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FBI Visits Me Over Manifesto (www.kenklippenstein.com)
submitted 2 days ago* (last edited 1 day ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

For the second time in a year, the FBI came to my home yesterday after I published the so-called manifesto of the man charged with killing two Israeli Embassy staffers in Washington.

Not a single mainstream media outlet has published the text because, as they claim, the FBI hasn’t confirmed its authenticity. But the real reason is simple. The media just doesn’t want to publish it. And the FBI doesn’t want the media to think it can

These are those 11 questions (from the email I’ve reproduced below):

  • When did he first encounter the manifesto?
  • How did he first encounter the manifesto?
  • Did he receive any instruction from the source of the manifesto about how to disseminate it?
  • Does the system or platform from which he received the manifesto capture metadata concerning the transfer of the manifesto?
  • Did he make any edits or changes to the manifesto?
  • Was this his first and only interaction with whomever submitted the manifesto?
  • Has anyone else submitted any other documentation regarding this incident?
  • Did his receipt of the manifesto predate the attack?
  • Where else, if anywhere, did he disseminate the manifesto?
  • Does he have any knowledge of where else the manifesto was published or shared?
  • Why does he think he was the one who received the manifesto?

Other than the questions implying the FBI is entertaining an outlandish theory that I conspired with the shooter, the others seem pretty straightforward and routine.

But there’s a Trump administration dimension to all of this. The administration has many times publicly warned about shadowy, unseen forces that it believes are bankrolling everything from Tesla vandalism to the college protests. That tone from the top, labeling seemingly everything terrorism, tells personnel that the gloves are off and more aggressive work in the field is now permissible.

Get ready to hear that I’m impeding the investigation, giving people a roadmap to the “sources and methods” that are used to catch terrorists, or whatever reason the national security state soundboard offers up for why the public isn’t allowed to know things.

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[-] [email protected] 10 points 1 day ago

Here's the manifesto they're asking about, from the same blog:

Explication

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

[-] [email protected] 17 points 2 days ago

lemmy.world/news removed this post because they agree with the FBI.

[-] [email protected] 11 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

As mentioned in the removal notes visible in the public modlog, your post was removed because it was a blog site (rule 2, 6), not a news site. [email protected] only allows news sites. I can't speak for the other members of the mod team, but if coming from a news site, I wouldn't have problems with the manifesto being published.

[-] [email protected] -1 points 2 days ago

Thank you. I see too many questionable opinion sites being offered up as news.

[-] [email protected] -5 points 2 days ago

You define news as anyone who obeys by FBI censorship.

Thank you for proving my point.

[-] [email protected] 6 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

No, but I certainly don’t include a substack blog with all articles that are clearly opinion pieces / blogs in the definition of a news article.

I am not saying that having or airing an opinion is bad, I just say that it isn’t what the news community is for.

And there’s a grey area, and I would love to debate you on that, but I don’t think this website falls anywhere close to that area.

[-] [email protected] 7 points 2 days ago

Out of curiousity, if the veracity of this 'blog' is confirmed in the facts that this reporter was approached by FBI following his reporting of a manifesto, and mainstream 'approved' sources simply are not covering, how is this any less news? What is your ideal recourse for this to not be posted in [email protected] if it is not merely an opinion piece?

[-] [email protected] -4 points 1 day ago

It's inherently an opinion piece. The writing is in the first person and he gives his opinions and views about things. I have nothing against the article, I would even say he is doing great writing and very important work, but it's not a news article.

I'm open to you changing my mind about this btw, I didn't do the removal, but I still would probably have done the same in this case. So if I'm wrong about this, I would like to know.

[-] [email protected] 6 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

It's fully factual reporting on a reporter who published a verified manifesto getting harrassed by the FBI. Including voice memos and emails. There is nothing "opinion" about the article except the last paragraph which states the consequences of this government harrassment.

[-] [email protected] 0 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Wow. The only NEWS site which publishes the manifesto and dares to give an explanation about the shooting instead of screaming antisemitism, is "not news"

I guess a journalist is someone who repeats America government propaganda. And a news site is a website which publishes American government propaganda.

[-] [email protected] 11 points 1 day ago

an outlandish theory that I conspired with the shooter

The questions sound like they're doing counterintelligence work.

If you look at how Russia's disinformation program works they hire Americans (often through shell companies that appear to be American) to publish random things for them. It sounds like the questions are more looking to trace the source of the document and determine the identity of each person in the chain. If you're just posting it for your own reasons then you have nothing to worry about.

That being said, unless you can verify the authenticity of the source and the contents of the message you may be, inadvertently, posting a fabricated document, spreading misinformation and furthering the goals of hostile States.

This is why journalists have stringent source checking requirements for what they report. Anyone can pretend to have access to secret information when they're simply anonymous people on the Internet. Choosing to spread that information without being able to verify the source is irresponsible at best.

[-] [email protected] 5 points 1 day ago

The document had been received before the shooting, in name of the shooter, so its authenticity is self-evident.

[-] [email protected] 7 points 2 days ago

there’s a Trump administration dimension to all of this. The administration has many times publicly warned about shadowy, unseen forces that it believes are bankrolling everything from Tesla vandalism to the college protests.

[-] [email protected] 2 points 18 hours ago

Fae looked at you??

[-] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago

I guess if anyone's read it, did the shooter know who he was going to shoot when he went to the museum, or did he just guess there would be embassy staff there?

[-] [email protected] 5 points 1 day ago

Beyond obvious that it was targeted against the Israeli embassy staff.

https://www.kenklippenstein.com/p/the-israel-embassy-shooter-manifesto

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.

this post was submitted on 28 May 2025
94 points (87.3% liked)

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