Mainstream media, and the U.S. bipartisan consensus, criminalize protest by conflating criticism of Israel with antisemitism, conflating emotional distress with harassment, and conflating disruption—no matter how peaceful—with violence.
After describing these facts (and distancing itself from the well-documented fact that the Israeli military was committing atrocities against Palestinians), The New York Times immediately asked, “Has there been a rise in antisemitic attacks?” Like the major organizations that track “antisemitic incidents,” the Times does not distinguish between incidents that target Israel and its policies, and incidents that target Jews. The Times thus joins the bipartisan consensus that has increasingly made it impossible to name or protest Israel’s daily unfolding crimes against humanity without being accused of antisemitism.
I don’t have any inside information on Elias Rodriguez’s motives, beyond his words at the scene and the manifesto attributed to him. Neither these sources nor the evidence compiled by the FBI and the Times provide any hints of antisemitism. Instead, they express his outrage at Israeli atrocities in Gaza. But that didn’t stop the NYT, The Washington Post, NPR, and other sources from leaping to the conclusion.
When Does a Movement Get Blamed for a Lone Shooter?
The incident bears comparison to Luigi Mangione’s alleged shooting of Brian Thompson, the UnitedHealthcare CEO, in December 2024. In both cases, the accused declared a clear political motive for the killing. In both cases, the alleged killers expressed political sentiments widely shared in the U.S. population: outrage at health insurance companies for their callous treatment of their customers, and outrage at Israel for its ongoing genocide in Gaza.
A smaller portion of the population has actually mobilized for change in both areas, organizing for Medicare for All and for a cease-fire, aid, and justice for Palestinians.
There is one big contradiction in the coverage though. In the Luigi Mangione case, the press reported on the outpouring of popular support for his act of rage with sympathy. “The crux of their support is based on a deep resentment and anger at the American healthcare system and insurance companies,” wroteCNN. “Mr. Mangione has inspired documentaries about his life and remains a topic of interest on social media. The GiveSendGo fund-raising page for his defense has reeled in donations and a steady stream of supportive notes,” commentedThe New York Times.
If anyone has normalized violence, it is the United States, with the world’s largest military spending, its largest military-industrial complex, its endless wars, its worldwide bases, and its non-stop glorification of military power and insistence on Israel’s “right to defend itself.”
Nor were his supporters criminalized or denounced. The Times was more bemused than critical in its reporting on rallies and protests supporting Mangione. The newspaper openly acknowledged that “UnitedHealthcare has long been the target of fury for denying claims, and has faced scrutiny for using algorithms to refuse coverage” and explained that protesters saw the murder as “a blow against America’s profit-driven healthcare system.”
Still, Mangione was consistently portrayed as a lone individual. Never once was he associated with the Medicare for All movement. Nor was the Medicare for All movement blamed for his act of violence. In fact, it wasn’t even mentioned in the massive coverage.
Not so for Elias Rodriguez. The Times framed the D.C. murders as the problem of the Palestine solidarity movement. “Pro-Palestinian Movement Faces an Uncertain Path After D.C. Attack,” it declared ominously, days after the attack. “The slaying of two Israeli Embassy workers cast a harsh spotlight on pro-Palestinian groups in the United States.” The Times noted that Rodriguez “chanted the same slogan, in the same cadence” that was chanted in college protests (“Free, free Palestine”) and wondered whether he was “influenced by more extreme pro-Palestinian organizations that reach Americans online and that glorify the actions of Hamas and other armed resistance groups.”
“Even peaceful protests,” the Times warned, might influence “attitudes against people connected to Israel.”
Equating Palestinian Rights With Violence
Well aware that they would be the first to be blamed, Palestine rights organizations “rushed to condemn” the attack. Nevertheless, the Times appeared obsessed with uncovering support for violence among them. “Protesters who chant ‘Free, free Palestine’ are almost always using tactics of nonviolent resistance. But the groups that organize behind Free Palestine banners also vary in their philosophies. Some advocate complete nonviolence in their broader approach, akin to anti-war protesters. Others back the right of Palestinians to engage in armed resistance against Israel, which they consider a right under international law, because they consider Israel the occupier of Palestinian lands.”
Consider? In fact armed resistance against occupation is a right under international law, and Israel doesoccupy Palestinian lands.
That’s not enough for the Times, though. Acceptable organizations must “advocate complete nonviolence.” Apparently, believing that international law permits violence under some circumstances also counts as “violence”?
But more to the point: The Times acknowledges that the protestors “almost always” use nonviolent tactics. It doesn’t give any examples here of the supposed “violent” exceptions, but Times editorial write Nicholas Kristof gives a hint when he chides student protesters because “peaceful protests have tipped into occupations of buildings, risks to commencements, and what I see as undue tolerance of antisemitism, chaos, vandalism, and extremism.” So, occupying a building or protesting at a commencement now counts as “violence”? Have Kristof and his colleagues never heard of civil disobedience?
Opposing Wars vs Commitment to Nonviolence
I have been attending anti-war protests since 1967 when my parents took me to a protest against the Vietnam War. I knew little about the concept of nonviolence, but I knew that dropping bombs on peasant villages a world away was wrong. It was drizzling. Some counterprotestors threw raw eggs at us, and some egg splashed on my raincoat. My mother said something along the lines of, “You know we are on the right side because we are standing here quietly, and they are the ones throwing things at us.” It felt like a microcosm of what I understood about the U.S. and Vietnam: The U.S. was on the wrong side because it was the one throwing the bombs.
Since that day I’ve been to many anti-war protests. My life has been shaped by an almost constant drumbeat of U.S. (and U.S.-funded or supported) wars in lands distant and not-so-distant, and I have protested many of them, including Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Lebanon, Grenada, Panama, Iraq, Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Libya, and now Gaza.
Over the years I’ve worked with many people whose politics are based on a commitment to nonviolence. I respect them deeply. But my politics has always been based more on the particulars: In the unequal wars where the U.S. is the clear aggressor, I want to make it stop.
I could say that I condemn every murder that has ever taken place since the beginning of time. But that’s a politically meaningless statement.
Vietnam Veteran Brian Willson was one of those people who believed deeply in nonviolence. In 1987—20 years after my first anti-war protest—he lay down on the train tracks to disrupt the trains carrying munitions from the Concord Naval Weapons Station, headed for El Salvador and the Contras in Nicaragua. For most of us, that seemed like the ultimate act of nonviolence: placing his body on the line to obstruct war. Today, commentators seem to conflate such “disruption” with violence.
That day, instead of slowing down and waiting for police to remove the protesters, the train sped up and ran over Willson, tearing off his legs.
I wasn’t there, but I joined the protest in Concord the following weekend when outraged protesters began to literally tear up the bloodied tracks with their bare hands. I hung back—not out of any moral predicament over whether physical destruction of the machinery of war was “violent” or “justified” but simply scared by (even though I shared) the rage of the crowd. Still, I gladly accepted a rusted tie nail that someone offered me. It still sits on the mantlepiece in my living room.
We live in a world, and a country, in which violence in the form of war is utterly normalized. Politicians, institutions, and holidays honor those who engage in military violence, and almost all of us are forced to be complicit in it. The manufacture of weapons of mass destruction is central to our economy. And we are in the midst of a U.S.-funded genocide in Gaza. Yet business leaders, politicians, and the media obsess endlessly instead over parsing the language of protesters to uncover evidence of their lack of commitment to nonviolence.
Is Israel’s “Right to Defend Itself” a Justification for Violence?
Since October 7 it’s almost impossible to find a U.S. mainstream media outlet or politician—from former President Joe Biden to Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) to current President Donald Trump—or pundit—from conservative centrist David Brooks to the mainstream liberal Ezra Klein—who doesn’t qualify even the mildest critique of Israel by insisting that “Israel has a right to defend itself.” None of them adopts a principled adherence to nonviolence.
Yet, they agree that Palestinians must make that commitment and accept a “demilitarized Palestinian state.” They never speak of a future Palestinian state’s right to defend itself.
Criminalizing Protest: Media Complicity
Mainstream media, and the U.S. bipartisan consensus, criminalize protest by conflating criticism of Israel with antisemitism, conflating emotional distress with harassment, and conflating disruption—no matter how peaceful—with violence.
Here’s how the Times summarized the campus protests in March 2025:
Much of the on-campus protest at Columbia was peaceful. But as both the encampment and the students’ fervor grew, some students and members of the faculty said they felt the already much-disputed lines between anti-Zionism and antisemitism were blurring beyond distinction. Many Jewish students said they felt fearful on campus because of chants, signs, and literature at the encampment that sometimes expressed support for the Hamas-led terrorist attack against Israel on October 7, 2023. There were also specific allegations of antisemitism and an uproar when video surfaced online of a student protest leader saying, “Zionists don’t deserve to live.” (He was later suspended.)
Note how the Times blurs “feelings,” “antisemitism,” and violence.
Amidst the hysteria about “violence,” nonviolent protest has increasingly been criminalized in the United States—beginning with forms of protest against Israel. Well before October 7, nonviolent protest in the form of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement was criminalized, as was much discussion of Israel. Using the word “genocide,” accusing Israel of racism, comparing Israel’s eliminationist campaign against Palestinians to the Holocaust, calling Zionism a form of racism—are all prohibited by legal definitions of antisemitism. Meanwhile the Trump administration has begun to detain and deport noncitizen Palestine activists on vague charges that their beliefs “condoning antisemitic conduct and disruptive protests in the United States would severely undermine” American foreign policy. How, then, can anyone protest against Israeli violence?
Is Protest Harassment?
Alex Gourevitch recently pointed out that campus and police crackdowns on protests on the grounds that they were loud, disruptive, refused to disperse, or made some students feel fearful essentially eliminate the right to protest altogether. As Gourevitch explains, “Feelings of unease would never suffice to meet the legal standard of a ‘hostile environment.’ Proving that one has been threatened or harassed requires objective evidence, not just a subjective sense of fear.”
Antidiscrimination laws prohibit creating a “hostile work environment.” But Gourevitch emphasizes that “whatever the proper domain of the hostile environment concept, it was never meant to (and shouldn’t) extend to protest. It is not just that protests involve political expression. They are a particular kind of political expression: public expressions of hostility toward political views and often the people who hold them. If applied to speech in the context of protest, the hostile environment standard—or any norm that takes feelings of fear and insecurity as grounds for intervention—would make protest impossible.”
Who Are the Real Purveyors of Violence?
If anyone has normalized violence, it is the United States, with the world’s largest military spending, its largest military-industrial complex, its endless wars, its worldwide bases, and its non-stop glorification of military power and insistence on Israel’s “right to defend itself.” And it’s Israel, with its now 19-month genocidal attack on Gaza, where 82% of the country’s Jewish population supports the expulsion of the entire Palestinian population and the government has openly declared that goal.
Schoolchildren may know Martin Luther King Jr. as a paragon of nonviolence. But few understand his explanation of nonviolence in his1967 speech “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break the Silence.” His decision to speak out against the U.S. war in Vietnam, he said “grows out of my experience in the ghettoes of the North… As I have walked among the desperate, rejected, and angry young men, I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems… that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action. But they ask—and rightly so—what about Vietnam? They ask if our own nation wasn't using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today—my own government.” His point was not to “justify” urban violence in the U.S., but to emphasize the need to confront large-scale, structural violence.
If we oppose violence, let’s not focus on demonizing those who are trying to stop the violence. Let’s not criminalize a wide range of nonviolent activities—including protesting, disrupting, occupying, writing, and speaking—aimed at naming, and stopping, a genocide. Let’s not grant impunity to those dropping the bombs. Let’s not allow a country—Israel—to get away with mass murder just because it claims to represent Jews. And let’s not use a lone crime—the murders in D.C.—to justify ongoing crimes against humanity.
John F. Kennedy said that “those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.” It’s hard not to look back on those words with some irony, given the overwhelming ways that U.S. Cold War policy in Latin America used violence, time and time again, to crush dissent there. But in today’s climate, many of us would fear the consequences of making such a statement.
I could say that I condemn every murder that has ever taken place since the beginning of time. But that’s a politically meaningless statement. I’m more interested in joining those trying to stop the mass murder and starvation in Gaza that’s being spurred by my government and paid for with my tax money—the murders that maybe, just maybe, we can do something about.
