An American blogger on Thursday published the final letter written by Elias Rodriguez, a far-left activist who carried out the deadly shooting at the Jewish Museum in Washington, killing two employees of the Israeli Embassy.
The blogger, Ken Klippenstein, claims that the signature and timestamp on the document indicate its authenticity. Other experts who chose to share the excerpt also believe it to be an original document.
In a lengthy, impassioned, and ideologically charged text, Rodriguez, a radical leftist from Chicago, claimed that Israel's conduct in the Gaza Strip, and in particular, American support for Israeli operations, had driven him to commit the terrorist attack.
"After a few months of rapidly mounting death tolls Israel had obliterated the capacity to even continue counting the dead, which has served its genocide well," Rodriguez wrote at the start of his letter. "At time of writing the Gaza health ministry records 53,000 killed by traumatic force, at least ten thousand lie under rubble, and who knows how many thousands more dead of preventable disease, hunger, with tens of thousands now at risk of imminent famine due to Israeli blockade, all enabled by Western and Arab government complicity."
In the letter's closing paragraph, Rodriguez justified his actions, writing: "Those of us against the genocide take satisfaction in arguing that the perpetrators and abettors have forfeited their humanity. I sympathize with this viewpoint and understand its value in soothing the psyche which cannot bear to accept the atrocities it witnesses, even mediated through the screen. But inhumanity has long since shown itself to be shockingly common, mundane, prosaically human. A perpetrator may then be a loving parent, a filial child, a generous and charitable friend, an amiable stranger, capable of moral strength at times when it suits him and sometimes even when it does not, and yet be a monster all the same. Humanity doesn't exempt one from accountability. The action would have been morally justified taken 11 years ago during Protective Edge, around the time I personally became acutely aware of our brutal conduct in Palestine. But I think to most Americans such an action would have been illegible, would seem insane. I am glad that today at least there are many Americans for which the action will be highly legible and, in some funny way, the only sane thing to do."
