Chants of “Free! Free, Palestine!”—coming out of the mouths of proponents of an Arab state stretching from a river to a sea too many cannot identify—have turned harsh, vicious and ominously threatening.
The cause of that of a “liberated Palestine.”
Paul Kessler, 69, was hit on the head with a megaphone in November by an Arab, causing him to fall backwards and critically injure his head. Already in May 2021, Arab gangs roaming Manhattan had severely beaten Joseph Borgen and provided a glimpse of what was to come. Arabs of Mandate Palestine, following in the footsteps of European pogromists, mimicked their violence slaughtering, raping and plundering Jews and their property as had been done in medieval Germany, and then in the Ukraine and Poland.
And they have the chutzpah to claim that Zionists are forcing Arabs to pay, as it were, for the holocaust Zionist are somehow committing against Arabs. But the term “Zionists” is just a euphemism for “Jews.” Last week, on the first day of Shavuot, Anne Pasternak, the Jewish director of the Brooklyn Museum as well as several other board members had their homes defaced with the red-painted slogan “blood on your hands” written on them.
Pasternak’s door had an inverted red triangle sprayed on it, the symbol seen in Hamas video clips when its terrorists target IDF troops and vehicles. She retorted that “violence, vandalism and intimidation have no place in that discourse.” Yes, intimidation. Forcing fear upon others.
As seen at the recent Salute to Israel Parade in New York City, someone had no qualms about holding up a hand-written poster reading “Kill Hostages Now.” There was also a photo of a keffiyeh-clad protester, who, of course, was masked, holding her phone high with the slogan “they’re not coming home” on its screen photographed at the same event. A death cult has arisen. People “love dead Jews,” but unlike Dara Horn’s collection of essays, it seems they want those deaths to be done now, rather than to exult in a horrific past.
Pink Floyd frontman Roger Waters exemplifies the thinking behind this resurgence of sought-out Jewish bloodletting in a Facebook video clip on May 8, talking of “rogue, racist, genocidal Israel.”
As historian Jeffrey Herf explains: “After October 7, there were people … who placed the Hamas massacres in a historical context: that of Israel’s oppression of the Palestinians … [which] has led to a very strange situation: people who consider themselves left-wing or liberal are approving of an organization that has its roots in a mixture of religious fundamentalism and the Nazis’ annihilative anti-Semitism.”
It is as if to hate Jews is so normal that you are permitted to assume the most abnormal rationalizations. As long as the Jews are the target, one gets a free pass.
Anti-Israel protesters, of all places, disrupted an event at Auschwitz. While being prevented from approaching the marchers, they shouted out, “stop the genocide.” At Auschwitz.
At Stanford University, according to Theo Baker, “there are principled protesters, there are ignorant protesters, and there are malicious protesters.”
He added that “to paint Israel’s defensive war against Hamas as an act of genocide … [is a] … charge [that] is not just absurd, it’s outrageous … too many today are willing to assume the worst possible motives for the actions of Jews—or in this case, the Jewish state.”
Many of those same students walked out during graduation on Sunday.
Levi Fox, a sophomore at the University of Texas at Austin, told the Texas Senate Subcommittee hearing on Higher Education in mid-May that pennies were thrown at him, and he was told to “go back to Germany.” A professor said: “They’ll come after you and put you in the ovens next.”
The by-now-famous letter by 500-plus Jewish students at Columbia University informed us that some of them were told they are “all inbred” and “have no culture.” They witnessed the poster of an “activist” that informed them they were Hamas’s next targets. A leader of the tent encampment at the campus said publicly and proudly that “Zionists don’t deserve to live,” and that we’re lucky they are “not just going out and murdering Zionists.”
The slogan “resist by any means necessary” was quite evident there at many other encampments and demonstrations. On June 3, Students for Justice in Palestine at Columbia asked their supporters to have their “hands on the Zionist entity’s neck.”
Outside the Nova exhibition in Lower Manhattan on June 10, a mob of anti-Israel protesters chanted “Long live the intifada,” waved a flag associated with the Iranian-backed Lebanese terrorist group Hezbollah, a banner signed by Samidoun (associated with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine terror group) and shouted, “Israel go to hell.” And they added, “The Zionists are not human.”
It’s not just the violence of the rhetoric, bad enough as that is, but it is accompanied by a visceral hatred. For example, Ayana Smith-Kooiman, a staffer for Minnesota Sen. Erin Maye Quade, posted: “I do not give a flying f**k about Hamas because the root of the problem is a colonial government segregating, ethnically cleansing, murdering Palestinians, stealing their land with impunity and not expecting a resistance group to violently fight back.” She added that “Israel, Britain and the U.S. are held accountable for their violence and thievery.” Ideological rigidity trumps rational analysis of facts.
In another post, she averred, “Personally, I think Zionists should f**k off.” That moved Rep. Mary Franson (R-Minn.) to respond, “Today, it appears one needs to be an antisemite to be part of the cool kids club in the democrat party.”
And sure enough, one Andrew Koppleman “comes to the rescue” and argues that pro-Palestine voices, such as Rabea (“nakba is a crime”) Eghbariah, suffer a “deep issue.” The problems he had with publishing his pseudo-academic tract revealed “that this episode exposes … the climate of fear that influenced” the website shut down. This, he suggests, “it can be stigmatized. It should be regarded with disgust.”
Jews aren’t the only ones who undergo fear, Koppelman wants us to know.
It takes evil people to speak and do evil. Based on what we have witnessed, seen and heard since Oct. 7, the pro-“Free-Palestine” forces, Arab Muslims, progressive neo-Marxists and antisemites of all shades, are indeed evil and the worst is yet to come.