human Affairs
Gavrilo Princep outside the courthouse in Sarajevo in 1914. (Unknown photographer/Wikimedia Commons /Public Domain)
Throughout history, acts of individual terror and assassinations have shaped human affairs. In pre-Bolshevik Russia, the anarchist belief in the “propaganda of the deed” informed the assassination of leading members of the Russian ruling elite, up to and including Tsar Alexander II in 1881.
The most impactful of such deeds was, of course, committed by Serbian nationalist Gavrilo Princep in 1914. Princep’s assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, in Sarajevo led directly to the carnage of the First World War.
“The assumption that ‘power’ is behind every single event has sown dragon’s teeth when it comes to making sense of a world that to large extent has lost its mind.”
Back to today, political violence is as American as apple pie. It also underpinned the establishment of the State of Israel and has driven its existence since. Both states were literally born in violence, with the ensuing development of both shaped by same.
This should be borne in mind when we hear the siren voices of authority declaiming against Rodriguez’s act as being un-American and anti-Semitic. It was not. It was instead entirely in keeping with the DNA of a society in which the Second Amendment, and the right it confers on the people “to keep and bear arms,” is venerated and worshipped — and always has been. It is also entirely in keeping with that of Israel, where the gun has done far more than the ballot box to shape the country’s national identity.
Gaza is in ruins, thousands of Palestinian infants and children are dead — with thousands more maimed — and famine looms. Under such grim and barbaric circumstances in the year 2025 not 1425, some people may find it difficult to muster a surplus of sympathy over the deaths of two supporters of the state and government responsible.
But sympathy is not the issue here. The issue, or at least the primary issue, is the extent to which it has moved the dial forward or not when it comes to opposing this monstrous crime committed against a civilian population.
One thinker who seriously grappled with the issue of acts of individual terror in his time was Leon Trotsky. He wrote a long article on the subject in 1911 — “Why Marxists Oppose Individual Terrorism.”
Trotsky:
“In our eyes, individual terror is inadmissible precisely because it belittles the role of the masses in their own consciousness, reconciles them to their powerlessness, and turns their eyes and hopes towards a great avenger and liberator.”
Elias Rodriguez, this otherwise ordinary young man from Chicago living an otherwise ordinary existence, has with one act of murderous violence crashed his way into the consciousness of a world corrupted by genocide in our time. Believing that he was engaged in an act of exemplary solidarity with its countless victims, he produced a handgun and extinguished the lives of a young couple.
There comes a point, surely, when the hegemonic penchant for death has to be superseded by the penchant for life.
John Wight, author of Gaza Weeps, 2021, writes on politics, culture, sport and whatever else. Please consider making a donation in order to help fund his efforts. You can do so here. You can also grab a copy of his book, This Boxing Game: A Journey in Beautiful Brutality, from all major booksellers, and his novel Gaza: This Bleeding Land from same. Please consider taking out a subscription at his Medium site.
The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
You’re seriously bringing in the Second Amendment as a root cause of America’s violence? You’ve been drinking too much Democratic kool-aid. If you had pointed instead to capitalism and its lust for profit and power as the real trigger for violence in America, you would have been more convincing. Globalization is sowing the seeds of violence across the world, so think bigger than the Second Amendment. In any case, the Second is just a wedge issue for a corrupt party that has zero answers for problems they themselves create.
I see no reason to mourn these two people any more than two people killed in Gaza.
Did Gazans not have dreams? Plans to marry? The latter have even been featured in documentaries but the young Palestinian woman who had bought her wedding dress and was planning her wedding even against the odds of surviving to become a wife was indeed bombed to bloody bits before her wedding day.
Is news of her death splattered over the world’s newspapers?
No.
If Milgrim had to die to bring this point home, then so be it.
Have to disagree. Watching the video of his very gentle arrest & him yelling ‘free, free Palestine’ only after the cameras came on, the ground level photos of bystander draped in the Israeli flag, and the subsequent explosion in MSM benefiting the ZioNazis, all to distract from the shooting over the heads of 31 foreign diplomats in Israel the previous day, is just too suspicious for me. Has a modified Hannibal directive gone global? We’ll see what the days ahead bring. Needless to say, any info coming from Israeli sources must at this point be considered a lie until verified by known good sources. In any case, this will only be a minor speed bump and will soon go down the memory hole. I had no empathy left as that days allotment had already been used up on the hundreds killed in Gaza.
Aaron Bushnell and Elias Rodriquez both flung themselves upon the funeral pyre, exactly like the Buddhist monks did in protesting war and ethnic cleansing. One action in real life resonates more than 10,000 hopes and prayers.
Whether or not you believe in an armed response to Israel’s ongoing genocide, the fact that our so called democratic institutions and international institutions have failed to stop it, pretty much guarantees that sooner or later, someone was going to take matters into their own hands. If those with the power to do so refuse to stop the slaughter, expect the armed response to escalate. That is the danger of our officials refusing to do their moral duty in the face of this genocide. What do people think drove Hamas to take action on October 7th? When options for remedy to gross human rights violations are shut down, the victims and those who support them will act.
It’s not rocket science.
Well said
Never once did the Biden administration ever raise a single objection to Netanyahus war on Gaza.
About Milgrim from The New Yorker:
Yasmina Asrarguis, a Muslim French Moroccan:
“She believed another Middle East was possible, where Jews and Muslims can live side by side and not kill each other for land,” Asrarguis said….”Even though Milgrim was young, “she did a lot to make her vision become something. She did what she could at her own level,” said Asrarguis. It’s a recognizable profile—the American Jewish kid who threw herself into Muslim-Jewish dialogue and the project of creating peace in the Middle East. “You can’t do justice with injustice,” Asrarguis said. “You don’t rebuild Gaza by bringing more injustice into this world.”
Thank you for sharing the excerpt from the 1911 “Why Marxists Oppose Individual Terrorism.” That was valuable. But I will not dismiss a false flag action out of hand because you say so. I will let the facts as they unfold guide me.
Indeed. To my mind, the “false flag” claim should not be “summarily dismissed” (nor should any act of politically-motivated murder reflexively attributed to a single perpetrator or an allegedly independent group of conspirators), but commentators should also not immediately leap to conclusively regarding that as the most convincing or plausible explanation for Elias Rodriguez’s actions (nor should they in the case of many other events).
Acts of spontaneous violence perpetrated by independent actors can (and certainly often do) occur as a product of significant shortcomings in the (geo)political order. At the same time, there has also been no shortage of past cases in which there is substantial evidence that politically-motivated violent actors were subject to clandestine influence and infiltration by institutions of power, as a means of co-opting, subverting, and/or discrediting the causes of those seemingly independent actors in an effort to benefit those same institutions (for a non-exhaustive list of examples, see “The Ever-Growing List of Admitted False Flag Attacks,” syndicated at the Centre for Research on Globalization, March 8, 2017). This has been demonstrably applicable to assorted past cases of anti-Zionist or pro-Palestinian militancy that were subject to being reverse-engineered by the authorities of Israel and aligned nation-states (“Why Israel Created Hamas,” Swiss Policy Research, Oct. 23, 2023).
Gavrilo Princep triggered the First European war is too simplistic. Imagine someone hacking away all the monetary resources of Z projects all over the world and their supporters in the form of EUSNATO. There won’t be any need for violence or rhetoric’s to counter the settler colonial project. If Europeans can take in refugees due to SMO, then why not repatriate Europeans from European Occupied Palestine to EUSA for a peaceful solution. European hatred and racism had been exported to an Asian territory in the name of religion through blatant Colonial overtures. Repatriation of the occupiers to their respective countries is the only non-violent solution.
Most Jews killed during the Holocaust were Polish. By all rights Israel should be in Poland, or at least in Eastern Europe. However, the Jewish leaders wanted the Power of Colonialism to exploit the indigenous and steal the resources like powerful civilized countries do.
Ironically, both Germany and Italy only appeared as nation states in the latter half of the 19th century and missed out on the gold rush of Colonialism.
Objectively, the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand and his wife was exactly the triggering incident for World War I. In the same sense as pulling the trigger on a pistol. It was the proximate cause for what happened after.
But pulling the trigger would do no damage without the previous construction of the pistol, slug, explosive charge, and cartridge. Together with all the other human events leading up to someone aiming the pistol and deciding to fire. These are the ultimate causes.
Prior to the assassination in Sarajevo, a large complex of political events had led Europe to such a precarious state of international relations that a catastrophe could be set off by one rather small politically-motivated murder.
I recommend reading “The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went To War In 1914”, by Christopher Clark.
“Repatriation of the occupiers to their respective countries is the only non-violent solution.”
Absolutely right.
The fact that is this obvious solution so extremely rarely mentioned speaks volumes
about the gigantic blind spots that have been created in Western and not just Western minds.
It is the obvious form of reparation for the Palestinians.
The State of the Israel is grounded mainly on stolen lands, businesses, infrastructure, and even institutions.
Let the Zionists go back to Europe and Russia, where most of them came from.
Millions of them have already received very substantial reparations from Germany.
Per Google’s AI, “From 1945 to 2018, the German government paid approximately $86.8 billion in restitution and compensation to Holocaust victims and their heirs.”
There is no reason why Zionists should get to keep both the restitution $$ and the land they stole.
Now it’s time for restitution for Palestinians. Their stolen lives and families can never be returned, but their land can and should and must be.
Where the Zionists go is not the Palestinians’ problem, just as the reasons the Zionists invaded Palestine in the first place were not the Palestinians’ problem.
“Days after the deed, we can only but wonder what are the thoughts now occupying the mind of 30-year-old Elias Rodriguez of Chicago.” John Wight
Imo, Elias Rodriquez is thoughtless! No doubt, the U$ Congress, rests. Assured, Elias Rodriguez’ “constitutional rights of due process of law.” Done & Dusted! IMO, Elias Rodriquez hears “voices,” “Good job, Brow…” “Oh, you know the thing!”
……*“But I don’t believe; And, I’m not consoled. I lean closer to the fire, but I’m cold” [I, LeoSun, believe Elias Rodriquez is a Plant]. *“The earth was born in a storm. The waters receded, the mountains were formed. The universe loves a drama, you know; &, Ladies & Gentlemen,” FOLLOWS Is WHAT “WE” KNOW!!! NOT Alleged. THIS is f/REAL > *“THE EURO-MED Human Rights Monitor reported, TWO (2) of the FIVE (5) AID Trucks that entered Friday contain BURIAL Shrouds NOT Food!!! The group’s head, Ramy Abdu, said, quote, “[T]his isn’t food, it’s preparation for mass death. Gaza isn’t being fed. It’s being buried,” unquote.
In real time, “we” witness DJ “The Big $hot” Trump flying high! Headed “Home!” Reeling fm Qatar’s “Big, Beautiful “Gift.” Confirming, the Butchers, the Bankers, the USG’s Hay-Maker, the “Big $hot,” got GAZA, in their rear view mirror. Like “the Big Guy,” Jo$eph R. Biden, Trump-Vance, Inc, “owns this!” *“The US president owns every despicable aspect of the calamity unfolding in Gaza perpetrated by his country’s ever reliable and obedient proxy, Israel.” 10.19.23, Andrew Mitrovica.
“My country” is not free. Itsa sweet land of misery. To thee, I sing,” Land where my government lies, bullets, missiles, blood & bull-$hit, flies, freely. B/c everybody, knows, “The Heart is The Marketplace;” And, the “Big $hot” like the “Big Guy,” is liar, liar pants on f/fire! Raging to, *“Snuff “US” Out!” How’d ya like that cooked, “Martial Law,” Slow-Boiled or Pan-Fried?”
“Gaza Weeps,” JOHN WIGHT. “Pray for Gaza. Be their cover!” TY, John Wight, CN, et al. Ciao
* “I Don’t Believe,” Paul Simon
*hxxps://www.democracynow.org/2025/5/20/israel_gaza_gideons_chariots
* Andrew Mitrovica @ https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2023/10/19/joe-biden-owns-this
* “Trumpland,” Chris Hedges & Mr. Fish’s Trumpland USA” @ hxxps://consortiumnews.com/2025/05/04/chris-hedges-trumpland/
Killing the innocent in response to the killing of the innocent is an action like a hunger strike or self-emulation, the scope of concern is broadened. If the truly guilty are selected for punishment, the response is focused and the event is closed. In the world today those who manage the killing of innocents on a grand scale have designed their own immunity thereby insuring that we can only kill ‘each other’ in our desperation for ‘justice’. I’ll leave it there, but this thought can expand well beyond its apparent simplicity.
Yep. I read it also. Interesting the same people who took joy at the murder of non-combatants affiliated with Saddam or Assad’s governments, and the daughter of a Russian official, are condemning these deaths as something different.
“Killing the innocent in response to the killing of the innocent”
I don’t believe that, it is more like a self inflicted excuse, they thought they could pass off as justification for a property grab, kinda like California and Hawaii fires.
The end result cannot be disputed.
Israel needs to turn the other cheek.
One life taken by another shreds the soul. You wake up in the morning and breath it in the air. And that is what is happening to us. That is all that is important.
In 1946, Eleanor Roosevelt wrote about a visit to the Zeilsheim displaced persons camp in Germany. She met with Jewish people who had survived the Holocaust. She asked, “When will our consciences grow so tender that we will act to prevent human misery rather than avenge it?”
Deeds such as that allegedly perpetrated by Rodriguez are inevitable under present circumstances. And any ensuing crackdown by the state security services will merely form part of a broader pattern underway long before the shots were fired in DC. If the Zionists hadn’t been able to seize on this incident, another would have served as well. Look at the running they’ve made just from denouncing peaceful campus protests. It will always be something. We mustn’t spend our efforts embracing or rejecting individual acts of this type. The focus has to remain on Palestine, now more than ever the cause of our time.
I wonder how the world would have reacted to the firebombing of Tokyo or Dresden if we had 24-7 live-streamed footage broadcast across ubiquitous addictive personal communications devices back in the 1940s? Would it have also driven people to madness?
In the grand scheme of the history of human warfare, what is going on in Gaza is not exceptional. If hairless apes have proven to be good at one thing since the dawn of civilization, it’s killing each other. What is exceptional is the accessibility and omnipresence of the horrors of war through technology.
As with Vietnam and many of the US’s wars and atrocities, what happens in Gaza largely stays in Gaza. Israel has killed over 200 journalists to kill most of their stories ( en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_journalists_killed_in_the_Gaza_war ).
What we have seen and learned has come from the arrogant, gleeful IDF and Israeli leaders taking perverse pride in their atrocities, much posted on TikTok (which MUST BE shut down!)
Deny as it always will and does, my own government (not the American people) is just as responsible for the deaths of these two people as it is for the deaths of the innocent Palestinians.
At least half of the American people support Trump’s complicity in the Gaza genocide, and the other half supported Biden’s complicity. So, yes, the American people are not blameless and must be held accountable for their support of genocide.
I read Elias Rodriguez’s statement, which Ken Klippenstein published on his SubStack yesterday, and who (Ken) has since gotten a visit from the FBI. The statement is very lucid and a serious recapitulation of the situation. Those who claim false flag cannot have read it. A false flag would try to trivialize his motives, and fail to state the stark reality of what Israel has done, and is doing.
I do not support violence, but America does. It is awash in violence at all turns. It’s in our entertainment, our games, our literature, and our government. The First Amendment may be valued, but the Second Amendment is sacred. How any one could think that the situation in Gaza would not provide a spark for that kind of kindling, is beyond me.
This is the kind of thing that will cause further erosion of our constitutional rights. It won’t stop the carnage in Gaza, and those who have the interest will use it to further vilify all who stand up for human rights, and an end to the suffering of the Palestinian people, caused by Israel, and its allies. But, it also won’t stop the protests from continuing.
Though it is apparent from public commentary elsewhere that there is significant sympathy if not support for Mr. Rodriguez’s action, I can’t disagree with a word of your commentary here,
Some of that commentary can be expected to, and does, touch on the fact that the perpetrators and enablers of the genocide continue that genocide without any global accountability or adequate effort to end it; i.e. that the extant system is, if anything, perpetuating it, so in the absence of any counterbalancing force, the only ‘solution’ is violence in response.
But I think you’re right: we’re so conditioned to violence that we seem all too ready to accept it – and those with shorter fuses (or who are more easily convinced of the rectitude of their position may see violence as an antidote for violence.) My own conclusion is that killing merely adds to the vicious cycles. And in this case, it will be used to try to justify Israel’s / Zionists’ claims of defense against “antisemitism” … and thus self-defeating.
Re: “But sympathy is not the issue here. The issue . . . is the extent to which it has moved the dial forward or not when it comes to opposing this monstrous crime committed against a civilian population.”
Thank you for this thoughtful commentary that keeps the eye on the one salient issue: how to stop the genocide in Gaza. I cannot feel anything for these two young people or their families even as I can intellectually understand that their deaths are tragedies.
I cannot feel any sympathy for anyone who supports Israel. That is what Israel’s genocide in Gaza has, in part, done to me personally.
John, excellent “scribbling.”
The False Flag will always rise in the bowels of “manunkind.”
It’s not true that Oswald is living in Australia on a CIA pension.
In memory of REPORTERS Robert Parry, Garry Webb and Charles Bowden, .
From my point of view. The real question is; Will this action by Elias make things worse for Palestinian children ?
The quick answer. How can it possibly get worse ?
From the corporate and western governmental genocide apologists point of view it’s just another annoying fact that has to be spun into an anti Hamas, woke pro Israel narrative…. So, no. It’s not a false flag operation.
BTW. Also on film. The shooter screamed he was doing it to highlight the Israeli systematic killing of Palestinian children.
Genocide is being normalized. It’s Unclear for now but there will be consequences.