ON THE evening of Wednesday, May 21, two staff members at the Israeli Embassy to the United States were shot dead after leaving an event at the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, DC. Their names were Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim.
Yaron, 30, was born in Jerusalem but spent much of his childhood in Germany; Sarah, 26, was born and raised in Prairie Village, a suburb of Kansas City. Both, apparently, were Messianic Jews: they adhered to a form of Judaism that combines traditional Jewish practices with the belief that Jesus is the long-awaited Messiah.
Their alleged murderer, Elias Rodriguez, a 31-year-old from Chicago, and supporter of the usual buffet of far-left groups, fired at least 21 rounds at the couple, continuing to fire after his victims fell to the ground. When he noticed Sarah was still alive and trying to crawl away, he reloaded and shot her at point-blank range, ‘execution-style’, as they say in the tabloid press, before running into the building shouting ‘Free, Free Palestine’ and claiming he had done it for Palestine and for Gaza as he was taken into custody.
The following morning the Israeli Embassy released a photograph of the victims, showing an attractive young couple evidently in love. It is reported that Yaron had recently purchased a ring, intending to propose to Sarah and become formally engaged upon their imminent return to Israel. Both of these young people are now in their graves, the prospect of fulfilling lives and decades of loving marriage and family life denied them by someone who saw them not as sacred individuals made in the image of God, but who had reduced them to what he perceived to be their identitarian essence, whether it be Jewish, Israeli, Zionist, agents of genocide, representatives of an apartheid and white supremacist colonialist state, or some other variant thereof. Had you told Rodriguez that Yaron and Sarah were advocates for peace between Israel and its neighbours and were involved in efforts to bridge the divide between Arabs and Israelis, I doubt he would have given it a second thought.
Sadly, reactions to the premeditated murders on social media followed an increasingly familiar pattern.
Gen-Z TikTok influencer Guy Christensen, a student at Ohio State University, told his 3.4million followers that he did ‘not condemn the elimination of the Zionist officials who worked at the Israeli embassy last night’, urging them ‘to support Elias’s actions’, before later, with extraordinary arrogance and pomposity, declaring: ‘[Rodriguez] is not a terrorist. He’s a resistance fighter, and the fact is that the fight against Israel’s war machine, against their genocide machine, against their criminality, includes their foreign diplomats in this country.’ My goodness, how I would love to get my hands on the self-important little bugger, speaking metaphorically of course. Alarmingly, America’s universities are full of people who think as he does, students and professors alike.
Christensen was not alone in rationalising the murder of innocent people. According to the Jerusalem Post, 28 pro-Palestine or Marxist groups have co-signed a ‘Unity of Fields’ campaign calling for Rodriguez’s release and describing the murders of Yaron and Sarah as ‘a legitimate act of resistance against the Zionist state and its genocidal campaign in Gaza’.
Reading about Christensen and others of his ilk, I was reminded of another coldblooded killing of an entirely innocent man, that of Brian Thompson, the CEO of UnitedHealthcare, who was shot on December 4, 2024, in Manhattan. Thompson, the 50-year-old father of two boys, was allegedly murdered by Luigi Mangione, a 26-year-old scion of a wealthy Italian American family, privately educated, and graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, a private Ivy League research university in Philadelphia.
Soon after his arrest, images of Mangione began to flood the Internet, invariably accompanied by references to his physical attractiveness or expressing support for his actions. ‘Who cares if he did it! Is he single?’ posted someone, presumably a woman, on TikTok. Even before he was arrested, grainy CCTV footage shared by police of him checking into a hostel, showing him smiling in ‘a toothpaste ad-worthy smile’, went viral. ‘Oh he’s definitely the most wanted man in America right now’ with a winking emoji was a characteristic post at the time.
Almost overnight, the story became less about a middle-aged husband and father murdered at close range on a dark street in New York, and more about the young man with chiselled features, a sharp jawline and irresistible smile, a charismatic folk hero to many despite the fact he killed Thompson by shooting him in the back in a case of premeditated murder, leaving two boys without their father and a 51-year-old woman without a husband.
In the wake of the murder, UnitedHealth Group’s Facebook account expressed their shock and sadness over the loss of their colleague. The post received 35,000 laughing emojis in response (versus only 2,200 crying ones). What this says about current conceptions of right and wrong, not to mention essential decency, I’ll leave to those reading this article.
Indeed, how do you laugh at the murder of an innocent man? What gives you that right? Is it because you have issues with the healthcare industry in this country? Well, so do I, and so do a lot of my fellow Americans. But there was a time when murder was condemned unequivocally, without any attempt at rationalisation, regardless of the identity of the victim.
I could list other examples of how killing or trying to kill someone is condoned for ideological reasons. Such examples are increasingly frequent as America’s moral compass becomes ever more compromised and the bar on taking another’s life continues to be lowered. Just think of those polls that indicated 30 per cent of Democrats were disappointed that Trump’s would-be assassin in Butler, Pennsylvania, had narrowly missed his target.
Still, as I struggle to process these troubling developments, I remain unable to dispel the image of a redheaded girl from Kansas exuding love and decency as she stands beside her Israeli boyfriend.
