The Pro-Hamas Threat to America

Commencement season is over, but don’t expect the pro-Palestine movement that overtook universities in recent months to dissipate. Given its larger ambitions and significant financial and political support, this protest movement will continue its disruptions nationwide well into the summer.

Nearly eight months after Hamas attacked Israel, it’s abundantly clear that this movement is anything but pro-Palestine. A recent weekend rally outside the White House featured overt support for Hamas and Hezbollah, and calls to murder Zionists. As they demand a “cease-fire,” these protesters ignore Hamas’ rejection of numerous Israeli offers for just that and they also ignore Hamas’ intentional use of civilians as human shields.

One would think a movement ostensibly about saving Palestinian lives would urge Hamas to release the hostages and surrender, which would immediately end the Israel-Hamas war. Instead, their chants of “We don’t want two states, we want 1948” and “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” make clear they support the U.S.-designated terrorist organization and its antisemitic objective: to destroy the world’s only Jewish state.

Furthermore, the invocations “by any means necessary” and to “globalize the intifada” are licenses to replicate Hamas’ attack on Oct. 7—the deadliest day for the Jewish people since the Holocaust—and Yasser Arafat’s second intifada: the three-year terror campaign he launched after rejecting an opportunity to establish a Palestinian state.

Some may dismiss this movement as nothing more than a small, self-evidently noxious cadre of extreme antisemitic students with no constituents outside the university quad. Yet, according to the FBI, antisemitic hate crimes are up threefold, with some of the assaults against Jews most reminiscent of 1930s Germany occurring on university campuses.

And while the average participant may know little about the cause for which he or she protests, demonstrators certainly share their pro-Hamas comrades’ political goals—and the movement’s organizers have the means to pursue them far beyond America’s ivory towers.

But what starts with the Jews never ends with the Jews. Antisemitism is the proverbial canary in the coal mine. Today’s contagion is a particular strain of anti-Americanism that seeks social and political revolution, “by any means necessary.”

Now, with the school year over, look for this virus to relocate to cities with weak or sympathetic leadership, as we’ve seen in Washington, D.C., and at UCLA.

The real prize this summer is Chicago, where the Democratic National Convention will be held in August. The parallels to the events of the 1968 DNC in Chicago are already apparent, except for one important distinction: Unlike his predecessor Richard Daley, today’s mayor, Brandon Johnson, is more likely to join the protesters than silence them when they chant “Genocide Joe.”

The good news is that Americans are waking up to the threat the pro-Hamas movement and its connections to progressive organizations and malign foreign actors pose to our society.

Antisemitism has destroyed every society it infects. Hopefully we are not too late in diagnosing and destroying it before it destroys us.

Originally distributed by Tribune News Service and published by the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette

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