Elias Rodriguez, a 30-year-old man from Chicago, allegedly murdered two Israeli embassy staffers outside the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday evening.
Rather than flee the scene, Rodriguez went into the museum, eventually pulled out a keffiyeh, admitted “I did this for Gaza,” and then began chanting “Free, free Palestine!” as the cops led him away in handcuffs.
In other words, he exhibited pride rather than remorse. What type of person lacks remorse immediately after murdering strangers? The psychopaths and sociopaths that doctors now diagnose under the umbrella term “antisocial personality disorder.”
No evidence now appears of Rodriguez displaying psychopathic or sociopathic behavior prior to Wednesday. Perhaps something emerges. Of what we know now, he exhibits numerous hallmarks of a successful adult. He boasted a degree from the University of Chicago-Illinois, a job from the American Osteopathic Information Association, and an apartment in what looks like a well-manicured complex in the Albany Park neighborhood of Chicago.
So what caused him to decide to murder two beautiful, also cause-oriented, people in his age group? Political zeal effectively imbued in Rodriguez the same characteristics that allow those diagnosed with antisocial personality disorder to kill without qualm.
Zealotry, characterized by such attributes as an inability to compromise, intolerance toward opposing views, demonization of the enemy, and passion overwhelming reason, increasingly looks like a synonym for “leftist.”
Last year, Luigi Mangione, and at least one of the two wannabe assassins of Donald Trump, demonstrated the dangers of left-wing fanatics unwilling to consider: Maybe I’m wrong? (RELATED: Luigi Mangione’s Cognitive Dissonance)
Rodriguez’s strong political beliefs on race, socialism, and much else invaded both his professional and personal life.
Before he became a history maker, he worked for a group called HistoryMakers that describes itself as “committed to preserving and making widely accessible the untold personal stories of both well-known and unsung African Americans.”
In 2017, he protested as a member of the Party for Socialism and Liberation outside the home of then-Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel regarding a proposed Amazon project in the city.
“The wealth that Amazon has brought to Seattle has not been shared with its Black residents,” Rodriguez explained. “[Amazon’s] whitening of Seattle is structurally racist and a direct danger to all workers who live in that city. So do we in Chicago and all across the country want a nation of cities dominated and occupied by massive corporations where only the rich and White can live and the vast majority of us must live on edges of the city and society living in deeper and deeper poverty? I don’t think so.”
The original Zealots, ironically, were Jews who wished to expel foreigners from Israel. So many of the zealots on the contemporary Israel-Palestine question are, like Mr. Rodriguez, neither Jewish nor Muslim but instead outsiders motivated by abstractions.
When you’re saving humanity, who has time to worry about this or that human?
“Humanity doesn’t exempt one from accountability,” Rodriguez wrote in a manifesto. “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.”
When your ideology instructs that murdering a beautiful young couple amounts to “the only sane thing to do,” then such beliefs act as a disorienting force as much as psychopathy, sociopathy, or 37 hits of LSD does.
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