Suspected terrorist Elias Rodriguez criticized his Iraq war vet dad, raised money to attend leftist conference
The suspected terrorist charged with fatally shooting two Israeli Embassy staffers in Washington, DC, talked heaped scorn on his father's military service in Iraq as he tried to raise money to attend a socialist rally in the nation's capital.
Elias Rodriguez, 31, of Chicago, had been at the center of a small GoFundMe page aimed at getting him to attend a People' Congress of Resistance meeting at Washington in September 2017.
The suspect raised money on GoFundMe to attend the Washington D.C. conference in 2017.
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Rodriguez was charged with first degree murder, the murder of foreign officials, causing the death of a person through the use of a firearm and discharge of a firearm during a crime of violence in federal court on Thursday.
Law enforcement sources said Rodriguez used a high end German-designed H&K 9mm pistol in the killings. He had bought the weapon years ago, according to sources.
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Sources also said he was well known to Chicago police as a left-wing rabble-rouser at various protests dating back years.
Rodriguez yelled 'free Palestine' after the shooting.
Katie Kalisher via Storyful
In addition to protesting against the war in Gaza, he attended protests against Amazon, and joined rallies for Black Lives Matter and in the case of Laquan McDonald — a teenager who was killed by police in 2014.
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In his plea for travel money, Rodriguez criticized America's invasion of Iraq as a 'genocidal imperialist war,' and scorned his father's service as an Army National Guardsman.
'When my dad came home from Baghdad, he came with souvenirs. One was a magazine pouch with a warning in Arabic to back away or my dad would shoot and kill you,' Rodriguez wrote.
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'He joked that the print was so small an Iraqi would be dead long before they had a chance to read it. He also gave me a patch of Iraq's national flag, one he ripped off of an Iraqi soldier's uniform because he could.
'I don't want to see another generation of Americans coming home from genocidal imperialist wars with trophies,' the terror suspect added.
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