Photo-illustration by Arno Rosenfeld via Getty Images
By Arno Rosenfeld
May 22, 2025
A manifesto defending “armed demonstration” against Israel under the name of Elias Rodriguez was posted on social media hours before police said they had arrested a man by that name for shooting two Israeli embassy staffers outside the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday night.
The anonymous account on X, formerly Twitter, made two posts with eight screenshots containing a 900-word manifesto signed by Rodriguez at 10:00 p.m. on Wednesday.
At a press conference around midnight, D.C. police said they had arrested Elias Rodriguez, who they identified as a 30-year-old man from Chicago, for shooting Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim outside an event for Jewish young professionals and diplomats at the museum.
An online footprint belonging to a man named Elias Rodriguez, who closely resembles the man in video captured of the arrest, in which a man shouted “free Palestine,” links him to the Party for Socialism and Liberation, an American organization that describes itself as a “revolutionary socialist party.”
A 2017 article in Liberation News, the official publication of the organization, described a speech Rodriguez delivered at a protest in Chicago against Amazon.
The account that posted the manifesto, called @kyotoleather, joined the social media website in 2013 but its first post was made on Oct. 21, 2023, about two weeks after the Oct. 7 Hamas terrorist attack against Israel and the start of the Israel-Hamas War. “This baby in Chicago says #FreePalestine and what she says goes,” the post read.
The manifesto posted Wednesday night under the heading “Escalate For Gaza, Bring The War Home” is focused on “atrocities committed by the Israelis against Palestine” and goes on to justify “armed action” as a complement to “nonviolent protest.”
It does not directly reference a shooting but concludes: “The action would have been morally justified taken 11 years ago during Protective Edge, around the time I personally became acutely aware of our brutal conduct in Palestine. But I think to most Americans such an action would have been illegible, would seem insane. I am glad …that today at least there are many Americans for which the action will be highly legible and, in some funny way, the only sane thing to do.”
The document was first reported by Ken Klippenstein, an independent journalist.
In November 2023, the X account that posted the manifesto reshared a post about Jewish Voice for Peace and IfNotNow protesting outside the Israeli consulate in Chicago.
The New York Times reported that a sign in the window of a Chicago apartment apparently occupied by Rodriguez had several pro-Palestinian signs in the window, including one that read: “Tikkun Olam means free Palestine.”
On Jan. 1, 2024 the account wrote: “Happy New Year, Death to Israel” and days later posted “De@th 2 Amerikkka.”
Last June, the account reshared a video of people in a nightclub chanting “let’s go bomb Tel Aviv” and in September the account posted “🔪🐷🇮🇱” over a screenshot of news articles about Israel invading Lebanon.
One week after the anniversary of the Oct. 7 attack, the account asked: “What more evidence is needed that the colony and its recalcitrants will have to be totally extirpated by the end of all this?” using a word that means to “root out and destroy completely,” over a video of Israeli pundits defending the war in Gaza.
“Progressive tweeps, as much as I love delving into the day’s Discourse™️, can we PLEASE save the idealistic and high-minded debate over the morality of sending a truck bomb into the offices of The New York Times until *AFTER* we send a truck bomb into the offi[ce],” the account wrote on Oct. 16.
The account mixed posts against Israel with unrelated memes and apparent jokes, including one in December that read: “Mash potatoes: the ice cream of supper time.”
