by Ben Cohen
The killing of two Jews in Washington D.C. last week should serve as a dire warning about the destructive capacity of far-left activism.
Elias Rodriguez gunned down Sarah Milgrim and Yaron Lischinsky, a young couple who worked at the Israeli embassy, as they left an event at the Capital Jewish Museum. In the hours after the shooting, Rodriguez posted a manifesto online that is as chilling as it is revealing. A pro-Palestinian activist, Rodriguez laid out his despair over the war in Gaza. But beneath the moral anguish was something far more dangerous: a worldview that reduces humanity to categories of oppressor and oppressed — which ultimately granted him moral license to annihilate.
Rodriguez’s manifesto illustrates how radical ideology seduces young minds and turns intelligent, thoughtful people into murdering extremists. It begins in empathy —outrage at suffering, a desire to protect the vulnerable — and then ends in dehumanization and brutality.
In this piece, I explore how far-left racial politics leads some young activists to invert the very principles they once claimed to defend. It is a journey from racial tolerance to race hatred, and from human rights to cold-blooded murder.
To understand Rodriguez’s brutality, we must understand the ideology that gave him permission to kill.
“White” Jews
To many white liberals, Jews no longer count as minorities. They have white skin, after all, and thus white privilege. Their perspectives can be dismissed as just “another white take.” As one friend told me, without a shred of self-awareness, Jews are only minorities “when it suits them.”
There is a long history behind this kind of thinking, mostly in left-wing academia that declared Jews “became white” and thus complicit in structures of racial inequality. Books like How Jews Became White Folks argued that by assimilating into postwar suburbia, Jews traded in their minority status for social capital and access to whiteness.
At the more extreme end of this kind of race essentialism, “whiteness” is an unmitigated evil and the defining aspect of human history. It is one’s moral duty to fight it in all its forms, and to ally oneself with the “oppressed”. In this Manichean world view, there are only the oppressors and the oppressed, the colonizer and the colonized.
Israel as the ultimate oppressor
Nowhere is this binary more rigid than in how the far left views Israel. In far left circles, Israel has become the poster-child for “whiteness” and “white supremacy”…
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