DC antisemitic terror killings channel spirit of the campus protesters

“Free, free Palestine,” Elias Rodriguez chanted as he was taken into custody for gunning down two young Israeli Embassy staffers outside the Capital Jewish Museum on Wednesday night.

Fatally shot in the street as they left the American Jewish Committee’s ACCESS Young Diplomats Reception, Yaron Lischinsky, 28, and Sarah Milgrim, 26, planned to get engaged next month in Israel.

“I did it. I did it for Gaza,” Rodriguez reportedly confessed moments after the killing — yet he targeted a Jewish event, not an Israeli one.

This was antisemitic terrorism, as is nearly all “anti-Zionist” action.

Shooting suspect Elias Rodriguez chanted “free Palestine” after being taken into custody. Katie Kalisher via Storyful

Yes, the screed he apparently posted on social media just before the attack cites the high death toll in Gaza, the ineffectiveness of nonviolent protest against Israel and anger at US support for Israel as justification for murder.

Rodriguez, born and raised in America with no obvious link to the Middle East, is a man of the modern left, following in the footsteps not just of the “pro-Palestine” lunatic who recently firebombed the home of Gov. Josh Shapiro (D-Pa.) but also of Luigi Mangione, much lionized as the “health care” assassin.

Indeed, posts from what’s thought to be Rodriguez’s X account applaud Mangione and praise political violence; they include thinly veiled death threats to Jews as well as “Death to America.”

He’s a onetime member of the far-left Party for Socialism and Liberation, some of whose recent posters have forthrightly urged “Extreminate Zionists!”

In short, Rodriguez did just what all those college protesters have been demanding: “Globalize the intifada.”

No matter that Lischinsky was a Christian, nor that Milgrim worked on building peaceful collaborations between Palestinians and Israelis: Such details don’t matter to progressive haters.

Old-school right-wing antisemitism is still real and periodically deadly, but it’s astonishing how far the global left has interpenetrated with Islamist antisemitism: Hamas, after all, imposes sharia law in Gaza.

It’s not just the lust for violence that unites them, but a hatred for Western civilization.