Ryan Wesley Routh, the 58-year-old alleged attempted assassin who tried to kill former President Donald Trump on Sunday, is avowedly pro-Ukraine — but appears, from his social media history, to also be anti-Israel.
In one post, preserved by the Israeli media service Abu Ali Express, Routh showed a Biblical map of “Palestine” (the name did not exist in Biblical times) and asked: “I am unclear what part of Isreal [sic] the Jews owned based on this historic map; Judea perhaps? It seems to historically be all palestinian [sic].”
The term “Palestine” was not used until the second century A.D., when the Romans reacted to a rebellion by Jewish residents of the area then-known as Judea by renaming the territory “Palestine,” to sever the Jewish connection to the land. The name was apparently derived from the Biblical people known as the Philistines, a foreign enemy group from the Mediterranean who settled near present-day Gaza but have no connection to the people who refer to themselves today as Palestinians.
Routh was so passionate about the Ukrainian cause that he traveled to Ukraine in an effort to join the war, and the to recruit soldiers, as Breitbart News reported Monday.
The combination of being avowedly pro-Ukraine, but skeptical of Israel, is a fair approximation of the current foreign policy consensus within the Democratic Party, as well as the media. The ABC News moderators at last Tuesday’s debate asked the two presidential candidates about pursuing victory in Ukraine, but a ceasefire in Gaza — despite the fact that Ukraine is fighting a nuclear-armed power, and that Israel is near victory against Hamas terrorists.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of The Agenda: What Trump Should Do in His First 100 Days, available for pre-order on Amazon. He is also the author of The Trumpian Virtues: The Lessons and Legacy of Donald Trump’s Presidency, now available on Audible. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
