Two Israeli embassy staffers were murdered Wednesday night in the nation’s capital by an anti-Israel gunman shouting “Free Palestine” in what the FBI is calling an act of “targeted terrorism.”
The shootings happened around 9pm ET outside the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, D.C., where the American Jewish Committee was hosting an event. According to eyewitnesses, the alleged gunman was seen sitting on a bench outside the venue and then pacing back and forth before he approached a group of people leaving the museum and shot two of them at close range.
The gunman then calmly walked back inside the museum, and, in the chaos of the scene, was initially thought he was a victim. One witness recalled the shooter saying, “I did it. I did it for Gaza. Free, free Palestine.”
Another witness, Yoni Kalin, described those moments to the local Fox affiliate in D.C. “The security guard happened to let this guy in. I guess they were thinking that he was a victim. He was covered in rain; he was clearly in trauma; he was in shock,” Kalin shared. “Some of the people at the event brought him water. They sat him down. ‘Are you okay?’ ‘Were you shot?’ ‘What happened?'”
Kalin suggested the suspect asked for someone to call the police. “About 10 minutes later, when the cops actually came in… he put his hands up, he grabbed a red keffiyeh out of his pocket, and started the ‘Free Palestine’ chants [and] ‘There’s only one solution: Intifada revolution,'” he added. “And he was being dragged out of the building as he was yelling, ‘Free Palestine.'”
Video from the scene also shows the alleged gunman yelling similar chants while being taken into custody by law enforcement.
The Victims
The victims of the shooting were 30-year-old Yaron Lischinsky and his 26-year-old girlfriend Sarah Lynn Milgrim. Lischinsky, who moved from Germany to Israel as a teenager and was a practicing Christian, reportedly had a plan to propose to Milgrim, who was Jewish and from Kansas, during a trip to Jerusalem next week.
“[Lischinsky] was a Christian, a true lover of Israel, served in the IDF, and chose to dedicate his life to the State of Israel and the Zionist cause,” Ron Prosor, Israel’s ambassador to Germany, wrote on X.
KU Hillel, a Jewish student group Milgrim was a part of at Kansas University, said in a statement that her “bright spirit and passion for the Jewish community touched everyone fortunate enough to know her.”
The Suspect
The suspect, Elias Rodriguez, is a 30 year old Chicago native. His LinkedIn profile says he graduated from the University of Illinois-Chicago. The Daily Mail and The New York Post report that Rodriguez has been involved in activism with Black Lives Matter and the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL), a far-left group that regularly posts anti-Israel rhetoric.
The group confirmed Rodriguez’s affiliation in an X post overnight but claimed his association with a local chapter ended in 2017. PSL attempted to distance itself from the shooting, tweeting “We have nothing to do with the shooting and do not support it.” Just hours before the murders, however, the group posted that “the world would not forget the crimes of the U.S. and Israel.”
In 2017, Rodriguez participated in a protest on the anniversary of the 2014 police-involved shooting of Laquan McDonald and related to Chicago’s efforts to bring Amazon’s headquarters to the city. The sign Rodriguez held read, “Money for people’s needs, not Amazon.” In an interview, he said the Seattle-based company’s “whitening of Seattle is structurally racist and a direct danger to all workers.” According to The Jerusalem Post, Rodriguez made a political donation to the Joe Biden campaign in 2020.
Independent journalist Ken Klippenstein posted to his own website an alleged manifesto from the suspect that accused Israel of being “a genocidal apartheid state” while “the American government has simply shrugged.”
The Reaction
Thursday morning, another eyewitness appeared on CNN with Sara Sidner, and she asked him to describe what he saw in the shooter’s eyes. He offered a blunt assessment of what he sees as the parallels between the murders and the anti-Israel protests on college campuses. “I went to Columbia for grad school, and I saw the same thing in his eyes as I saw in the eyes of all the protesters at Columbia,” he said. “Nothing different between him and them.”
That connection did not sit well with the visibly uncomfortable Sidner. ”Do you worry that there will be a conflation though of the two – those people who are speaking their mind and who really care about what is happening in Gaza and those people who are like this person who did this horrific shooting who intend to do harm,” she stammered.
The witness was not having it. “A conflation? I mean, they are calling for Intifada. At Columbia University, they call for Intifada, constantly,” he noted. “They’re not quiet; they’re loud. You can hear it. They make recordings of themselves. So, what’s the difference?”
Megyn called Sidner “an idiot” for being “so worried about the tie [the witness] was making to the violence that was just unleashed against two people walking out of this Israel event and what we are hearing on college campuses literally calling for an Intifada against anybody who is pro-Israel.”
“No one is saying that they caused it or that they made this guy do it, Sara, but it is exactly the same rhetoric,” Megyn continued. “Jewish people are getting a little sick of college campuses allowing these people to run around calling for their murder. She recoils at him making the connection. F-ck off.”
Where We Are Now
The Daily Wire’s Michael Knowles joined Megyn on Thursday’s show and said Sidner’s reaction is emblematic of a “suicidal impulse” on the left. “Whenever they see any political action, they see a clear perpetrator, they see a clear victim, and they say, well, it has to be the opposite,” he explained. “They always have to immediately take the side of the perpetrator and always immediately neglect the victim, even when the political action is so clear as a murderer murders a young couple of civilians.”
“This is not to say that the Israel-Palestine issue is without nuance and complexity… I recognize there has been a lot of nuance and complexity to this issue – not only for about 100 years, but really for centuries and even millennia. However, I want nothing to do with the ‘Free Palestine’ movement,” he continued. “Listen to the arguments that these people are making… [it] is a call, at the very least, for ethnic cleansing, if not genocide… These are arguments that we would not accept on any other front and that we disagree with at a fundamental philosophical level.”
Ultimately, Knowles said this is the tragic but foreseeable outcome of all that has been allowed to fester on college campuses and beyond in the wake of October 7. “So, if there has been ambiguity, if there has been some lack of clarity up until now,” he concluded, “well now you are seeing the logical conclusion of those arguments made by the people who favor unjust political violence in many other circumstances and with which we have basically nothing in common.”
You can check out Megyn’s full interview with Knowles by tuning in to episode 1,078 on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you like to listen. And don’t forget that you can catch The Megyn Kelly Show live on SiriusXM’s Triumph (channel 111) weekdays from 12pm to 2pm ET.