(JTA) — Guy Christensen, a TikTok influencer with more than 3 million followers, came out in support of the shooting attack that killed two Israeli embassy employees.
“I do not condemn the elimination of the Zionist officials who worked at the Israeli embassy last night,” Christensen, a Gen-Z influencer who goes by YourFavoriteGuy on TikTok, said in a video posted Thursday.
“I want to urge you first to support Elias’ actions,” he added later, referencing the alleged shooter. “He is not a terrorist. He’s a resistance fighter, and the fact is that the fight against Israel’s war machine, against their genocide machine, against their criminality, includes their foreign diplomats in this country.”
The video represented a reversal for Christensen, who had earlier posted a video condemning the murders. The video supporting the attack later disappeared from TikTok and Instagram. He appeared to suggest that the platform had removed it: “also tiktok banned my vid LOL,” he wrote on a subsequent post.
With the video, Christensen joined a growing collection of voices openly supporting the attack. He may be the one with the largest audience.
For nearly all of the time since Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023 attack and the war it launched in Gaza, Christensen has been a constant, vocal pro-Palestinian activist. In a November 2023 essay, penned when he was still in high school, he wrote that that support began when he discovered “more than what the media was telling me.”
Pro-Palestinian historical revisions
Since then, videos condemning Israel and voicing support for Palestinians have populated his feed — and helped him rack up followers in the process. In the video supporting the murders, Chirstensen — as in many of his videos — was decked out in pro-Palestinian paraphrenalia. He wore a keffiyeh as well as a shirt that appeared to say “Jesus was a Palestinian.” A Palestinian flag hung behind him.
In his initial denunciation of the attack — which killed Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim, a young couple who were attending an event hosted by the American Jewish Committee — Christensen said, “I don’t support the slaughter of civilians. That’s not the way to go about it and bring justice.”
In the earlier video, he made clear that he still condemned the victims’ activities and affiliations — just not their murders. “These people deserve to be tried and punished and sentenced to jail for their facilitation of this genocide,” he said.
He spent much of the video predicting that the attack would lead to a government crackdown on pro-Palestinian activists, which he compared to Kristallnacht, the mass Nazi pogrom that is considered by many to be the beginning of the Holocaust.
Some of Christensen’s followers said they agreed with that stance. But others rejected it. Many made the case that they believed that the attack had been a “false flag” operation perpetrated by supporters of Israel to galvanize opposition to pro-Palestinian activism.
Similar comments were unfolding across the internet on Thursday. Pro-Palestinian activists and groups that denounced the shooting drew a flurry of rebuttals: “Condemn yourselves,” one popular account responded to Jewish Voice for Peace’s post decrying the attack on X.
News stories related to the shooting, meanwhile, saw fights play out in their comments section. When the news site Block Club Chicago reported on a search of the alleged gunman’s apartment, for example, several responses included requests for Rodriguez’s legal defense fund. The progressive radio show “Democracy Now” elicited comments likening Rodriguez to Luigi Mangione, the man accused of killing the CEO of UnitedHealthcare in December — reflecting a trend peeking out across the internet.
Amid this context, by Thursday night, about a day after the murders, Christensen reversed course.
“Israel has livestreamed a genocide to the entire world the last two years,” he said regarding the war that began 19 months ago with Hamas’ invasion. “And you cannot expect to do such a thing in this world without the people standing up to fight, to stop you in any way they can, to resist against you, and that is exactly what happened.”
Like some who have praised the attack, Christensen denied that it was antisemitic by citing Lischinsky’s self-identification as a Christian. (Lischinsky had posted that he was Christian, and appears to have affiliated as a Messianic Jew, a movement that couples Jewish practices with belief in Jesus as the messiah — an idea considered incompatible with Judaism by all Jewish denominations.)
“Do not let yourself be fooled by the media, by the Zionists in this country who are telling you that this was an antisemitic terrorist attack,” he said. “It was not. First of all, the man who was assassinated was a Christian Zionist, proclaiming it so on his social media. He spent his days working at the Israeli Embassy fighting to maintain Israel’s genocide and support for that genocide in this country.”
Chirstensen continued, ”He is a war criminal, and the same is true for the woman. This was not because they were Jewish, it was because they were Zionists.”
(On Friday afternoon, he posted a “disclaimer” video where he said the following: “Since Zionists on Twitter are going rabid over what I just posted, I just want to disclaim that I’m not suicidal, I would never make a threat that would jeopardize my position to influence and educate people about the atrocity and evils that Zionism is currently bringing down upon the Palestinian people, especially in Gaza. I hate Nazis and I hate Zionists, so I don’t have a problem with you much if you’re not one of those things.”)
He spent much of his video supporting the attack reading the entirety of a manifesto that appears to have been posted by the gunman, titled “Escalate For Gaza, Bring The War Home.” In a subsequent video, he expressed fear that pro-Israel activists would spur a federal investigation of him.
After reading the document, Christensen reiterated the reversal of his condemnation of the attack, comparing himself to Luke Skywalker, the protagonist of the Star Wars franchise.
Condemning the attack, he said, would be like “condemning Luke Skywalker for attacking the Death Star because the Empire might crack down on the resistance.”
He then signed off.
“We must meet with escalation and stronger resistance,” he said. “I hope my retracted condemnation does not allow our government to condemn me to a cell. But I don’t know. Follow my page for more. Thank you and free Palestine.”
