When Hamas stormed across the Gaza border on October 7, 2023, it knew exactly what it was doing. The group had detailed maps of nearby Israeli military bases and forces, and quickly overran them. But the terrorist group did not stop there. Instead, Hamas advanced into civilian communities, butchering and burning whole families, shooting children in front of their parents, and parents in front of their children. Gunmen executed a grandmother in her home and uploaded the video to her Facebook page for friends and family to see. After discovering a music festival in the vicinity, the group diverted its paragliding fighters to massacre and kidnap the attendees. “I killed 10 Jews with my own hands,” one Hamas member ecstatically told his parents over the phone.
As it turned out, the Israeli military was not the primary target of Hamas. It was just in the way of the real target: any and all Jewish people in the land of Israel. The terrorist group’s anti-Zionism turned out to be a flimsy cover for its anti-Semitism.
Last night, another assailant used the Palestinian struggle as a pretext to harm Jews. In Washington, D.C., a man named Elias Rodriguez allegedly shot and killed two people as they were exiting an event at the Capital Jewish Museum. There is much we still don’t know about this terrible tragedy, but we do know that Rodriguez has been charged with first-degree murder and other crimes (he has not entered a plea), and that witnesses say he confessed to the crime, declaring, “I did it for Gaza.”
The victims of this atrocity happened to be staff members at the Israeli embassy. But the gathering they attended was not an Israeli-embassy event, and it was not held in the Israeli embassy: It was a gathering of Jews at a Jewish institution. Rodriguez went to an American Jewish Committee event for young professionals and allegedly executed two people leaving the venue. “Police believe the shooter targeted the event but had not singled out any individual before arriving,” The Washington Post reported. It seems to have been mere happenstance that left the Israeli-embassy staffers dead and not someone else.
One of the victims, Sarah Milgrim, was actually American. The other victim, Yaron Lischinsky, was born to a Jewish father and a Christian mother, and the family lived for a time in Nuremberg, Germany, a place with a dark legacy of anti-Semitism, before returning to Israel when Yaron was 16.
Like Hamas, the perpetrator wrapped his anti-Semitic animus in the disguise of the Palestinian struggle, reportedly pulling out a keffiyeh and shouting, “Free Palestine!” But his depraved actions, like theirs, expose the lie of his lofty words. Neither Palestine nor Israel will ever truly be free until their societies are liberated from megalomaniacal men who perpetrate demonic acts in their name.
The event that Rodriguez targeted reportedly featured speakers discussing “humanitarian diplomacy” for crises “throughout the Middle East and North Africa.” Despite his protestations to the contrary, Rodriguez did nothing last night for Palestinians. His alleged decision to murder guests at an AJC event suggests that what he wanted was simply to hurt Jews.
Like other forms of bigotry, the problem of anti-Jewish prejudice will not be resolved by its targets. Anti-Semitism will not be expunged by the 0.2 percent of the world that is Jewish, but by the 99.8 percent that is not. The FBI and Metropolitan Police Department are investigating the shooting as a potential hate crime. But the larger question today is: Will our society provide excuses and justifications that fuel further anti-Jewish violence, or will it choose to stand against those who use such pretexts to brutalize Jews the way they’ve been brutalized for centuries? – my italics
A biblical hatred is engulfing both sides in the Gaza conflict – and blinding them to reason
Jonathan Freedland
Israel starving Palestinians, two killings at a Jewish museum: both are atrocities. But vanishingly few can see it
I sat this week with Hussein Agha, a man who has given his working life to seeking peace between Israelis and Palestinians, negotiating from the Palestinian side of the table. He was gloomier than I have ever seen him, adamant that peace between the two sides can never, ever come. Because, Agha explained, this conflict was not about mere lines on a map or forms of words, the goods in which diplomats trade. This was about emotions, and specifically hatreds. Hatreds that, he feared, are becoming too murderous to contain. “It’s biblical,” he said.
What he had in mind was the fury that drove Hamas to slaughter around 1,200 Israelis on a sleepy Saturday morning nearly 20 months ago and the fury that has driven the government of Benjamin Netanyahu to bombard Gaza ever since, killing more than 50,000, according to the Hamas-controlled health ministry, and, over the last 80 days, denying food to those who remain. He fears that the hatreds that fuelled these events, and that are fuelled by them, will grow larger and more venomous until nothing and no one is left. The whole land shall be laid waste and made desolate.
A biblical rage is one that devours all reason. It is blinding. It prevents those who are gripped by it from seeing anything other than their own side. It prevents them holding two apparently opposed thoughts in their minds, even when both are true. Take, as an example, two statements we can make about the events of this week.
Israel’s use of hunger as a weapon of war, keeping humanitarian aid out of Gaza for some 11 weeks, is a morally indefensible act that has, rightly, outraged the world. The partial lifting of the blockade supplies the tiniest fraction of what is needed and represents, by Netanyahu’s own admission, the “minimal” amount he can get away with to keep US political support. That is a fact.
The deadly assault on the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington DC on Wednesday night was a morally indefensible act that left two young people dead. The pair were staffers at the Israeli embassy, but all the evidence suggests they were struck at random. Even if he was heard chanting “Free Palestine” or “I did it for Gaza”, the gunman’s target was a Jewish institution filled with Jews. That makes it an antisemitic act. That too is a fact.
And yet, people struggle to hold both facts at once. They fear that by acknowledging one, they will somehow weaken the force of the other. Some seized on the killings in Washington to downplay the killings in Gaza; others did the reverse.
In the first category were those who used the deaths of Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim to argue that even to speak about the agony currently inflicted on Gaza by Israel is to incite terrorism. That was the move made by Netanyahu himself, a man never slow to exploit Jewish suffering for his own narrow political purposes. Earlier in the week, France, Canada and the UK had joined together to denounce Israel’s escalating offensive in Gaza and especially its policy of hunger, described in March by Israel’s defence minister as one of the country’s “main pressure levers” against Hamas. The shootings in DC gave Netanyahu an opening to hit back.
“I say to President Macron, Prime Minister Carney and Prime Minister Starmer, when mass murderers, rapists, baby killers and kidnappers thank you, you’re on the wrong side of justice,” the Israeli PM said, before deploying a phrase once favoured by the left: “You’re on the wrong side of history.”
His argument amounts to the claim, often made, that those who draw attention to the consequences of Israeli policy are guilty of “delegitimising” Israel. It does not occur to Netanyahu or his allies that what might undermine Israeli legitimacy in the eyes of a watching world is not the condemnation of Israel’s actions, or the reporting of them, but the actions themselves.
Again, two statements, apparently in tension, can be true at the same time. Journalists who this week demanded that Israel and Egypt make Gaza accessible to international news organisations were right to do so: the facts need to be known. Those facts, once known, may well drive people into a state of rage – even murderous rage – which is why they have to be handled with scrupulous care.
And so, the UN humanitarian chief, Tom Fletcher, has been right to be clear and full-throated in his demands for Israel to let food and medicine into Gaza, but was wrong to suggest that 14,000 babies in Gaza would die within 48 hours – a statement that later had to be corrected, because that warning applied to what would happen if the state of siege was maintained not for another 48 hours, but for a full year. Grave enough, but not the same. Deep and lethal hatreds are at work here; people can be stirred to violence very easily. There is little room to be casual.
I would say the same of Yair Golan, a former general and now leader of Israel’s opposition Democrats party. He deserves credit for demanding Israelis face up to and look hard at what so many prefer not to see. This week he warned, “Israel is on the way to becoming a pariah state, like South Africa was, if we don’t return to acting like a sane country,” adding that “a sane country does not fight against civilians, does not kill babies as a hobby, and does not give itself the aim of expelling populations.” That reference to baby-killing, the use of the word “hobby”, immediately allowed his critics to say he was reviving the antisemitic blood libel that cast Jews as the ritual slayers of Christian children.
This whole terrain is perilous and has to be navigated with great care, whether from within the conflict or without – and, again, that means realising that two things can be true at once. Yes, it’s true that anti-Zionism is not always antisemitic. But that doesn’t mean it’s never antisemitic. Gary Lineker thought he was posting an anti-Zionist video. He failed to see it came attached to antisemitic imagery, in the form of a rat, a favourite Nazi shorthand for Jew.
That episode was a reminder that, much as we might want these categories to be neat and hermetically sealed – “Zionism” over here and fair game for attack; “Jews” over there and protected by anti-racism – the boundary between them is blurred and porous. A man in Washington was angry with Israel and it was a Jewish museum that ended up under deadly fire.
There are countless distinctions like that to be made; complex, apparently contradictory statements to be held in mind all at the same time. But it’s impossible to see them when blinded by a rage and loathing that will not be quelled, when blinded by mutual hatred of biblical proportions. Agha no longer likes to speak in terms of peace or resolving the conflict, but rather of more modest “arrangements” that might keep these furies in check. Either way, one way or the other, this needs to end.
Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist
New Pentagon spokesperson promoted antisemitic conspiracy theory last year
The US department of defense, which has held just one news conference this year, announced on Friday that it has a new press secretary, Kingsley Wilson, who has repeatedly shared an antisemitic conspiracy theory promoted by neo-Nazis.
As NPR’s Tom Dreisbach reported in March, Wilson claimed in a post on X last summer that Leo Frank, a Jewish man who was lynched by an antisemitic mob in Georgia in 1915 after being falsely accused of raping and murdering a young girl, “raped & murdered a 13-year-old girl” and “ tried to frame a black man for his crime”.
Wilson posted that false claim in response to a post from the Anti-Defamation League commemoration the 109th anniversary of Frank’s lunching, and noting that Frank had received a posthumous pardon from the state of Georgia in 1986. The 1915 lynching spurred the creation of the ADL.
As NPR explained, neo-Nazis have continued to claim that Frank was guilty, and a group of neo-Nazis protested the Broadway musical “Parade,” which dramatizes Frank’s trial and lynching, in 2023.
Wilson previously endorsed the neo-Nazi conspiracy theory that same year, in response to a tweet from the head of the ADL.
“White supremacists and other antisemites have long used conspiracy theories about the Leo Frank case to cast doubt on the circumstances of the antisemitic lynching,” an ADL spokesperson told the Guardian in March. “We are deeply disturbed that any public official would parrot these hateful and false conspiracy theories, and we hope Kingsley Wilson will immediately retract her remarks.”
Wilson has served in the Pentagon press office since January, before being promoted on Friday. When her repeated endorsement of the attacks on Leo Frank were first reported in March, the American Jewish Committee said in a statement that she was “clearly unfit for her role”.
“Anyone who posts antisemitic conspiracy theories lifted right out of the neo-Nazi playbook should not be in public office”, the AJC wrote in March. Two months later, and just days after two Israeli embassy staffers were murdered as they left an AJC event in Washington, Wilson has been given a much more prominent role in the Trump administration, as the Pentagon’s chief spokesperson.
Tom Malinowski, a former diplomat and Democratic member of Congress, noted on X that Wilson was promoted by Pete Hegseth, the defense secretary, despite Wilson’s recently revealed history of promoting an antisemitic conspiracy theory. “Please don’t tell me this administration gives a damn about anti-Semitism”, Malinowski wrote.
Last year, Wilson also endorsed the “great replacement theory”, which has inspired antisemitic violence. “The Great Replacement isn’t a right-wing conspiracy theory”, she wrote on X last August,” it’s reality”.
Wilson previously served as a spokesperson for the Center for Renewing America, a Christian nationalist group founded by Russ Vought, a Project 2025 architect who is now the director of the White House Office of Management and Budget. Wilson in the daughter of Steve Cortes, a Fox News contributor and former Trump campaign operative who served on Trump’s National Hispanic Advisory Council.
Trump administration is minimizing white supremacist threat, officials warn
Coming changes at the state department follow pattern of moving resources away from programs that focus on preventing far-right violence
US state department employees recently opened up their emails to find a PDF to their new “style guide”, which dictates what language and terminology they can and can’t use.
According to this new updated guide, the term “racially or ethnically motivated violent extremism”– “REMVE” or “RMVE” – was now banned, except in situations where they were legally compelled to use it.
While style guide updates in government agencies that tinker with acronyms between administrations are not unusual, the document did not yet propose an alternative term for the threat from the violent far right.
Current and former state department officials told the Guardian that this was just one reason why they are concerned about how seriously the Trump administration will take the ongoing threat from white supremacists at home and abroad.
Over the last six years, the state department caught up to European partners by recognizing the transnational threat posed by the radical far right – after decades of laser focus on jihadist terrorism.
In January, one week before Donald Trump returned to the White House, the state department took action against the white supremacist collective Terrorgram, designating it as a foreign terrorist organization and linking it to a shooting at an LGBTQ+ bar in Slovakia, a knife attack at a mosque in Turkey and a planned attack on energy facilities in New Jersey.
It was the third “racially or ethnically motivated violent extremist” group to ever face terrorist designation or sanctions from the state department. First was the Russian Imperial Movement in 2020, and later the neo-Nazi Nordic Resistance in 2024.
In addition to the new ban on using language to refer to the threat of white supremacists, last month Marco Rubio, the secretary of state, unveiled a plan for huge cuts at the state department, which would result in the elimination of more than a hundred offices and about 700 jobs – including those whose portfolios include racially motivated violent extremism.
Among the offices on the chopping block is the Office for Countering Violent Extremism, or “CVE”, which works on identifying root causes of radicalization and extremism to prevent terrorist attacks before they happen.
CVE began looking at international white supremacist terrorism around 2019. Now, that threat accounts for about a third of their work. Rubio said in his announcement of the plan that the current state department was “beholden to a radical political ideology”.
The coming changes at the state department follow a pattern of moving resources away from programs that work on the threat of the far right since Trump took office. In March, the FBI scaled back an office that was focused on domestic extremism. The FBI’s joint terrorism taskforces, which investigated domestic and international terrorist threats, were redirected to assist in the president’s immigration enforcement operations.
Meanwhile, offices at the Department of Homeland Security, similar to the state department’s CVE, which worked on threat prevention, including from the far right, have also seen cuts and funding for grants has been terminated.
“If you’re dismantling the offices that deal with those threats, you’re dismantling the administration’s ability to deal with the far right,” said William Braniff who left his role as director of the DHS’s Center for Prevention, Partnerships and Programs (CP3) earlier this year and now heads American University’s Polarization and Extremism Research and Innovation Lab (Peril) in the school of public affairs.
Officials and experts interviewed by the Guardian suspected that the cuts to those programs, particularly to violence prevention programs, probably stemmed from a desire to just “move fast and break things” in the spirit of the “department of government efficiency” (Doge), rather than a pointed agenda to upend the government’s ability to track and battle the far right.
Some also fear that they are looking to prioritize threats that play well with Trump’s base; at the same time, they are deprioritizing the threat from the far right, which Trump and his allies have cast as a politicized smokescreen for the Biden administration to go after white Christian Americans. (The term “REMVE” was already seen as a concession, to avoid accusations of politicization; officials note that America’s partner countries are free to use the term “far right).
“Previous administrations weren’t trying to censor the radical right, they were dealing with real actors on the right wing,” said Jason Blazakis, former director of the counter-terrorism finance and designations office at the Bureau of Counterterrorism, who now teaches terrorism studies at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies.
“People say that this administration doesn’t want to talk about this [the threat from the far right] any more, and I think there’s an element of truth to that.”
Blazakis says the new focus of counter-terrorism is “threats that are seen as political winners in the Maga movement,” such as cartels and Islamist jihadism.
Trump administration is minimizing white supremacist threat, officials warn
Coming changes at the state department follow pattern of moving resources away from programs that focus on preventing far-right violence
Tess Owen
Sat 24 May 2025 12.00 BST
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US state department employees recently opened up their emails to find a PDF to their new “style guide”, which dictates what language and terminology they can and can’t use.
According to this new updated guide, the term “racially or ethnically motivated violent extremism”– “REMVE” or “RMVE” – was now banned, except in situations where they were legally compelled to use it.
While style guide updates in government agencies that tinker with acronyms between administrations are not unusual, the document did not yet propose an alternative term for the threat from the violent far right.
Current and former state department officials told the Guardian that this was just one reason why they are concerned about how seriously the Trump administration will take the ongoing threat from white supremacists at home and abroad.
Over the last six years, the state department caught up to European partners by recognizing the transnational threat posed by the radical far right – after decades of laser focus on jihadist terrorism.
In January, one week before Donald Trump returned to the White House, the state department took action against the white supremacist collective Terrorgram, designating it as a foreign terrorist organization and linking it to a shooting at an LGBTQ+ bar in Slovakia, a knife attack at a mosque in Turkey and a planned attack on energy facilities in New Jersey.
It was the third “racially or ethnically motivated violent extremist” group to ever face terrorist designation or sanctions from the state department. First was the Russian Imperial Movement in 2020, and later the neo-Nazi Nordic Resistance in 2024.
In addition to the new ban on using language to refer to the threat of white supremacists, last month Marco Rubio, the secretary of state, unveiled a plan for huge cuts at the state department, which would result in the elimination of more than a hundred offices and about 700 jobs – including those whose portfolios include racially motivated violent extremism.
Among the offices on the chopping block is the Office for Countering Violent Extremism, or “CVE”, which works on identifying root causes of radicalization and extremism to prevent terrorist attacks before they happen.
CVE began looking at international white supremacist terrorism around 2019. Now, that threat accounts for about a third of their work. Rubio said in his announcement of the plan that the current state department was “beholden to a radical political ideology”.
The coming changes at the state department follow a pattern of moving resources away from programs that work on the threat of the far right since Trump took office. In March, the FBI scaled back an office that was focused on domestic extremism. The FBI’s joint terrorism taskforces, which investigated domestic and international terrorist threats, were redirected to assist in the president’s immigration enforcement operations.
Meanwhile, offices at the Department of Homeland Security, similar to the state department’s CVE, which worked on threat prevention, including from the far right, have also seen cuts and funding for grants has been terminated.
“If you’re dismantling the offices that deal with those threats, you’re dismantling the administration’s ability to deal with the far right,” said William Braniff who left his role as director of the DHS’s Center for Prevention, Partnerships and Programs (CP3) earlier this year and now heads American University’s Polarization and Extremism Research and Innovation Lab (Peril) in the school of public affairs.
Officials and experts interviewed by the Guardian suspected that the cuts to those programs, particularly to violence prevention programs, probably stemmed from a desire to just “move fast and break things” in the spirit of the “department of government efficiency” (Doge), rather than a pointed agenda to upend the government’s ability to track and battle the far right.
Some also fear that they are looking to prioritize threats that play well with Trump’s base; at the same time, they are deprioritizing the threat from the far right, which Trump and his allies have cast as a politicized smokescreen for the Biden administration to go after white Christian Americans. (The term “REMVE” was already seen as a concession, to avoid accusations of politicization; officials note that America’s partner countries are free to use the term “far right).
“Previous administrations weren’t trying to censor the radical right, they were dealing with real actors on the right wing,” said Jason Blazakis, former director of the counter-terrorism finance and designations office at the Bureau of Counterterrorism, who now teaches terrorism studies at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies.
“People say that this administration doesn’t want to talk about this [the threat from the far right] any more, and I think there’s an element of truth to that.”
Blazakis says the new focus of counter-terrorism is “threats that are seen as political winners in the Maga movement,” such as cartels and Islamist jihadism.
At the state department, rumors had been swirling for weeks that Sebastian Gorka, who is serving as senior director for counter-terrorism on the national security council, was looking to ban the term “REMVE”. (When the Guardian contacted the state department to request comment on the style guide change, our inquiry was directed to Gorka).
In his current role, Gorka has plenty of influence on state department initiatives. During his first brief tenure with the Trump administration, reporting highlighted his ties to far-right groups in his native Hungary. He also made comments downplaying the threat of white supremacy just days before neo-Nazis violently rallied in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017. At Politico’s recent Security Summit, Gorka outlined his vision for counter-terrorism policy.
“What we are doing right now is preparing the new US counter-terrorism strategy, refocusing on the real cause of jihadism, which is the ideology of jihad,” he said.
Formal recognition of the threat from modern white supremacist terrorism by the US government came during Trump’s first administration. A number of deadly attacks around the world, from Christchurch, New Zealand, to El Paso, Texas, to Halle, Germany, highlighted the growing danger of an increasingly globally interconnected far right who were united by a shared belief in “great replacement” conspiracy theories, which stoke fears of immigrants of color outnumbering populations in white-majority countries.
Speaking before Congress in 2020 Chris Wray, then the FBI chief, for the first time identified white supremacist violence as the top domestic terror threat. The US intelligence community put out a report last year identifying white supremacist or neo-Nazi extremists as among the top global terror threats.
Getting the state department to care about the threat from the global far right was initially an uphill battle, sources told the Guardian.
Even as coming cuts suggest resources will be taken away from that threat, it hasn’t gone away.
This week, German police arrested teen members of a far-right terrorist cell on suspicion of targeting migrants and political opponents in attacks with the broader goal of destabilizing democracy. Police say that the cell was part of an organization called Last Defence Wave, which organized across 70 chat groups around Germany. Authorities in Brazil recently said that they foiled a planned bomb attack on Lady Gaga’s concert by a far-right anti-LGBTQ+ hate group.
And some officials at the state department fear that far-right terrorist groups are becoming emboldened in light of the Trump administration, pivoting attention away from them. For example, the US neo-Nazi group The Base, whose leader is based in Russia, appears to be looking to ramp up violence overseas, recently calling for targeted attacks in Ukraine.
One official characterized the cuts to violence prevention programs at the state department, including those that work on the threat from the far right, as “excessive and careless reduction in government” that “will make us less safe”.
