James Messerschmidt
On the one-year anniversary of the worst slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust, the “pro-Palestinian” movement chose to celebrate, with hundreds of “protesters” hitting Wall Street and thousands gathering in Washington Square Park to march uptown.
Their fellow-travelers also formed by the hundreds at campuses such as Columbia and NYU, chanting “From the river to the sea / Palestine will be free” — a call for Israel’s elimination, even if most of them refuse to realize or admit it.
Other calls for murder included chants like, “There is only one solution, intifada revolution” and “Long live the intifada.”
They vandalized a City College building, bloodied at least one counter-protester and set a fire in Washington Square Park.
Many, probably most, wore masks.
Part of the point was plainly to drown out the various pro-Israel rallies of the day, most of them somber memorials for those lost on Oct. 7: The protesters can’t even let Jews and their supporters grieve peacefully.
Another, to intimidate — in a (cowardly: remember the masks) show of the fury to be aimed at those who support Israel against its genocidal enemies.
And of course many — the radicalized college kids, the city’s large lefty professional-protest class — mainly wanted to act out and revel in their imagined righteousness, secure in the comfort that they’ll face zero consequences for any property damage, bloodshed or other disruptions (good luck to anyone who needs an ambulance on all the shut-down streets).
Put that lack of consequences on Gov. Hochul, who’s done nothing this past year to rally the forces of civilization against these wannabe-barbarians: She claims to be a moderate, but apparently not one who’s willing to lift a finger to help the center hold.
We’ll stand with Liel Leibovitz here: These thugs “cheering for the monsters who still hold four American citizens in captivity” are unintentionally doing us all a favor by proving “that the so-called pro-Palestine crowd isn’t really all that interested in Palestine.”
Their project is fundamentally anti-American as well as antisemitic.
And if the governor and other leading Democrats can’t draw the obvious lessons, the rest of us still will.