On the D.C. Shooter’s Hispanic Ethnicity

How Islam has made inroads within Hispanic communities

As we processed the events in Washington D.C. last week, one of the unexplored and perhaps befuddling observations made by many was in taking notice of the shooter’s Hispanic ethnicity. It seemed to me as a Hispanic person with Jewish ancestry, who has lived in a predominant Mexican-American community in south Texas most of my life, that those who made this observation weren’t quite sure what to do with it or how to think about it. Growing antisemitism among Latinos, however, is a subtopic I’ve actually taken particular note of since and (come to think of it) well before 10-7. Growing antisemitism within non-Arab and non-Muslim communities is something we shouldn’t be bashful in exploring.

This anti-Israel tendency among my Mexican-American community here in the Rio Grande Valley was first and partly observed in the summer war of 2014, although it did not become as in-my-face as it did during the so-called “march of return” of 2018. The first major red flag for me came when at a local rally in McAllen, following the breaching of the wall and the moving of the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem, the now notorious Omar Suleiman (who currently is leading the charge to build an exclusionary subdivision deep in the heart of Dallas, Texas) showed up with bodyguards to give a quick ‘speech,’ having visited the area to “witness” the “crimes” committed by the first Trump Administration on the southern border against migrants. I remember thinking what the h*** is a fundamentalist Imam doing here?

About a year later, I was visiting with a legendary and renowned Chicana activist in Laguna Vista Texas, who was an active leader in a Houston-based group called MAYO (Mexican American Youth Organization) in the seventies and eighties. We held care for the human rights of immigrants crossing the border in common, as she became familiar with my work during that time for an advocacy nonprofit, for which I used to write.

The last time we saw each other turned out to be just that, because of two extremely disturbing comments she made. The first regarded the Netflix streaming service. I do not recall how it came up, but she said in Spanish (the language in which we often spoke to one another) that she has chosen not to buy a Netflix account because “Los duenos son judios.” / “The owners are Jews.” I was so stunned that I was speechless for a few moments, allowing her to quickly veer to another topic, as I tried making sense of things. A few moments later, she asked me to wait in the living room while she grabbed something from another area of her home. She brought back a copy of (I kid you not) The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which she highly recommended and described as merely “controversial.”

Yolanda had concealed this side of her for our first couple of meetings, and apparently showed it once she could “trust” me. I knew she was critical of Israeli policies in the Palestinian territories, but this was something else. At this point, I realized she was beyond reach and not too long after, made my exit, never to see her again.

A couple years later, a Jewish friend of mine who was raised Jewish and publicly wears his Star of David told me that at a protest in McAllen against the overturning of Roe v. Wade, a young lady with whom he had begun a conversation abruptly ended it upon learning that he was a “Zionist,” by which he only meant that he supported Israel’s right to exist. He explained that they had been having a pleasant discussion up to the point where his Jewish ethnicity and upbringing became the topic.

Since the October Crimes Against Humanity, I’ve only noticed this phenomenon evermore.

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In the days following that day which changed everything, at the end of October 2023, I attended a pro-Hamas rally in order to oppose and report on it. I brought leaflets criticizing the organizers–Food Not Bombs, at the time led by the Palestinian-Argentine activist Mariam El-Haj, a local ‘psychologist’–and of course got into confrontations with goons assigned to follow and harass me.

One of these individuals was a UNITE Here union bureaucrat from the Austin area named John Cuvillier, who is also from the Rio Grande Valley. He was fully masked in a balaclava and followed me with two other people throughout the entire time I was there. (Cuvillier, who has strong ties to the Democratic Socialists of America, DSA, showed up to the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley [UTRGV] in December 2023 for a pro-Hamas rally wearing the same costume and acting as a march leader.)

During the October 2023 Hamas rally in McAllen, as I reported at the time, a Mexican woman speaking in Spanish spoke to attendees while wearing a burka. She explained how Islam is compatible with Christianity, appealing to the heavily Catholic and protestant community of south Texas where we were, adding that Muslims also believe in the ‘Virgin Mary’. This was the first time I’d ever heard the words uttered by the D.C. assailant rendered into Spanish: “Libre, libre Palestina.”

In proceeding weeks and months, local middle-class activists in the Rio Grande Valley took up this bilingual approach to sympathizing with Hamas, with a campaign titled “From Palestine to Mexico border walls have got to go.” I was asked to be interviewed by a reporter for the Texas Tribune, Berenice Garcia, about this as she knew I was the most prominent critic of this slogan. She requested we speak immediately and ended up speaking for more than an hour. This happened to be the week before an upcoming May 16 Hamas protest at UTRGV. Our interview and the story she was supposedly working on never published.

I later learned that Garcia was good friends with the organizers of the protest and runs within their ‘LGBTQ’-aligned circles as a lesbian herself, having infiltrated her private Instagram page using a fake account she fell for, leading me to think she was only gathering intel to pass along to her buddies. She later told me, after contacting her, that the story got “shelved.”

My former friend, Alyson Duarte who is a well-known DACA (deferred action for childhood arrivals) activist from Mexico, began showing signs of this mental illness in recent years as well. She was the person who infamously disrupted a primary debate between Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden in September 2019. Throughout our years of knowing one another, we had all sorts of political dialogues, including on the Middle East. I recall how during one conversation she flat-out said, in full tone and voice, “f*** Israel.”

Like with Yolanda Garza-Birdwell, discussed above, I was taken aback. Criticizing the Israeli government, or certain politicians, is not just okay; it’s a duty — as many Israelis will confirm. However, her wholesale condemnation of the country always seemed a little bizarre and hateful to me.

This attitude expressed by Alyson came full circle last year, in May 2024, when she attended the above-mentioned Hamas rally at UTRGV. She of course covered her face with a black medical mask. I realized she had gone, from a video a friend took of the event, as I was at another part of campus holding an Israeli flag in opposition to the Hamasniks.

I was initially shocked because I thought she might have told me she was in town, as she was earning a PhD in Philosophy at Texas A&M and usually told me when she was around, so that we could get together and talk politics. When I noticed her in a video frame, I texted and asked her if that was her, a question she to this day has never answered. However, I sent her a close-up screenshot and told her I knew it was her, adding she would need a bigger mask to hide her identity from me. I again asked her in a public social media forum regarding politics that she herself actually invited me to join online, if she had attended the rally, but her silence (to which I had never been treated in years of ‘friendship’) said it all.

Her pleading the Fifth Amendment with me came from fear of compromising her immigration and education status, which was the reason for her wearing a mask in the first place, as she was always a fan of hiding her face at protests going back to 2015.

While many pro-Israel sympathizers have noted that the events of D.C. were “not surprising” and expected, for me, the fact that the shooter came from the Hispanic community was also not surprising and even anticipated. That an attempt to bring Latinos over to the pro-Hamas ledger was being made seemed for a long time to be quite nefariously apparent, as well. In fact in my article about the May 2024 protest at UTRGV, I predicted that the rise of “John Brown Gun Club” groups (the local chapter of which endorsed the rally) such as one based in Chicago where the shooter lived, would mean political assassinations against Jews. Did the D.C. shooter belong to the “Windy City John Brown Gun Club“?

* * *

The Somali author and brave dissident, Ayaan Hirsi Ali who escaped Islam and has devoted her life to opposing it at great risk and harm to her personal safety and that of her colleagues, has also noticed this trend.

During a recent speech at Texas University, in Austin, Ali discussed the inroads Muslims were making in the conversion of Hispanic individuals. During the question and answer session, following her lecture, Ali was asked by a young woman how we can reeducate people away from the totalitarian ideology that is Islam.

Ali, in part, replied:

“Islam is one of the fastest growing religions in Europe and in America, and they’re growing also by converting people. The Hispanic population apparently in Houston is converting to Islam; but no one has told that population what it really means to be part of that, to join that religion, what it is that religion says. We engage in self-censorship and politeness paradoxically because we were bad to our Jewish minority.

“I remember a Jewish mayor in Amsterdam [Ali is a former Dutch member of Parliament] in the early days, when we were talking about developing assimilating programs to assimilate Muslim communities into Holland. He kept insisting to me, ‘but we don’t want to do to the Muslim minority what we did to the Jews.’ That became the excuse to do nothing. That can’t be right.”

An attorney approached the microphone next and explained that she had filed amicus briefs with the U.S. Supreme Court, complaining about how a Sharia tribunal was operating in Texas. She added she’d seen Islamic marriage certificates herself between first cousins.

I myself know Mexican-Americans who have converted to Islam.

Indeed, after a protest in McAllen calling for an arms embargo against Israel held by local activist Margarita Gonzalez, I noticed the girlfriend of a Jordanian attendee (Ahmad Abdullah) began wearing hijab not long after the protest. At the June 2024 protest, which I reported on by wearing a disguise and infiltrating the march, the young woman was not covered in the “traditional” attire. But having recently seen the couple at a Pakistani restaurant, she was now covered from head to toe. She’s also Hispanic.

The above-mentioned Mariam El-Haj who organized the October 2023 Hamas rally actually became well-known locally in 2012 when her father attempted to kill her and her boyfriend by gun, injuring El Haj, in what local activists who know her have told me was an attempted “honor killing.”

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In addition to this strategy of Islamist ‘Hispandering’, what else could be at play here?

I submit that as Hispanics and Latinos have increasingly joined the middle-classes in the U.S., over the last several decades and therefore have acquired more debt and financial hardships associated with mortgages and student loans, the more susceptible they have become to antisemitic demagogy. Afterall, antisemitism in this current epoch of global capitalism is marketed by the unscrupulous as the purest form of scapegoating.

Depressingly for me, a family member who is also Mexican-American recently sent me Artificial Intelligence-translated videos of Adolf Hitler speeches into English, in an attempt to bring me over to the side of psychosis in which they permanently dwell. I explained to this family member that such poison is only appealing to those financially-ruined layers of the middle-classes looking for a conspiracy theory to blame for their woes and shortcomings. It’s no wonder that this family member is currently in a state of financial ruin and bankruptcy.

* * *

A systematic campaign to scapegoat state failure towards Israel among leftist Latin American governments has also been underway for a long time. During the rule of Hugo Chavez, it is well documented that he traveled to Iran and established close relations with the mullahs, a partnership that has been continued under the successor Maduro regime which currently maintains a staunchly anti-Israel stance. Is it any wonder, then, that many of the ultra-left and Stalinist-leaning activists and political parties are also cheerleaders for Maduro?

Although I myself am a supporter of the Cuban Revolution, it has also been depressing for me as a friend of Israel and the Cuban working-class that the current Cuban government has likewise taken a pro-Hamas stance since October. However, we should recall the notable exception of how Fidel Castro in his famous 2010 Atlantic interview with the acclaimed Jeffrey Goldberg condemned Ahmadinejad’s Holocaust-denial and unequivocally stated that Israel “without a doubt”/”sin duda” has the right to exist, adding that the Iranian government should try to understand why Israel fears for its existence and acknowledge the unique horror of the Shoa. The existence and well-being of a thriving Jewish community in Cuba should also be noted.

In Mexico following the October Pogrom, I saw headlines on leftist news stations offering glowing coverage of “indigenous-led” protests in which an Israeli flag was stained with red paint and burned, complete to the rhythm of “drum circles”–a common fetish of middle-class leftist bums. Here in the Rio Grande Valley, where many Jews hail from Mexico and Latin America, one of my Mexican-Jewish mentors who is also the local Hadassah chapter head told me that antisemitism is rife within Mexico’s political system. I asked her why. She replied with one simple word: “Scapegoats.” This lovely comrade of mine, Evelyn Tencer, courageously ran circles around the May 2024 rally goers with an Israeli flag.

* * *

As Islam continues winning converts amongst the vagrant and mentally-ill middle classes of various nationalities and ethnic groups, we should prepare to see more acts like those of D.C. committed by non-Arab sympathizers or new adherents to ‘the religion of peace.’ At the same time, we should be prepared to inoculate such people from scapegoatism, before it’s too late.