From the BLM riots to the DC shooting in five short years

Jonathan S. Tobin

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Black Lives Matter protest. Credit: Shane Aldendorff/Pixabay.

The path that led Elias Rodriguez, a 31-year-old college-educated Hispanic man with a professional career working for a medical organization, to embrace a belief in “Free Palestine”—shorthand for the destruction of Israel—was likely complex. But however it started, it ultimately led him to act out that genocidal idea by killing two young Israeli embassy staffers in Washington on May 21.

To fully understand this tragic event and the way it marked the logical culmination of a period of anti-Israel and antisemitic agitation, it is necessary to place it in the full context of what has been happening on the American left since another watershed moment. The killing of George Floyd by a Minneapolis policeman almost exactly five years ago on May 25, 2020, set off a summer of “mostly peaceful” demonstrations and riots across the United States.

The moral panic about race that ensued after that Memorial Day incident transformed political discourse and culture. And it marked the rise of an ideology associated with the Black Lives Matter movement that encompassed more than just the widespread belief in the myth that African-Americans were being routinely hunted and killed by the police. The belief in the toxic myths of critical race theory, intersectionality, settler-colonialism and woke catechism of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI)—all of which became a new orthodoxy from which dissent wasn’t allowed—came to dominate American society.

An obsession with race

As we soon learned, the BLM mantra wasn’t merely a revisionist attempt to frame the United States as an irredeemably racist nation. Critical race theory divided the world into two immutable groups of people of color and white oppressors forever at war with each other. Unsurprisingly, this neo-Marxist mindset falsely categorized Jews and Israel as part of the “white oppressor” class, despite the fact that the majority of Israelis originate from other areas of the Middle East from which they were forced to flee or expelled.

It is only by referencing this dogma can it be understood why someone like Rodriguez would wind up murdering two strangers in cold blood because he assumed that both were Jewish and connected to Israel since they were attending an event at the Capital Jewish Museum.

The killing was carried out by a man apparently immersed in the politics of the far left and participated in “pro-Palestinian” protests. He shouted “Free, free Palestine” before being taken into custody and reportedly told police, “I did it for Palestine. I did it for Gaza.” The manifesto found at his Chicago home spoke of his belief that peaceful demonstrations against Israel were insufficient and that the “perpetrators and abettors of genocide” had “forfeited their humanity.” It also spoke of the “morality” of “armed action.”

This crime is being dismissed by some as a “lone wolf” incident that can’t be linked to fashionable “criticism” of Israel rooted in lies about Israel committing genocide or starving Palestinian babies. Others will dispute that it has anything to do with the anti-Israel cause, and the wave of antisemitism and hatred for the Jewish state and Jews that has surged since the Hamas-led Palestinian Arab attacks on southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. Such assertions serve the purposes of those who wish to distance the murders from the widespread acceptance of blood libels against Jews linked to the war in Gaza against Hamas that Israel has been fighting for the past 19 months.

Mainstreaming blood libels

Since that date, the American left has treated Israel as the villain of the war that began with the largest mass slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust and views its efforts to eradicate Hamas as the real crime. With the help of the media, popular culture and the left wing of the Democratic Party, invective against Israel and open antisemitism has gone mainstream in a way unprecedented since the Second World War.

Such anti-Israel and antisemitic sentiments are not new. They’ve been part of the far left’s toolbox for more than half a century since the Soviet-inspired “Zionism is racism” campaign became a popular slogan in the Communist bloc and across the Third World. But the support it has gained in mainstream American political discourse—to the point where, as the latest Gallup tracking poll tells us, those who identify as Democrats now support the Palestinian cause over that of Israel by a staggering 59% to 21% margin, while Republicans and independents still overwhelmingly back the Jewish state—would have been unimaginable without the impact that the BLM summer had on American life.

The point being is that if you believe that America is racist, it’s that much easier to believe the same of Israel. At the heart of the turn against the Jewish state isn’t a reasoned critique of the Middle East conflict, which goes on because of the Palestinian Arabs’ consistent refusal to accept the legitimacy of a Jewish state, no matter where its borders might be drawn. Nor is it really about what is happening in Gaza since its Hamas rulers launched the current war, which could end the moment they release the remaining Israeli hostages and agree to surrender their rule over the Strip.

The argument about Israel isn’t about a belief in a two-state solution that the Palestinians don’t want or opinions about Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his government. It is a conviction that Israel is a manifestation of racism, colonialism and oppression against people of color. That is why the mobs on college campuses and in the streets of American cities who have sought to make life intolerable for Jews act not merely out of extremism, but with a sense that their cause is just and linked to a great progressive crusade.

The effort to mainstream the idea that Israelis and Jews are guilty of horrible crimes that must be punished inevitably led to the Washington murders. As such, it is part and parcel of the way a radical BLM movement and its misguided liberal enablers, including those in the Jewish community such as the Anti-Defamation League and the American Jewish Committee (the agency that sponsored the May 21 event that ended tragically) essentially legitimized a way of looking at the world that racialized political discourse.

Not every person who was duped into taking part in the BLM demonstrations that gained widespread support from political liberals in the summer of 2020 necessarily agreed with everything that movement espoused, including its hatred for Israel and antisemitism. Many, if not most, participants—aside from those who burned and looted city neighborhoods or attacked police in their thousands—thought they were merely expressing support for civil rights and outrage at an unjust, brutal killing caught on a video that went viral.

By the same token, it’s possible that some of those screaming for Jewish genocide (“From the river to the sea!”) and terrorism against Jews (“Globalize the intifada!”) don’t fully understand the implications of what they are saying or doing. The results, though, are now obvious: The Washington shooting exemplifies the fatal implications of mainstreaming such slogans.

Trump’s necessary pushback

Nevertheless, it is impossible to imagine or understand how we have arrived at a moment in American history when the public square is awash in antisemitic discourse without comprehending how the spread of “progressive” ideas about race and identity since May 25, 2020, made it possible.

The ubiquity of pro-Hamas mobs on college campuses and the violence directed at Jews in the last 19 months culminating in the murders on May 21, 2025, are a direct result of the success that leftists have had in indoctrinating so many Americans in their doctrines. Only by convincing students and so many others, like Rodriguez, who are immersed in fashionable notions that smear Israelis and Jews and valorize Islamist terrorists, could these lies about Israel, Zionism and Jews become so popular. The process by which the left completed its long march through our institutions that culminated in the BLM summer led just as inevitably to the deaths of two young people in front of a Jewish venue.

That is why so many well-meaning liberals and groups like the American Jewish Committee and others who have expressed their horror at the murder of 30-year-old Yaron Lischinsky and 26-year-old Sarah Milgrim—the two murdered Israeli embassy staffers—are wrong to oppose President Donald Trump’s efforts to rid American higher education of woke ideologues, as well as to deport foreign students who have violated the terms of their visas by taking part in antisemitic lawbreaking. If there is to be a much-needed pushback against the post-Oct. 7 surge in Jew-hatred, it cannot be separated from the false leftist doctrines that fuel it. Trump is seeking to attack the root cause of this hatred while his liberal critics look away from it to stay in sync with their partisan allies.

The madness that took hold in the United States after the killing of Floyd was more than just the result of COVID counter-measures that induced mass hysteria or the spread of misinformation about police killings. And it was more than a deliberate attempt to undermine the enormous progress in race relations since the passage of federal civil-rights legislation in the 1970s. It was part of a broader neo-Marxist assault on Western civilization and the values of the American republic that had been percolating on the far left for decades. But beyond that, it was also a necessary element in the destructive process that led to the wave of leftist Jew-hatred that culminated in the shedding of innocent blood on American soil.

The best way to honor the victims and to ensure that such horrors are not repeated involves more than just turning all American Jewish institutions, synagogues and communal buildings into harder targets, necessary though that may be. It also means supporting the Trump administration’s vital campaign to punish those colleges and universities that have tolerated and enabled antisemitism and to guarantee that woke ideology no longer dominates them. We now know that those who chant for Jewish genocide abroad will, sooner or later, resort to the same sort of violence at home. The trail of these murders leads directly back not just to Oct. 7 but to the BLM summer of 2020. Ignoring that brutal fact will only lead to more hatred and bloodshed.

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Jonathan S. Tobin is editor-in-chief of the Jewish News Syndicate, a senior contributor for The Federalist, a columnist for Newsweek and a contributor to many other publications. He covers the American political scene, foreign policy, the U.S.-Israel relationship, Middle East diplomacy, the Jewish world and the arts. He hosts the JNS “Think Twice” podcast, both the weekly video program and the “Jonathan Tobin Daily” program, which are available on all major audio platforms and YouTube. Previously, he was executive editor, then senior online editor and chief political blogger, for Commentary magazine. Before that, he was editor-in-chief of The Jewish Exponent in Philadelphia and editor of the Connecticut Jewish Ledger. He has won more than 60 awards for commentary, art criticism and other writing. He appears regularly on television, commenting on politics and foreign policy. Born in New York City, he studied history at Columbia University.

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