The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Blast From the Blogging Past: Saint Pancake and the Anti-Israel Cause

Posted on | May 25, 2025 | 1 Comment

Certainly it is not a coincidence that Elias Rodriguez is being compared to Rachel Corrie and Aaron Bushnell by a slew of social media accounts. When people are part of an activist hive-mind, participating in a propaganda campaign on behalf of a terrorist organization, one does not expect originality in their rhetoric. As I’ve been saying for more than a decade, bad causes attract bad people, and the kind of people who think “solidarity” with Hamas is a good idea . . . Well, they’re not the sharpest tools in the shed. Like a herd of bleating sheep, they mindlessly repeat the same slogans because they’re incapable of more intelligent discourse.

Pro-Hamas terrorist Elias Rodriguez

No need to use “allegedly” here. Elias Rodriguez has admitted he murdered Israeli embassy aides Sarah Milgrim and Yaron Lischinsky — shot them in the back, and kept shooting even after Milgrim, severely wounded, was trying to crawl away. Nor is there any doubt about Rodriguez’s motive. He “did it for Gaza,” he told the cops, and posted an online “manifesto” elaborating on his pro-Hamas beliefs.

February 2024: Aaron Bushnell

To quote myself:

“If you’re a Jew-hating, terrorist-supporting left-wing kook, the kind who likes to scream ‘Free Palestine’ and chant other pro-Hamas slogans, I want to encourage you to emulate Aaron Bushnell.”

Bushnell lit himself on fire in front of the Israeli embassy in Washington, livestreaming it on Twitch after declaring he would “no longer be complicit in genocide.” Brilliant idea. The world would be a better place if all the entire pro-Hamas student protesters at Ivy League universities decided to emulate Bushnell en masse. But what really drew my attention was the people comparing Elias Rodriguez to Rachel Corrie.

In case you’ve forgotten, or perhaps never knew, who Rachel Corrie was, she was a 23-year-old middle-class college kid from Olympia, Washington, who got caught up in post-9/11 “peace” activism. During the Second Intifada, at a time when the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades and other terrorists were blasting Jews to smithereens on a regular basis, Rachel Corrie took up the Palestinian cause, joining a radical “direct action” group called the International Solidarity Movement (ISM). Her radicalization ultimately ended with her death in Rafah, Gaza:

Her fanaticism led Corrie to travel to Gaza in January 2003. Three weeks later, when activists organized an international protest of the impending U.S. invasion of Iraq, Corrie was photographed burning a hand-drawn fascimile of the U.S. flag, her face distorted by rage, while dozens of Palestinian children watched. . . .
So it was that, on March 16, 2003, Rachel Corrie joined six other ISM activists in a “direct action” against the Israeli military. The Israelis were destroying terrorist bases and smuggling tunnels in Gaza, an operation that ISM attempted to thwart. The circumstances of Corrie’s death have been mired in controversy for years, but there is no argument that she positioned herself in the path of an Israeli bulldozer and was fatally crushed.

Immediately, the anti-Israel propagandists seized on Corrie’s death to portray her as a martyr, and commenters at the Little Green Footballs blog responded by mocking her as “Saint Pancake.”

Do you know what I mean by the phrase “institutional memory”? Back when I was in the newspaper business, every newsroom had some old guys who’d been there 15 or 20 years, who could help provide guidance to the new hires. This was before you could research stuff with computers, and you had to go plowing through archives in what was called the “morgue” if you wanted to look up the background on a story. Old-timers in the newsroom were a repository of institutional memory, because they could show you the “shortcuts” (so to speak) in this kind of research.

A major problem in the 21st-century communication environment is a deficit of institutional memory. There are so many people out there blabbering away on social media — and, indeed, “professional journalists” at major news organizations — who don’t know a damned thing about what happened 15 or 20 years ago. Still fewer are those who, like me, are old enough to have watched the Six-Day War on TV news as it happened. Unless you’re my age or older, you can’t have that kind of direct historical knowledge, and you’re certainly unlikely to know the background of the so-called “Palestinian” cause. To put it bluntly, Yasser Arafat was the Fidel Castro or Ho Chi Minh of the Middle East, at a time when the Soviet Union’s geopolitical strategy was focused on sponsoring “wars of national liberation” in the Third World. Almost none of the journalists and commentators on the current situation in the Middle East are old enough to understand this Cold War background, which is a major reason why latter-day Communists — literally, I mean Communists — are able to deceive so many idiots into supporting Hamas terrorists.

The recent death of David Horowitz has deprived us of a valuable source of institutional memory on all this. Among his contributions to the cause of freedom was starting a site called Discover the Networks, a database about left-wing organizations and individuals that is extremely useful to anyone researching the Left. For example, Discover the Networks can tell you all about the Workers World Party (WWP) and its splinter, the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL), both of which are connected to International ANSWER (“Act Now to Stop War and End Racism”).

David Horowitz also created Front Page Magazine, where Daniel Greenfield describes Elias Rodriguez as a “Communist terrorist,” pointing out Rodriguez’s known association with PSL and ANSWER.

We could follow this chain of connections further, to include Code Pink co-founder Jodie Evans:

From 2017-2022, Evans and [her husband] Neville Roy Singham together served as the two principal funders of The People’s Forum, a New York-based organization describing itself as a “movement incubator for working class and marginalized communities to build unity across historic lines of division at home and abroad.” During that period, the couple — through an array of shell organizations and donor advisory groups — gave more than $20.4 million to The People’s Forum, a sum that accounted for almost all of the funding which the organization received.

Here’s the connection to Elias Rodriguez:

The suspected terrorist charged with gunning down two Israeli embassy workers in Washington Wednesday is associated with radical socialist groups funded by the far-left Chinese sympathizer, millionaire Neville Singham and his activist wife Jodie Evans.
Elias Rodriguez, 31, who allegedly confessed to killing the couple outside the Capital Jewish Museum and chanted “free, free Palestine!” was part of that network through his association with the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL), a Communist political organization that has fielded presidential candidates since 2008.
In 2018, Rodriguez also raised $240 in a GoFundMe campaign to join the March to Fight Poverty in Washington DC and took part in demonstrations and protests around Chicago as a member of the ANSWER coalition around 2017 and 2018, another radical socialist group, according to the Anti-Defamation League.
Both the PSL and ANSWER Coalition are connected to People’s Forum – a Manhattan-based non-profit which has ties to the Chinese Communist Party – through funding from Singham, 71.
All three groups have been involved in anti-Israel protests, with the People’s Forum having a cadre of operatives embedded at Columbia University — an epicenter of protest — according to previous reports.
The People’s Forum received more than $20 million in grants from Singham, much of it filtered through the Goldman Sachs Philanthropy Fund, a fiscal sponsor, as The Post has previously reported.
Another group, the Bronx Antiwar Coalition is also connected to groups in Singham’s orbit. The Bronx group applauded the murders of the Israeli diplomats on X Thursday.
“What Elias Rodriguez did is the highest expression of anti-Zionism,” a tweet from the group proclaimed.
The Bronx Anti-War Coalition was founded by Dee Knight, a radical socialist and pro-China activist, who has worked with People’s Forum, according to reports. . . .
“The People’s Forum… and ANSWER Coalition serve as the conduit through which [Chinese Communist Party]-affiliated entities have effectively co-opted pro-Palestinian activism in the US, advancing a broader anti-American, anti-democratic, and anti-capitalist agenda,” according to [the National Contagion Research Institute].

These people are literally Communists, like I said, but kids nowadays don’t know enough about history to understand what’s wrong with Communism, which killed 100 million people in the 20th century.

Institutional memory matters, and I hope y’all remember yesterday’s post, in which I explained why I’m rattling the tip jar this weekend — just $5 or $10 would help — and ended with the familiar reminder that the Five Most Important Words in the English Language are:

HIT THE FREAKING TIP JAR!



 

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Category: Israel, Terrorism

Comments

One Response to “Blast From the Blogging Past: Saint Pancake and the Anti-Israel Cause”

  1. The Mainstream Media’s Memory Hole Has Swallowed Deadly Attacks on Jews : The Other McCain
    June 7th, 2025 @ 8:49 am

    […] two weeks have elapsed since left-wing activist Elias Rodriguez murdered Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim outside the Capital Jewish Museum in D.C., and it was only last Sunday that an Egyptian illegal […]