The Intifada Is Here
Pro-Palestinian terrorism has landed with full force on American shores, backed by the media establishment and progressive activists. It must be stopped.
In just the past two months, America has experienced what can only be described as a wave of antisemitic, anti-Israel terrorism carried out by pro-Palestinian activists. In mid- April, during Passover, the Pennsylvania governor’s mansion was set alight by a radical leftist who said that he committed the arson attack because he was angry about the war in Gaza. Governor Josh Shapiro and his family were home at the time, only saved from horrific deaths by the quick action of first responders and a functional alarm system. As a state governor, Shapiro has nothing to do with setting policy toward Israel; he was targeted because he was Jewish, pure and simple. A month later, a far-left activist from Chicago checked a gun in his luggage, flew to Washington DC, found an event for Jewish diplomatic staff at a Jewish museum, and proceeded to murder a young couple who worked at the Israeli embassy in cold blood. After his dastardly deed, he waltzed into the event and screamed about how he shot those two people for Palestine. This act of premeditated, wanton, antisemitic murder was either excused or cheered on by the pro-Palestinian faction. Just weeks later, an illegal immigrant from Egypt – who entered under the Biden administration – traveled more than 100 miles to Boulder, Colorado to attack elderly Jewish participants in a peaceful weekly march advocating for the release of the Israeli hostages in Gaza. He set them alight using a homemade flamethrower and several firebombs, causing severe injuries and total chaos. At the scene, he professed his unrepentant guilt, saying he wanted to kill “Zionists” and would gladly do so again.
These horrific events are not happening in a vacuum. Over the past few months, Israel has ramped up its campaign against Hamas in Gaza, re-occupying large areas of the Strip, controlling access and movement, meticulously clearing the remaining tunnel network, taking out Hamas commanders, and, perhaps most importantly, setting up its own food and aid distribution system in Gaza, bypassing international organizations and Hamas fronts. These actions have earned some serious success in the time they have been undertaken and the reaction in the West among media, international bodies, liberal intelligentsia, progressives, and the various pro-Palestinian backers has been absolutely apoplectic. Israel has been accused of genocide more times than I can count, but it has accelerated and become more specific and prediction-based since March. The IDF is routinely smeared with false atrocity rumors, including several instances where they purportedly killed Gazans waiting for aid – none of which actually occurred. Official UN representatives have claimed that Israel’s new aid distribution mechanism, which has provided millions of meals in the weeks it has operated, would lead to the deaths of 14,000 infants within 48 hours. Of course, this never happened. Israel is blamed for killing Hamas leaders who were hiding in tunnels directly underneath hospitals, as this supposedly shows that it is they who are indifferent to human life, not the Hamas leaders who deliberately built and hid in tunnels underneath civilian hospitals. And the media – both traditional and social – has gone into overdrive repeating these spurious claims.
Progressive outlets and commentators have lionized these attackers as doing the work of actual resistance against the evil American-Israeli genocide in Gaza. They have labeled these actions as justified in the face of the “occupation” of Palestine and professed their solidarity with Hamas. Pro-Palestinian protests have themselves ramped up, including in their property violence and their targeting of visible Jews. Chants like “Globalize the Intifada” have echoed through the streets of dozens of major American cities. Influencers on platforms like TikTok have engaged in modern-day versions of the blood libel and garnered tens of millions of views and favorable algorithmic treatment in the process. Media coverage has been awful, with nearly every purportedly neutral piece on these attacks mentioning Israeli action in Gaza as a rationale and parroting ‘statistics’ from the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry as the word of God. Politicians have tweeted their condolences and lambasted this antisemitism, while almost universally connecting it to the phantom menace of Islamophobia.
These actions are creating a climate of antisemitic incitement that has already been acted on in a high profile and murderous manner three times in two months. Copycat attacks or other acts of targeted violence will continue as long as these false narratives about Israel are combined with media malpractice and leftist approval. But enough is enough. American society is not defenseless against this rising tide of terror. We can and should put a stop to it, using the tools our government already has access to.
First, we should destroy the supercharging mechanism that has made a relatively niche ideology for average Americans – Palestinian nationalism – into the cause célèbre of our nation’s youth. That, my friends, is the Chinese Communist-controlled social media (read: spyware and propaganda) app, TikTok. As I have written ad nauseam on this website, we merely need to enforce the ban that has been duly passed by bipartisan majorities in Congress and ratified 9-0 by the Supreme Court. This is by far the easiest bit of low-hanging fruit that can put a serious dent in the transmission and dissemination of enemy agitprop meant to incite violence against American Jews.
Next, the US should wholeheartedly take the side of Israel in its righteous battle against Hamas, Islamic terrorism, and antisemitic global opinion. We should continue selling weapons to Jerusalem, providing them intelligence support, and helping to expand the alternate aid distribution system. We must push back aggressively against the slanderous claims of institutionally anti-Israel organizations like the United Nations, providing the facts of the matter and debunking the lies meant to demean the Jewish State. We should act to defund these institutions when possible, cutting off our support for these modern-day blood libelers and forcing them to look elsewhere for money to promote their despicable causes. American dollars should not go to aid any group that shows support for Hamas, antipathy toward our best ally in the region, or riles up rioters in the United States. That includes domestic NGOs that support these violent antisemitic protest movements.
In that vein, the federal government should use its investigative and intelligence tools to discover the funding networks, both foreign and domestic, for these organized acts of violence and shut them down. These activists claim they are in solidarity with Hamas; let’s see if they are in league with them, too. If so, these groups should be shut down and prosecuted as being in material support of terrorism, just as the Holy Land Foundation was during the War on Terror. We have a host of surveillance capabilities at our fingertips and should use them. They were meant to shut down terror networks and their domestic allies; the threat has presented itself once again and must be neutralized. Foreign funding of domestic organizations, particularly emanating from enemy states like Qatar and Iran, should be forbidden and these ties forcibly cut off.
Finally, law enforcement must begin treating these pro-Hamas demonstrations and the groups behind them as inherently suspect from the start. There should be zero tolerance for violence at protests and a strong and consistent police presence to enforce that rule with as much force as is deemed necessary. Localities should limit such demonstrations when possible or confine them to areas that do not present massive targets of opportunity, like Jewish neighborhoods or synagogues. Domestic groups that organize these protests – including the Party for Socialism and Liberation, a communist group with which the DC shooter was affiliated – should be targeted for infiltration and undermining by undercover officers. Groups that are abusing tax-exempt status to advocate for violence against Jews and the destruction of America should be stripped of those protections.
We face a risk the likes of which we have not seen in years. Islamic terrorism may not be in vogue as the threat of the day, but it remains a clear and present danger to American society and our Jewish citizenry. Now, it has domestic backers more powerful and widespread than ever before, incited by foreign enemy propaganda. In short, the intifada has been globalized. What are we going to do about it?