The True Purpose of Anti-Israel Protests: Dismantling the West
Please don’t mistake Wednesday’s Rockefeller Center Christmas tree demonstration for just another unimaginative lashing-out by dyspeptic attention-mongering misfits. It was much more than that.
Oh, the usual suspects were there — cossetted Columbia University types; unmoored sociopaths who hate America but who can’t bring themselves to leave; perverse excitement-seekers and the inevitable anti-Semites and associated haters.
But that fellow waving a Palestinian flag while atop a pillar in front of 1211 Sixth Avenue — this newspaper’s headquarters — was something else entirely. His was an atavistic celebration of mass murder — this time not at home by hijacked airliner, but rather in a land far away conducted one bloody-handed execution at a time, and 1,400-plus overall.
It was an enthusiastic endorsement of rape, torture, mutilation and kidnapping — a brutal forecast of what the Palestinian war cry “from the river to the sea” really means: extermination in detail. The audacity is staggering.
What happened in Midtown Wednesday night, and during the Macy’s parade Thanksgiving day and at transportation hubs, river crossings and public parks citywide for weeks now, are not protests per se. They are efforts to seduce New York into standing behind the man on the pillar — if not endorsing the October 7 slaughter explicitly, then by acquiescing in it.
Indeed, what else are the pro-Palestinian demonstrators seeking if not legitimacy? Theirs is a dark ideology wrapped inside a murderous interpretation of the world’s second largest religion. This isn’t about a right to demonstrate, by the way. It gets boring the third or fourth time the Brooklyn Bridge is blocked, but nobody is calling for water cannons. Yet it is very much about the purpose of the demonstrations: unambiguous demands for New York, and New Yorkers, to withdraw support for Israel’s right to exist as a free and independent state.
And more than that, too. It has correctly been noted that Israel stands today in the same space it occupied millennia ago — with its language, customs and culture fundamentally intact. If that’s not authenticity — if that’s not legitimacy — then nothing is.
Moreover, Israel endures as the wells-spring of Western civilization itself — for all its warts and wrinkles, the Judeo-Christian ethic has produced the freest, most enviable culture in human history. That’s what is at issue when the Palestinian flags came out Wednesday. They represented an assault by advocates of a dark, theocratic worldview on a particular American institution, sure — but also on Western values generally. They want to tear down our democracy, our economy, our very way of life.
It is no surprise that so many on the hard left — the AOCs, the Ilhan Omars, the democratic socialists — also are to be found in the Palestinian camp. By and large, they’re no great fans of the West either. But it is disappointing that more mainstream civic leaders — many of whom eloquently condemned Oct. 7 at the time — now fail publicly to make the obvious connection between that massacre and the current demonstrations.
So let’s be clear: “Never forget” was the watchword after Sept. 11. Now the details differ but the principles persist — and memories are slipping. This is an error, and it courts tragic consequences.
