Ken Klippenstein, a national security reporter who previously worked as an investigative journalist at The Intercept, was the first reporter to publish the Manifesto written by Elias Rodriguez, the man who shot two Israeli embassy staff members in Washington, D.C.
It appears the FBI and federal government didn’t want the Manifesto released to the public. Klippenstein had FBI agents show up at his door asking him about it. They questioned why he was the first to report on the shooting (He says it took him 4-5 hours to gather information and verify the authenticity of the Manifesto, so it wasn’t that soon after the incident). The agents implied that he had some connection with the shooter enabling him to get the facts so quickly.
Maybe Ken is just an amazing investigative journalist who happens to be better than law enforcement when it comes to investigating. Seriously, though, I guarantee they felt embarrassed/angry that a reporter had obtained the Manifesto before they did (unless they did. No one knows for sure since they were never going to release it to the public).
One possible explanation as to why federal officials would want to keep the Manifesto hidden: the government prefers to keep the public in the dark about the shooter’s motive because it gives them an opportunity to provide the narrative they want us to believe vs. reality.
In fact, Republican Representative Randy Fine was on television lying about what was written in the Manifesto. Fine claimed Rodriguez mentioned Intifada in his Manifesto, which is a lie. He said Gaza should be “nuked” and called Palestinians “evil.” His opponent in the Florida House race was Muslim, so Fine gave him the nickname, “Jihad Josh Weil.”
The man is a deplorable racist that should never have made it to Congress.
If anything, his lies serve to strengthen the notion that every Manifesto or other important document should be released to the public. It’s better to allow everyone to read the original document and come to their own conclusions than to allow those in power to feed us whatever they want us to believe—fact or fantasy.
Even worse, when facts aren’t made readily accessible, a vacuum is created that, more often than not, ends up being filled by insane conspiracy theories and lies. Rather than allow misinformation to spread, just give us the facts.
The following Manifesto, written by the Israeli museum shooter, was first published on Ken Klippenstein’s Substack. Please show your appreciation by visiting the link and subscribing. Ken is frequently the first to report on important events. His expertise is in National Security.
The Manifesto of Elias Rodriguez
*Paragraph formatting was added to make the single, long block of text easier to read. Don’t read anything into when/where paragraphs end or begin. The writer didn’t use paragraphs, they’ve been added to this copy of the document by the Editor.
May 20, 2025
Halilintar is a word that means something like thunder or lightning. In the wake of an act people look for a text to fix its meaning, so here’s an attempt. The atrocities committed by Israelis against Palestine defy description and defy quantification. Instead of reading descriptions mostly we watch them unfold on video, sometimes live.
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. 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.
The Gaza information office includes the ten thousand under the rubble with the dead in their own count. In news reports there have been those “ten thousand” under the rubble for months now, despite the continual making of more rubble and repeated bombing of rubble again and again and the bombing of tents amid the rubble.
Like the Yemen death toll which had been frozen at some few thousand for years under Saudi-UK-US bombardment before being belatedly revealed to stand at 500k dead, all of these figures are almost surely a criminal undercount. I have no trouble believing the estimates that put the toll at 100,000 or more. More have been murdered since March of this year than in “Protective Edge” and “Cast Lead” put together.
What more at this point can one say about the proportion of mangled and burned and exploded human beings whom were children. We who let this happen will never deserve the Palestinians’ forgiveness. They’ve let us know as much.
An armed action is not necessarily a military action. It usually is not. Usually it is theater and spectacle, a quality it shares with many unarmed actions.
Nonviolent protest in the opening weeks of the genocide seemed to signal some sort of turning point. Never before had so many tens of thousands joined the Palestinians in the streets across the West. Never before had so many American politicians been forced to concede that, rhetorically at least, the Palestinians were human beings, too.
But thus far the rhetoric has not amounted to much. The Israelis themselves boast about their own shock at the free hand the Americans have given them to exterminate the Palestinians.
Public opinion has shifted against the genocidal apartheid state, and the American government has simply shrugged, they’ll do without public opinion then, criminalize it where they can, suffocate it with bland reassurances that they’re doing all they can to restrain Israel where it cannot criminalize protest outright.
Aaron Bushnell and others sacrificed themselves in the hopes of stopping the massacre and the state works to make us feel their sacrifice was made in vain, that there is no hope in escalating for Gaza and no point in bringing the war home. We can’t let them succeed. Their sacrifices were not made in vain.
The impunity that representatives of our government feel at abetting this slaughter should be revealed as an illusion, then. The impunity we see is the worst for those of us in immediate proximity to the genocidaires.
A surgeon who treated victims of the Mayan genocide by the Guatemalan state recounts an instance in which he was operating on a patient who’d been critically injured during a massacre when, suddenly, armed gunmen entered the room and shot the patient to death on his operating table, laughing as they killed him.
The physician said the worst part was seeing the killers, well known to him, openly swagger down local streets in the years after.
Elsewhere a man of conscience once attempted to throw Robert McNamara off a Martha’s Vineyard-bound ferry into the sea, incensed at the same impunity and arrogance he saw in that butcher of Vietnam as he sat in the ferry’s lounge laughing with friends. The man took issue with McNamara’s “very posture, telling you, ‘My history is fine, and I can be slumped over a bar like this with my good friend Ralph here and you’ll have to lump it.'”
The man did not succeed in heaving McNamara off a catwalk into the water, the former secretary of state managed to cling to the railing and clamber back to his feet, but the assailant explicated the value of the attempt by saying “Well, I got him outside, just the two of us, and suddenly his history wasn’t so fine, was it?”
A word about the morality of armed demonstration. 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.
I love you Mom, Dad, baby sis, the rest of my familia, including you, O*
Free Palestine
-Elias Rodriguez
It’s striking to me how intelligent, well-spoken, and “sane” Rodriguez sounds in his writing. It doesn’t fit the profile of the insane, murderous terrorist that officials and the media have made him out to be. I agree with a lot of what he’s saying (no, I’m not going to hurt anyone). Many of us feel helpless as we watch the horrors of what Israel is doing in Gaza. I’ve written extensively on the subject as a method of getting the constant thoughts out of my head.
I’ve written about:
The 18,000+ children who’ve been killed. Not including the thousands who’ve had limbs amputated without anesthesia or pain relief.
The young, 19-year-old engineer who was filmed raising his arm for help as he burned to death after his tent was bombed.
The toddler who watched his mother, holding his 1-year-old sibling—both of them engulfed in flames as they burned to death just before he succumbed to a head injury suffered from the bombing of their tent on the beach—away from the bombing and chaos in Gaza…
The dozens and dozens of Palestinian children who are now orphans.
The Where’s Daddy program used by the IDF that alerted them when a male Palestinian arrived home so they could bomb him there in order to kill his wife and children along with him.
The hundreds of journalists targeted and killed by Israel to prevent the truth of what was happening from getting out.
The IDF soldiers who posed with the dead bodies of the World Central Kitchen workers, posting the photos in their Telegram channel, laughing about the “dead whore,” referring to the woman.
I could go on and on and on, but I won’t. Everything published on the site about Gaza and the Palestinians can be found on the Topic Page.
