A secular jihadi brings the intifada to Washington

Clifford D. May | FDD | May 28, 2025

Not so long ago, homicidal antisemitism in America was widely regarded as peculiar to neo-Nazis, white supremacists, and other far-right extremists, men such as Robert Gregory Bowers who, in 2018, murdered 11 worshippers and wounded six more at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, PA.

Meanwhile, within the American left, antisemitism has been metastasizing. Last week, we saw the results.

A college-educated terrorist shot and killed – “allegedly” if you insist, but he admitted it and there’s surveillance footage – Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim.

They were young Israeli embassy staffers, one Jewish, one Christian, though Elias Rodriguez could not have known such things.

What he did know is that they had just exited the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, D.C. following an event hosted by the American Jewish Committee. The event focused on providing humanitarian aid, not least to Gazans.

He shot both in the back, then fired repeatedly when they fell to the ground. After that, he tossed away his weapon and strolled into the museum. “There was a shooting,” he reportedly announced. “People have been shot! Call 911!” A woman tried to calm him. Another brought him a glass of water.

When the police arrived, he pulled out a red keffiyeh and shouted “Free, Free Palestine!”

Mr. Rodriguez, 31, is a leftist activist, affiliated with the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL), and the ANSWER (for Act Now to Stop War and End Racism) Coalition.

Both groups hate the West, America, Israel, and Jews. Does that qualify as intersectionality?

PSL and ANSWER reportedly receive funding from Neville Roy Singham, a multi-millionaire American citizen who makes his home in Shanghai and is married to Jodie Evans, a co-founder of Code Pink, a whacky-left group, one that delights in boisterously disrupting congressional hearings.

As for Mr. Rodriguez’s red keffiyeh, that’s associated with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), a secular, Marxist-Leninist organization.

The PFLP receives financial and military backing from Tehran. One of its spokesmen has referred to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) as “blood brothers” and “comrades.”

Designated as a terrorist organization by the U.S., the EU, and others, the PFLP supports “armed struggle” in alliance with Islamists. The annihilation of Israel is its primary goal.

A hypocrisy worth your attention: Leftists claim to champion “diversity and inclusion,” yet find it intolerable that one tiny Jewish state exists among the more that 20 Arab states and more than 50 Muslim states stretching from western Africa to eastern Asia.

Note, too, that no one who shouts, “Free Palestine!” means to suggest that people in Gaza and the West Bank should be guaranteed freedom of speech, press, religion, and assembly – rights enjoyed by Jewish, Christian, and Muslim Israelis.

Instead, the phrase is employed to express their demand that Israel be Judenfrei, German for Jew-free, the term the Nazis used to describe areas from which Jews had been eliminated through mass murder and/or forced transfers to concentration camps.

During World War II, Muslims intent on Jewish genocide allied with the Nazis.

The most enthusiastic Nazi fellow traveler was Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem and de facto leader of Palestinian Muslims. (They did not, in those days, self-identify as “Palestinians,” as did indigenous Jews of the Holy Land.)

He spent the war years in Berlin recruiting Muslims for Hitler’s Waffen-SS, and broadcasting Nazi propaganda into the Middle East.

After the defeat of the Nazis, the anti-Zionist project was adopted by the Soviet Union and the Communist International, aka the Comintern.

They refused to recognize Zionism as the national liberation movement of the Jewish people who reclaimed part of their ancient homeland that for centuries had been occupied by foreign empires and settler-colonists.

Instead, they denounced Zionism as bourgeois and incompatible with proletarian internationalism.

After the declaration of Israeli independence in 1948, they backed Israel’s enemies. They invented the slanderous meme that “Zionism is racism.”

Other radical leftists followed suit. In the 1970s, the Baader-Meinhof Group, also known as the Red Army Faction (RAF), denounced Israel as a tool of the capitalist West.

RAF members trained with the PFLP and, most infamously, collaborated with the PFLP in the June 27, 1976 hijacking of an Air France Flight.

After diverting the plane to Entebbe Airport in Uganda, the hijackers separated the Jewish passengers and held them hostage.

On July 4, Israeli commandoes launched a mission that freed 102 of 106 hostages. The mission leader, Yonatan Netanyahu, older brother of current Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, was the only Israeli soldier killed during the rescue.

The notorious terrorist Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, better known as Carlos the Jackal, personifies not just the alliance of leftist and Islamist terrorists but their convergence.

Born in Venezuela in 1949, he studied in Moscow and then trained with the PFLP. By his own count, 2,000 people were killed in more than 100 bombings, assassinations, and other attacks he coordinated.

Captured by French agents in Sudan in 1994, he was transferred to France and sentenced to life in prison.

Behind bars, he converted to Islam. In 2003, he published “Revolutionary Islam,” in which he praised the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 as a “lofty feat,” and expressed admiration for the Islamic Republic of Iran.

He called on “all revolutionaries, including those of the left, even atheists,” to accept the leadership of jihadis because they represent the only “transnational force capable of standing up against the enslavement of nations” by the West.

Today’s slogan, “Globalize the intifada!” is another way of issuing that same command. Mr. Rodriguez, the (alleged) executioner of a defenseless young woman and an unarmed young man, regards himself as such a revolutionary.

Members of the left/Islamist alliance encourage that delusion.

Clifford D. May is founder and president of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), a columnist for the Washington Times, and host of the “Foreign Podicy” podcast.

June 1, 2025 | 11 Comments »

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  2. “Children of October 7” premieres Monday, June 2nd on Paramount Plus.

    The Children of October 7 is a 2024 Israeli documentary film in which dancer and activist Montana Tucker interviews seven of the young victims of the October 7 Hamas-led attack on Israel.[3

    – Wikipedia

  3. I only posted that link to show the Communist leadership in these protests. I disagree with the. Videos premise that Jews are being attacked as white. black and Muslim antisemites don’t regard Jews as white and hate us more.

  4. OK. I see it’s still not back. The significance of this last link I posted is only the embedded video of a march in which the two leading banners are of Worker’s World Party which I mentioned in the post fquigley dismissed as little parties and personal stuff, and Freedom Socialist Party, the party of the DC shooter.

  5. By the way, I read The Forgotten Friendship on Scribd/Everand which are partnered book equivalents of Netflix. Somebody uploaded it. It’s there. You can access both with a Scribd membership.

  7. @Peloni Post You’re Welcome and thanks. disappeared. . Another one. May have forgotten link. Note Worker’s World and Freedom Socialist party banners in front in embedded clip of demo.

  8. Worker’s World and Freedom Socialist Party banners lead the march in this embedded clip. Recall I said Workers World, which started as a Trot party has been the main assist for every far left demo since the 80s, and the D.C. shooter who shouted “Free Palestine” after gunning down Elias Gonzalez, was a member of Freedom Socialist Party. By the way, both were ethnically Jewish. They described as a Christian of Jewish heritage.

    https://youtu.be/sxFqdIqBDMo?si=Yf6odKWIcePbm2Zy

    • @Sebastien
      Thanks, it’s back.

      Also, thanks for raising Kramer’s book once more. It is a very important source on a variety of topics which I highly recommend.

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  10. As a gesture to its Western Allies in World War II, Stalin unilaterally dissolved the Comintern on 15 May 1943. While its formal structures were dismantled, mechanisms of Soviet control over the international communist movement persisted and were later partially revived through the Cominform (1947–1956).

    The Soviet Union’s active promotion of anti-Zionism, often intertwined with antisemitism, can be traced through several key periods:
    1. Early Stages (1940s-1950s):
    Initial Support for Israel: Initially, the Soviet Union, under Stalin, adopted a pro-Zionist stance, supporting the 1947 UN Partition Plan and granting de jure recognition to Israel in 1948. This was driven by a desire to diminish British influence in the Middle East and a hope that Israel would become a socialist, pro-Soviet state.
    Shift in Policy: However, after Israel’s establishment, Stalin’s views shifted due to Israel’s growing ties with the United States and the West.
    Early Anti-Zionist Propaganda: By the late 1950s, the Soviet Union started engaging in anti-Zionist propaganda, although a particularly intense campaign would begin later. The Soviet press began to attack Zionism, Jewish culture, and “rootless cosmopolitanism”.
    2. Intensification After the Six-Day War (1967-1970s):
    Anti-Zionist Campaign: Following Israel’s victory in the 1967 Six-Day War, the Soviet Union launched a significant anti-Zionist campaign. This included official propaganda characterizing Zionism as racist, aggressive, and a tool of American imperialism.
    Framing Zionism as Racism: The Soviet Union actively promoted the idea of Zionism as racism, culminating in the 1975 UN General Assembly Resolution 3379, which equated Zionism with racism.
    “Zionology”: The Soviets developed a field of study called “Zionology” that framed Zionism as a reactionary and dangerous ideology.
    3. Creation of the Anti-Zionist Committee (1983):
    Official Propaganda Tool: The Soviet Union established the Anti-Zionist Committee of the Soviet Public (AZCSP) in 1983 as an official tool for disseminating anti-Zionist propaganda.
    Widespread Dissemination: The AZCSP and other Soviet institutions published and distributed a large volume of literature, including books, articles, and pamphlets, to promote their anti-Zionist views.
    4. Decline and Dissolution (Late 1980s-1990s):
    Gorbachev Era: With the advent of Mikhail Gorbachev’s reforms (Glasnost and Perestroika) in the late 1980s, the Soviet Union’s stance on Zionism began to soften.
    Restoration of Relations: Diplomatic relations with Israel were restored in 1991, shortly before the Soviet Union’s dissolution.
    Revocation of “Zionism is Racism”: The Soviet Union also supported the revocation of the UN resolution equating Zionism with racism in 1991.
    In Summary:
    While the Soviet Union initially supported the creation of Israel, its stance gradually shifted to active anti-Zionism, particularly after 1967. The intensity of the campaign varied over time, reaching a peak in the 1970s and early 1980s, before declining with the reforms of the late 1980s and ultimately ceasing with the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

    Though the Bolsheviks/Communists were anti-Zionist until WWII, as well. Illuminating book on the subject:

    “The Forgotten Friendship: Israel and the Soviet Union 1947-53, by Arnold Krammer

    efore I defected to America from Romania, leaving my post as chief of Romanian intelligence, I was responsible for giving Arafat about $200,000 in laundered cash every month throughout the 1970s. I also sent two cargo planes to Beirut a week, stuffed with uniforms and supplies. Other Soviet bloc states did much the same….

    I was given the KGB’s “personal file” on Arafat. He was an Egyptian bourgeois turned into a devoted Marxist by KGB foreign intelligence. The KGB had trained him at its Balashikha special-ops school east of Moscow and in the mid-1960s decided to groom him as the future PLO leader. First, the KGB destroyed the official records of Arafat’s birth in Cairo, replacing them with fictitious documents saying that he had been born in Jerusalem and was therefore a Palestinian by birth.

    The KGB’s disinformation department then went to work on Arafat’s four-page tract called “Falastinuna” (Our Palestine), turning it into a 48-page monthly magazine for the Palestinian terrorist organization al-Fatah. Arafat had headed al-Fatah since 1957. The KGB distributed it throughout the Arab world and in West Germany, which in those days played host to many Palestinian students….

    Arafat was an important undercover operative for the KGB. Right after the 1967 Six Day Arab-Israeli war, Moscow got him appointed to chairman of the PLO. Egyptian ruler Gamal Abdel Nasser, a Soviet puppet, proposed the appointment. In 1969 the KGB asked Arafat to declare war on American “imperial-Zionism” during the first summit of the Black Terrorist International, a neo-Fascist pro-Palestine organization financed by the KGB and Libya’s Moammar Gadhafi. It appealed to him so much, Arafat later claimed to have invented the imperial-Zionist battle cry. But in fact, “imperial-Zionism” was a Moscow invention, a modern adaptation of the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” and long a favorite tool of Russian intelligence to foment ethnic hatred. The KGB always regarded anti-Semitism plus anti-imperialism as a rich source of anti-Americanism….

    In March 1978 I secretly brought Arafat to Bucharest for final instructions on how to behave in Washington. “You simply have to keep on pretending that you’ll break with terrorism and that you’ll recognize Israel — over, and over, and over,” Ceausescu told him for the umpteenth time….

    Mr. Pacepa was the highest ranking intelligence officer ever to have defected from the former Soviet bloc. The author of “Red Horizons” (Regnery, 1987), he is finishing a book on the origins of current anti-Americanism.

    Sources:
    Wall Street Journal (September 24, 2003)

    https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/yasser-arafat-s-kgb-connections

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