May 28: Is Elias Rodriguez an Antisemite?

Bibi pushing for war, again?; China and the fentanyl trade; Israel and Syria hold direct talks

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The Big Story

Was Elias Rodriguez, the man who murdered two Israeli embassy employees outside Washington, D.C.’s Capital Jewish Museum last week, an antisemite?

Usually, when someone guns down two people he believes are Jews (one, Yaron Lischinsky, was in fact a Christian), the answer to that question is generally an unambiguous yes. But at least a few somewhat prominent people are arguing the answer is no. On Tuesday afternoon, the independent journalist Ken Klippenstein published extracts from a group chat in which Rodriguez had participated, and interviewed some of the chat’s members, who were childhood friends of Rodriguez. In the published messages, we can see Rodriguez, a “self-professed Maoist Third Worldist,” praise Josef Stalin, rail against “the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie,” and speak of the need to “genocide white people to make [the United States] a normal country.” Klippenstein writes that Rodriguez …

… hated the Republican and Democratic parties, Kamala Harris, Joe Biden, Donald Trump, the right and left, the “bourgeoisie,” the United States, the West, and, of course, Israel. He even hated the only political group I could find he’d associated with. … “PSL sucks shit,” Rodriguez wrote in one of many messages lambasting the obscure Party for Socialism and Liberation that he had once participated in. “I wish I had just done a misadventure with FRSO [Freedom Road Socialist Org] rather than PSL lol,” he wrote.

But, Klippenstein writes, Rodriguez never expressed any antipathy for Jews outside of his obsessive hatred of Israel. Several friends and former coworkers of the shooter told Klippenstein that they’d never heard Rodriguez say anything negative about Jews, “not even in a joking way.” “Hatred of Israel and what it is doing in Gaza,” Klippenstein concludes, “is not the same as antisemitism.” Some on the right, including the red-pill prince himself, Curtis Yarvin, weighed in on social media to (sort of) agree, arguing that what Rodriguez was motivated by was “murderous global race communism,” not “antisemitism,” which Yarvin dismissed as a “communist bogeyman.”

At the level of idiot literalism, we suppose that’s correct. Rodriguez may have murdered two innocent people in protest of a fictive genocide perpetrated by Jews, the narrative of which was fed to him by a global propaganda machine involving every antisemitic actor on the planet ranging from Hezbollah to Jake Shields, but, in his own mind, he didn’t hate Jews as Jews. He didn’t privately joke about the Holocaust, he didn’t deride Jews as “Christ-killers” or allege they were responsible for World War I or the pornography industry, he didn’t use anti-Jewish slurs, and he didn’t talk about how Hitler was misunderstood. So I’m sure everyone reading this is quite relieved.

But formal ideology is a poor explanation for why things happen in the world. Sure, explicit antisemitism is more common on the extreme end of the political Right, in the sense that more people are willing to express anti-Jewish prejudice. And there is now a faction on the right working to instrumentalize antisemitic sectarianism, usually expressed in coded language about “neocons” and “warmongers,” as a tool for consolidating and wielding institutional power—an alarming development that we’ve been covering in detail here for the past few months.

But the latter version—antisemitism not as saying or thinking bad things about Jews but as a tool of governance—is the one that matters in the real world. And on that score, the recent moves by Tucker Carlson and company are but a clumsy imitation of what we’ve spent a decade observing from the Obama Democratic Party. It was not The Daily Stormer but The New York Times that published a “Jew tracker” to identify which Congressional opponents of the Obama Iran deal were Jewish; it was students at Harvard and George Washington University and their well-credentialed professors, not revisionist podcasters, who rushed to celebrate the slaughter of innocent Israelis and made “Glory to the martyrs” the slogan of the modern American university. Even today, when anonymous “sources familiar with the administration’s thinking” whisper to the Washington Post that Iran hawks are loyal to a foreign power and that Israel wants to drag Washington into a “wider regional war,” they are merely repeating, point for point, the favored talkers of the Obama and Biden administrations as they made Jews into the instrument for reorganizing their party along sectarian-racialist lines.

So, to return to our original question—yes, of course Rodriguez is an antisemite. In fact, we’d go so far as to say that in murdering two innocents over a “genocide” that doesn’t exist, only to have the future thought leaders of the Democratic Party rush to defend his actions as a (tactically misguided) instance of “vigilante justice,” he is a perfectly representative antisemite of our times.

—Park MacDougald

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The Rest

→Prepare to read this every few weeks until October:

As the Trump administration tries to negotiate a nuclear deal with Iran, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel has been threatening to upend the talks by striking Iran’s main nuclear enrichment facilities, according to officials briefed on the situation.

That’s from a Wednesday report in The New York Times, in a piece co-bylined by four journalists and based on interviews with “officials in the United States, Europe, and Israel,” which follows reports that Trump and Netanyahu recently had a phone call marked by “heated disagreements” on Iran and that Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem warned Netanyahu not to strike Iran in a “candid” Monday meeting. In a press conference Wednesday, Trump confirmed he’d told Netanyahu that it wasn’t “appropriate” to strike Iran right now, and that he’d prefer to solve the issue with a “very strong document.”

→The more interesting part of the Times story is what it said about the ongoing U.S.-Iranian nuclear negotiations. Despite Trump on Sunday teasing “something good” happening within the next “two days” and Noem reportedly telling Netanyahu in Jerusalem to give U.S. negotiators another “week,” sources “familiar with the negotiations” told the Times that the only deal currently on offer is an agreement to “set the stage for further negotiations.” Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff, the Times added, has “dropped his early objections to an interim understanding that lays out principles for a final deal”—a bad sign, given the Iranians’ desire to stall for time while they shore up their position in the region. Late Wednesday afternoon, The Jerusalem Post reported that Israeli officials, including Strategic Affairs Minister Ron Dermer, met in Washington with Witkoff and Vice President J.D. Vance, amid Israeli fears that the United States is preparing to sign an interim memorandum of understanding with Tehran.

→From now until midnight on Friday, you can use the discount code LASTCHANCE to get 18% off your annual Tablet subscription. SUBSCRIBE HERE.

→Quote of the Day:

In operations like the DEA’s Sleeping Giant probe—a deep U.S. government investigation into alliances between the Sinaloa Cartel and Chinese Triads that continues to unfold—[Don] Im mapped a stunningly sophisticated system in which Chinese businesses and citizens, secreting their wealth out of the Communist economy, bid on pools of underground cash worldwide, generated from fentanyl-, meth-, ketamine-, heroin-, and cocaine-fueled economies.

The scheme vacuums up cartel proceeds—cash brokers literally warehousing fentanyl-stained bills in diaspora shops across North America—then places those funds up for auction in encrypted WeChat channels. From there, the money is cleverly funneled into legitimate global trade, ultimately laundering value back to Chinese factories and superlabs operating in Canada and Mexico.

That’s from an article at “The Bureau” interviewing retired DEA agent Donald Im on his career of investigating Chinese involvement in the North American drug-trade, particularly via the Chinese diaspora in Latin America and Vancouver, Canada.

Read it here:

From Dien Bien Phu to Fentanyl: How China’s State-Linked Narco Networks Engineered a Reverse Opium War

→Scenes from Gaza:

That was the scene on Wednesday at a UN World Food Program warehouse in Al-Maghazi, in central Gaza. According to i24 News Middle East correspondent Ariel Oseran, this footage was taken after Gazan civilians, enraged by reports that Hamas operatives were seizing flour, stormed the warehouse. Hamas gunmen opened fire on the crowd, killing five, again per Oseran.

→Saudi Arabia’s new state-owned artificial intelligence company, Humain, is planning to launch a $10 billion venture capital fund focused on the AI industry, the Financial Times reports. Humain, owned by Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund, was unveiled the day before Trump’s trip to Riyadh, and has already secured major deals with Nvidia (for microchips) and AMD (for processors) as part of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s bid to muscle into the global AI industry. The new VC fund, to be dubbed “Humain Ventures,” is set to launch later this summer with up to $10 billion in investments in start-ups across the United States, Europe, and Asia. “U.S. tech firms increasingly view Gulf states and their powerful sovereign wealth funds as critical sources of investment,” the FT reports, “with American tech executives in talks with regional officials about investments and raising capital.” Humain CEO Tareq Amin told the paper he was “in talks” with a host of companies close to the Trump administration, including OpenAI, Elon Musk’s xAI, and VC firm Andreessen Horowitz.

→Israel and Syria are engaged in “direct talks” and “face-to-face meetings” aimed at preventing conflicts along the countries’ shared border, Reuters reported on Tuesday. The direct talks come after reports earlier this month that the two sides were engaged in indirect negotiations mediated by the United Arab Emirates. According to Reuters, the discussions on the Syrian side have been led by Ahmad al-Dalati, a senior security official who now serves as governor of Syria’s Quneitra province, which borders the Israeli-controlled Golan Heights. During his recent visit to the Middle East, President Trump expressed hope that Syria, under the leadership of Ahmed al-Sheraa, would eventually be able to join the Abraham Accords and normalize relations with Israel, but said that the Syrians still have “a lot of work to do.”

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