May 22: A Week-long Blood Libel Culminates in Murder
Woman shot by security outside CIA headquarters; Majority of Americans believe Democrats covered up Biden mental decline; Trump considers bringing Fannie May public
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The Big Story
Israeli Yaron Lischinsky, 30, and American Sarah Lynn Milgrim, 26, were shot dead by a lone gunman chanting “Free, free Palestine” near the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday, according to The Washington Post. The tragedy of the murders is compounded by their personal story. The couple met while working at the Israeli Embassy 18 months ago, The New York Times reported. Milgrim recently told her parents she would travel with Lischinsky to meet his family in Jerusalem. Unbeknownst to her, Lischinsky had purchased an engagement ring and planned to propose during the trip—a detail her parents learned only after the shooting.
The horrific crime comes at the end of a week marked by the emergence of a modern blood libel alleging that Israel is deliberately “starving babies” in Gaza. It is not clear where this new messaging idea came from; what’s known is that it spread like wildfire, helped by a powerful amalgam of legacy press, Democratic Party politicians, and anti-Israel influencers on the right. On May 17, Tucker Carlson’s favorite historian Darryl Cooper posted a tweet raging against the death of a young girl apparently starved by Israel. When asked by an X interlocutor how he knew it was real, Cooper said “because I trust @tparsi”—Trita Parsi, the founder of the National Iranian American Council. Except it turns out the little girl in the picture is not dead; she has cancer, and is in the UAE for treatment. On Tuesday, United Nations humanitarian chief Tom Fletcher claimed on the BBC that 14,000 babies would die in Gaza within 48 hours. That was a lie—but by the time the BBC retracted it, it had already gone viral. NBC News not only published the same false statistic but added a picture of a starving child—who turned out to be from Yemen. After their post got nearly 5 million views on X, it was quietly deleted. Sen. Bernie Sanders said Wednesday on X that “The entire population of Gaza is acutely malnourished and many are on the brink of starvation. History will not forget U.S. complicity in enabling this humanitarian disaster.” Also Wednesday, Mehdi Hasan appeared on Piers Morgan Uncensored, where he accused Israel of “killing babies as a hobby.” Morgan replied that for the first time ever he agreed with Hasan’s assessment that Israel’s war on Hamas constituted a “genocide.” On Wednesday night, right-wing influencer Candace Owens boosted a video of podcaster Theo Von weeping as Dr. Gabor Maté detailed the psychological impacts of the war on Gazan children on Von’s show Tuesday. The video went viral after Owens reposted it, who went on to praise Von and noted, “God will have vengeance on those that defend what is happening in Gaza.”
Well, someone certainly got vengeance. After the attack, the alleged shooter, identified by NBC News as Elias Rodriguez of Chicago, fled into the museum—where security detained him before handing him over to authorities. Rodriguez appears to have been radicalized by a mix of communism and Islamic extremism. A source familiar with the matter claims he was a member of the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL) until 2017, though the party denies any recent connection. The PSL, a Marxist-Leninist and Maoist political group advocating for communist revolution, according to InfluenceWatch, is in damage control on X. “We reject any attempt to associate the PSL with the DC shooting,” the group posted. X users have responded by sharing images of a purported PSL flag reading, “Exterminate Zionists!” The PSL denies authorizing the flag, and no independent media has verified its authenticity, but the optics are damaging.
On the Islamic extremism front, national security analyst Travis Hawley linked Rodriguez to an eBay account, elrodr-8199, that purchased Muslim prayer rugs celebrating 9/11.
In a manifesto published by the shooter on X before his crime and verified by the Anti-Defemation League’s Center for Extremism, Rodriguez called for an armed demonstration against the “genocide” in Gaza. Chillingly, the manifesto suggests the murders were premeditated, targeting the diplomats as “the only sane thing to do.” Rodriguez also claims his actions will resonate with more Americans today than a decade ago—a disturbing assertion that may hold some truth. The manifesto can be seen below:
It’s unclear how much impact the rhetorical atmosphere of today’s discourse could actually have on an attack like this one, but our senior policy analyst would wager that it has, at the very least, some measurable effect:
When you have a nonstop outpouring of hate targeting a specific community and accusing it of the most heinous crimes, supported by key elements of both major parties and platformed on the biggest social media site, you are creating conditions that will galvanize every stray atom in the country. This is a systemic crisis that the American Jewish community seems entirely unable to address, and therefore will continue to endanger the lives of Jews and Christians alike.
Can either the left or the right vanquish that plague from its ranks? “Trump could end the avalanche of antisemitism on the right with one tweet and a few well-placed firings,” continues our analyst. “The left is too far gone to reason with.”
To learn more about the PSL, refer to Park MacDougald’s May 2024 edition of The Scroll Below:
—Adam Lehrer
The Rest
→As if there weren't enough spurts of political violence for one day, a woman was shot by security guards Thursday morning outside the CIA headquarters in Virginia after crashing into a gate outside the building, according to NBC News. The woman, identified as Monia Spadaro, survived the shooting in what CIA officials are calling a “security incident.”
→TruthSocial of the Day
President Trump said Wednesday he was considering making two giant government-sponsored home lenders, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, public. Interestingly, Omeed Malik, the Persian mega donor, close friend and business associate of Donald Trump, Jr. and financier of Tucker Carlson’s post-Fox News career (per New York Magazine), was appointed to Fannie Mae’s board in April.
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→Stat of the Day: 72%
That’s the percentage of Americans who believe the cover-up of former President Joe Biden’s mental decline is a “serious scandal,” according to a poll conducted by Rasmussen. The poll also found that 44% of voters believe that “Joe Biden’s mental condition was already going downhill before he ever got elected in 2020.” Some 41% disagreed. 60% believe he would not have been mentally or physically capable of doing his job had he stayed in the 2024 race and beaten President Donald Trump to win a second term.
→Article of the Day
The Columbia Journalism Review published a piece on sexual misconduct allegations made against Wesley Lowery, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who rose to fame for his coverage of Black Lives Matter organizing in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014. One Tablet contributor likened the following excerpt to “the modern liberal equivalent of a Henry James scene”:
To read the full article, click the link
https://www.cjr.org/feature-2/wesley-lowery-sexual-assault-journalists-attest-experiences.php
→Immigration and Customs Enforcement and local law enforcement officials arrested 13 alleged members of Armenian organized crime syndicates in both Los Angeles and Hollywood, Florida, Wednesday, according to an ICE press release. Among the defendants charged are Ara Artuni, 41, of Porter Ranch, California, who is charged with attempted murder in aid of racketeering, and a rival, Robert Amiryan, 46, of Hollywood, California, who is charged with kidnapping. Vahan Harutyunyan, 50, of Hollywood, Florida, made his initial appearance earlier today in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, and was ordered detained. According to the affidavits filed with the criminal complaints, the Russian mafia-linked Armenian Organized Crime syndicate has made LA a center of its activities. Artuni, a syndicate leader known as an avtoritet—which translates as authority in Russian—is charged with ordering the attempted murder of Amiryan during the summer of 2023. In retaliation, Amiryan, also an avtoritet, allegedly conspired with members of his own criminal organization to kidnap and torture one of Artuni’s associates in June 2023. In addition to attempted murder, Artuni and his criminal enterprise have since 2021 also allegedly engaged in bank fraud, wire fraud, and “cargo theft” targeting online retailers such as Amazon. Artuni Enterprise members and associates enrolled with Amazon as carriers and then diverged from the Amazon routes and stole all or part of the shipment. To date, according to data provided to ICE by Amazon, Artuni Enterprise has allegedly stolen goods from Amazon worth more than $83 million. One more defendant remains at large, according to NBC Los Angeles. Alec Mouhibian, an Armenian American resident of Los Angeles and the host of the Filthy Armenian Adventures podcast, told us over text that he was surprised by the news. “Armenian organized crime isn’t as big a thing now as it used to be,” he said. “The heyday of it was the ’90s with the arrival of the new Soviet immigrants, usually doing stuff like credit card or medicare fraud. Now, I guess, it’s Amazon cargo fraud.”
→Bitcoin rises to $110,000
Bitcoin climbed to an all-time high Wednesday, reaching the $110,000 threshold, according to Forbes. Austin King, the founder of the layer-1 blockchain Omni Network, chalks the gain in value to three different “structural tailwinds” converging at once:
“Record-setting demand from U.S. spot ETFs is absorbing supply faster than miners can create it after last year’s halving, with BlackRock’s IBIT logging a 20-day inflow streak and total ETF inflows topping $3B in May alone.”
“Policymakers are shifting from hostility to embrace: the Senate’s bipartisan GENIUS stablecoin bill and Texas’ move toward a state-level Strategic Bitcoin Reserve both widen the regulatory aperture and give institutions the confidence to allocate.”
“A renewed bid for inflation hedges is pulling in large allocators—Blackstone just made its first ETF purchase—while everyday investors look for protection against sticky price pressures.”
→Chinese scientists discovered a novel strain of bacterium with “unique abilities” that allowed it to thrive on the Tiangong Space Station, says The New York Post. The bacteria, dubbed Niallia tiangongensis, is similar to bacteria Niallia circulans—often found in sewage and soil—but demonstrates mutations that scientists believe could prove beneficial in the study of “life as it moves into space.” Scientists said the novel strain “demonstrates a unique ability to hydrolyze gelatin suggesting that it can utilize gelatin as a substrate in nutrient-limited environments.”
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I believe that every Palestinian supporter has forfeited their humanity as well as any credibility. Hamas has been using women and children as shields. They could have ended the war October 8, 2023. Anyone who pushed their propaganda is complicit in murder.
BD E and HYD Those who remember the protests against the Vietnam Earthquake will recall that the protests became more militant and violent and were tolerated by the mainstream media even after acts of violence were committed on college campuses and government institutions This is what happens when radical speech that is a clear and present danger festers into violent conduct