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Tuesday, November 28, 2023

How Hamas Became an Environmentalist and Gun Control Cause

By On November 28, 2023
From Queers for Palestine to marchers carrying signs reading, “Palestine is a Reproductive Justice Issue”, the Hamas cause has been vertically integrated throughout the Left. Greta Thunberg was booed after injecting anti-Israel chants into environmental rallies. The BLM movement was a longtime foe of Israel, but Asian Studies departments recently joined in.

The leaders of March for Our Lives and the Sunrise Movement, a gun control group and an environmental protest group, signed a letter to Biden warning that young people wouldn’t vote for him unless he forced Israel to stop attacking Hamas.

How better to promote gun control than by defending mass murderers who used machine guns to kill innocent people and how better to champion the environment than by supporting terrorists who deliberately start fires in Israel. What does Hamas have in common with gun control advocates, environmentalists and abortion activists?

“I think something very bad is happening on the left,” Israel’s Labor leader Merav Michaeli complained. “People who consider themselves to be democratic, progressive, are supporting a totalitarian terror regime that oppresses women, the LGBTQ+ community… The more you go to the left, the more there’s a big mix-up. Something went very wrong on the way.”

The ‘something’ that went wrong is called ‘intersectionality’. That’s why abortion protesters, gay activists, environmentalists, gun control activists and the entire Left have to support Hamas. But intersectionality is also bait and switch. While gay activists have to support Hamas, the Islamic terrorist group doesn’t have to stop throwing them off buildings. Making sure Hamas has enough fuel to fire rockets at Israeli kindergartens may be a reproductive justice issue, but no one expects masked men armed with RPGs to shout, “Allahu Akbar” at a Planned Parenthood rally.

Rather than a daisy chain connecting all the leftist causes together, intersectionality is actually a hierarchy that prioritizes the worst causes. It’s how the entire gay rights movement, to the dismay of some gay men and many lesbians, was drafted into the transgender cause. It’s why the extreme wing of each individual movement, from BLM in civil rights to art vandals in the environmental movement, have come to dominate while the moderates have been shut down.

Intersectionality has sidelined both principles and tactical considerations while making protestations of victimhood into the only consideration that matters. The more violent the rhetoric and the more extreme the cause, the more it takes over the entire Left.

This would make little sense if leftists actually cared about feminism, gay rights or global warming. But then again if they actually cared about those things, wouldn’t the USSR, China and Communist China be utopias where benevolent gay people cleaned up the environment?

The first and foremost thing that Merav Michaeli and most leftists don’t understand about the Left is that causes, whether it’s gun control or men pretending to be women, are just leverage to recruit activists, tear up society and then seize power. And once that happens, the new regime will have as much use for transgenderism or environmentalism as the Soviet Union did.

When you understand that, it becomes quite obvious why the Left supports Hamas, how it can juggle support for Islamic terrorism with the LGBTQ movement, and why it demands that gay rights take a back seat to Jihad. Intersectionality is just a new suit of clothes on the very old leftist idea that all causes are ultimately subordinate to the overriding cause of the revolution.

Under Stalinism, American Jewish leftists were told to support a regime that was massacring Jews and had allied with Nazi Germany. American feminists advocating for reproductive rights were ordered to back Communist China which was forcibly breeding women and aborting their babies. The American Indian movement was expected to support the Sandinista regime which was burning its own Indian population alive. To be a leftist is to be a traitor to your own cause.

These crimes which scarred generations of leftists were whitewashed out of history by leftists and the movement was rebranded as identity politics narcissism. Much as the military tried to appeal to a self-identified generation with the slogan ‘Army of One’, the Left rebranded as a movement centered around the personal identity of each of its members. But just as the army is still a massive hierarchy, not a personal development seminar, the Left is a collectivist movement whose central idea is that it is the group, not the individual, that actually matters.

Intersectionality promised a more individualistic leftist movement, one that was highly attuned to the ‘lived experience’ of its members and the more complex, and less black and white nature of identity politics in a world of many ethnic groups and sexualities, but that was bait and switch. Instead of customizing the movement to its members, intersectionality customized its members to the movement and its overriding objectives of burning down everything and seizing power.

And thus Hamas.

The American Left originally embraced third world liberation movements. When what it thought were secular Arab Socialist movements, including the PLO, turned out to be Islamist, it went along without missing a beat. After 9/11, liberals and Democrats in a fit of schismogenesis countered Bush’s War on Terror with a war for terrorists. Islamists became an oppressed group and a vital part of the leftist coalition not in spite of their destructiveness, but because of it.

If the Left actually cared about the things it claims to care about, it would be natural for it to side with Israel. But if the Left actually cared about those things, it would wave the American flag and condemn the Third World. Instead the Left acts like America is the worst place in the world and that every backward dictatorship is morally superior to us.

The hostility of the Left to the countries it’s in is the best evidence that it doesn’t believe in its causes. The diversity of the causes are a pretext for the true cause of mass destruction.

The inner purpose of any leftist cause is to create division and sow mistrust. The specificity of the cause is only a means of recruiting activists from a particular part of the spectrum. The more causes, the more races, ethnicities, sexualities, classes and belief systems, it can recruit from. Intersectionality is ultimately an academic term for demanding that the outer purpose, the official cause, must be subservient to the inner purpose.

How are abortion rights, gay rights or gun control served by supporting Hamas? The outer purpose of those movements is not served, but the inner purpose is advanced. And the inner purpose is the same as that of Hamas. The gun control advocates, environmentalists and other leftist activists are not here to improve our society, like Hamas they want to destroy it.






Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.

Thank you for reading.

Monday, November 27, 2023

The Dead Al Qaeda Hippie Who Went Viral on TikTok

By On November 27, 2023
Eight years after he was taken out by a drone strike in Waziristan, Adam Gadahn went viral on TikTok. Had the former Al Qaeda terrorist been alive to see TikTok lefties praising his, “Letter to America”, written in Osama bin Laden’s name, he would have been absolutely thrilled.

Raised by California hippies, Adam Gadahn’s message clicked with TikTok teens because he used to be one of them. After experimenting with heavy metal to rebel against his dad’s terrible folk music (“So tell us what the sign will be/Of the end of the age we know/War and famine everywhere/There’s no place left to go” he went for the ultimate in death metal.

We love nothing more than “slitting the throats of the infidels” he bragged in his videos in a fake Arabic accent right out of ‘Team America World Police’. “You and your people will, Allah willing, experience things, which will make you forget all about the horrors of September 11.”

Al Qaeda embraced the previously useless hipster because he promised to teach them how to reach Americans. But the ‘Azzam the American’ experiment never took off. Even after he stopped wearing a burka-like disguise over his square wire rimmed glasses, and wound a tablecloth around his head instead, he never stopped looking like a dork in a costume.

Adam never belonged in Pakistan, he belonged in ‘Fast Times at Ridgemont High’ or ‘Napoleon Dynamite’: his blank thousand yard stare had been perfected by getting high, not in Koran study.

Americans did not rush to enlist in Al Qaeda because of his words. Adam had aimed his rhetoric at the Michael Moore demographic that had birthed him, but one it was one thing to jeer Bush in between Starbucks lattes and another to move to a cave on the Pakistani border.

The videos mostly tapered off and he was reduced to translating the speeches of Al Qaeda leaders. After Osama bin Laden’s death, Americans stopped paying attention to Al Qaeda, and Adam’s death in a drone strike took second billing to the deaths of two American hostages.

But Adam or Azzam had been ahead of his time. He had peaked before the age of social media, and he never reached the audience he needed. But that’s changing now.

8 years after he was spattered over parts of Pakistan, Adam is an Al Qaeda influencer now.

The living can catch up to the times, but the dead can only wait for the times to catch up to them. When Adam Gadahn converted to Islam in 1996 and then assaulted his local Imam for not being antisemitic enough, there weren’t a lot of American teenagers like him. But we now live in a world where there are plenty of American teens converting to Islam and going Jihad.

Take Trevor Bickford, a 19-year-old from Wells, Maine, a town of less than 10,000 people, who converted to Islam, and headed down to Times Square to kill non-Muslims. Or Xavier Pelkey, 19, of Waterville, Maine, a city of 15,000, who joined ISIS and planned his own terror attack. Or Jonathan Xie, a 20-year-old from a New Jersey suburb who joined Hamas and threatened to bomb Trump Tower.

When Shannon Maureen Conley, a 19-year-old teenage girl from suburban Colorado converted to Islam and tried to join ISIS in 2014, there were articles and profiles on her. By the 2020s, it’s become common enough that American teens becoming Islamic terrorists has become routine. Hardly anyone bothers with the extended profiles of what is now a social phenomenon.

The handful that actually go all the way, like Adam, Trevor, Xavier, Jonathan or Shannon are the tip of the iceberg. When Osama bin Laden’s “Letter to America”, actually written by Adam, went viral on TikTok, it exposed a much larger contingent of American teens friendly to the Jihad. Most Muslims are not actually terrorists, they’re just sympathetic to their positions. The same is true of parts of the non-Muslim world, including Europe, and it’s true of some American teens.

A poll showing that 51% of Americans 18-24 supported the murders, rapes and kidnappings atrocities committed by Hamas on Oct 7 is not just a statement about Israel. How many of them also think Al Qaeda had a point? There’s no meaningful polling on that: only anecdotal.

Adam’s “Letter to America”, stripped of his terrorist cosplay, the costumes and the droning voice, proved to be effective with teens who are like him, bored, dissatisfied and lacking in meaning. The Al Qaeda influencer rebelled against the Christian and Jewish religions of his parents, adopted Islam and then called for the destruction of America. In a counterculture that prizes teenage rebellion as the ultimate form of cultural change, Adam was the ‘it’ Jihadist.

Converting to Islam is a bit of a side road from the one that his Boomer parents took to get to their place in the counterculture. Adam went from his dad’s ‘Beat of the Earth’ and ‘Love Will Find a Way’ to a scorched earth triumph over the infidels, but isn’t this where the Left always ends up? Converting to Islam and joining Al Qaeda is the Zoomer answer to the Boomer side roads of joining Charlie Manson’s race war or drinking Kool-Aid with Jim Jones.

The Age of Aquarius always ends in Altamont and gulags. Why not also Jihad?

Adam Gadahn adapted Osama bin Laden’s message to a generation of teens who grew up believing that America was racist, “freedom and democracy that you call to is for yourselves and for white race only”, destroying the environment, ranting that “you have destroyed nature with your industrial waste and gasses… despite this, you refuse to sign the Kyoto agreement” (Adam had started out as an environmentalist), and oppressing the rest of the world. Starting with the leftist premise that America was evil, Al Qaeda made perfect sense. And to leftists it still does.

The first Al Qaeda influencer is postmortem piggybacking on a culture of radical activism that has made Islamic terrorism into the ultimate counterculture.

The Guardian profiles Americans who reacted to Islamic terrorism by reading the Koran and converting to Islam. The dead-eyed Manson followers and Jim Jones cult members are reading Korans and shouting “ceasefire”, they’re blocking traffic and having hysterics at the Capitol.

The Left has always drawn on fractured souls for its causes. Even more than dynamiting buildings, it set bombs to blow up the culture and its values. The more people it broke, the more recruits it gained. Islamists in America have gone beyond recruiting in prison and are recruiting from this same broken base. Mom and Dad may have protested the war, but Junior is a Jihadist.

Islam, like the Left, promises to destroy a failed world built on oppression and lies, in order to save it. Behind the apocalyptic idealism is the same perversity that led Adam Gadahn to threaten that, “the streets of America shall run red with blood.” Was this rhetoric really all that different from the anarchists, the Black Panthers or the Symbionese Liberation Army?

The radicals have become one great big apocalyptic gestalt, castrating teenagers, burning down pro-life centers, marching through the streets, tearing down statues and looting stores. The spectacle of it matters more than the details of the ideology. Like Mao’s Cultural Revolution, some teens robotically repeat verbose dogma they don’t understand, whether it’s Critical Race Theory or Hadiths, because it lets them run around destroying things and terrorizing people.

The destructive impulses that leftist radicals and Islamic terrorists channel are fairly similar. And not so different from the Hitler Youth. Put on a uniform, shock your parents and wreck things. The more you rage and hate, the stronger you feel and the more you bypass the hard work of adulthood. Radical politics is just another way for teenagers to never grow up.

‘Azzam the American’ was a Jihadist Peter Pan who never had to grow up. He’s dead now. And some of those radicals protesting for Hamas will eventually convert and follow in his footsteps.

Adam Gadahn understood instinctively how to take a foreign ideology and make it palatable to those like him, but we’re now in a world and a country full of Adams. Social decay has been supplemented by educational and pop culture indoctrination. TikTok is happy to spread Osama’s message as long as it weakens America. There is a world of strange bedfellows out there all happy to see us fall. And if we are not careful, some of them will be our children.

The return of ‘Azzam the American’ is a reminder that we’re not just in a war, but a culture war. A broken and divided nation is in no shape to defeat a vast enemy that is already inside our borders. The War on Terror is an extension of the old culture war we’ve been losing until now. Islamic terrorism could not succeed unless it could rely on a fifth column inside our countries.

After 9/11, it was clear that we would have to win an internal war to win an external one. Now as the wars come together and the enemy roams our streets, the need is more urgent than ever.

Either we defeat the enemy within or the war is lost.





Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.

Thank you for reading.

Sunday, November 26, 2023

Thirty Years Ago Israel Deported Hamas. Clinton Made Israel Take It Back

By On November 26, 2023
“Deporting The Hope For Peace?” Newsweek asked. The hope for peace was Hamas.

The year was 1992. The Clinton administration was trying to get Israeli Prime Minister Rabin and the PLO’s Yasser Arafat to sign on the dotted line of the Oslo Accords to create a terror state inside Israel. In the name of peace. Unfortunately Hamas kept killing Israelis.

15-year-old Helena Rapp had been stabbed to death at a bus stop on the way to school. A few days later, Rabbi Shimon Biran, a father of four, was similarly murdered by an Islamic terrorist.

Fed up with the latest killings, Prime Minister Rabin put 417 Islamists terrorists on buses and dumped them in Lebanon. The monsters he deported included top Hamas terror leaders.

On the six buses were current Hamas leader Ismael Haniyeh, Hamas co-founder Abdel Aziz al-Rantisi, who would vow, “by Allah, we will not leave one Jew in Palestine”, Abu Osama, who helped draft the Hamas charter calling for the extermination of the Jews, Hamas co-founders Mohammed Taha, Hammad Al-Hasanat, and Mahmoud Zahar, who threatened “They have legitimized the killing of their people all over the world by killing our people”, Hamad Al-Bitawi, who proclaimed that “Jihad is a collective duty” along with Abdullah al-Shami, the head of Islamic Jihad, and many other present and future Islamic terror leaders deported to Lebanon.

The New York Times headlined its coverage, “Ousted Arabs Shiver and Wait in Lebanese Limbo”. Newsweek also sympathetically described how the Hamas terrorists were “shivering in the cold.” The Washington Post lingered on their handcuff “welts”. The Associated Press provided detailed coverage of their cases of diarrhea turning the bowel movements of Islamist terrorists into an item worthy of international coverage.

In reality the Hamas and Islamic Jihad terrorists had been equipped by Israel with raincoats, blankets, food and $50 each: more than enough to buy whatever they needed in Lebanon.

“We are thirsty, cold and hungry,” said Dr. Abdul-Aziz Rantisi,” is how the Times began its story. It mentioned that Rantisi was planning a hunger strike, not that he was a terrorist leader.

The Los Angeles Times suggested that the “free speech” of the terrorists had been violated. It asked them to “define Hamas’ membership conditions” and ”many answered, ‘To pray and be good Muslims.’” That is how the media explained the Islamic terror group to Americans.

The Red Cross, which after over a month had failed to pay a visit to the Israeli hostages, including children and old women being held by Hamas, was quickly on the scene with “three truckloads of tents, food, blankets and bedding”. The aid organization set up tents for the Hamas terrorists who were apparently too lazy or incompetent to set up their own tents.

The head of UNRWA trekked out from Vienna to visit the expelled Hamas terrorists.

Bernard Pfefferle, the local chief delegate of the International Committee of the Red Cross, wept, “They won’t survive the winter out there like this.” In fact, they survived just fine.

UN Under Secretary General James O. C. Jonah, Bernard Kouchner, France’s Minister for Humanitarian Affairs, and many other foreign dignitaries tried to visit the Hamas terrorists.

French Ambassador Daniel Husson asked to meet with the Hamas terrorists to “express France’s sympathy with their cause.”

Amnesty International organized a letter writing campaign whining that the Hamas deportees were “living in tents in freezing conditions” and demanding the “safe return of the deportees to Israel.” B’Tselem, a pro-terror ‘human rights’ group operating inside Israel, denounced the deportations as a “a flagrant violation of human rights”. During the Oct 7 attacks, Vivian Silver, a B’Tselem board member, was killed by the terrorists she had spent her life advocating for.

B’Tselem had been one of the pro-terrorist groups that had originally challenged the deportations in Israel’s leftist Supreme Court in a bid to keep Hamas inside Israel.

The media relentlessly covered the Hamas deportees the way it had failed to cover their victims. By the end, Abdel Aziz al-Rantisi had held a record of 1,500 press conferences. Every time the Islamic terrorists sneezed there was a correspondent there to write about it, a photographer there to take a picture of it and a human rights activist there to condemn Israel for it.

Even if it was all a lie.

“EXPELLED PALESTINIANS RUN OUT OF WATER,” a Washington Post headline blared. In that same story the paper mentioned that they were getting their water from a stream. Other stories complained that they were running out of water while surrounded by snow.

One Associated Press story described a deportee eating a breakfast of jam, cheese and bread or beans and chickpeas with lemon sauce, and then a lunch of tuna fish or sardines, and then complaining, “I’m so sick of this food. I eat only to stay alive.”

In reality the Hamas and Islamic terrorists had plenty of food and water. At one point even a New York Times article admitted that “on Thursday, the Palestinians said that they had fasted during the day to preserve food stocks that had dwindled to some vermicelli and potatoes, with drinking water completely gone. Yet today, an Associated Press reporter said that the deported men were cooking rice, chickpeas and canned meat, and that some had eggs.”

A week after they were deported the New York Times claimed that the Hamas terrorists would start “dying from pneumonia” in a few days. None of them died even after seven months.

In reality, they were holding lavish religious feasts with Hezbollah and Iran’s IRGC terrorists. 
The tent city would become an enclave of television sets, fax machines, copy machines, cell phones, a fridge filled with soda and a satellite dish beaming Iranian television shows to them. 

Israel had dumped the Hamas terrorists in Lebanon, but the Hezbollah allied government refused to take them and blocked the road with tanks to keep them from leaving. The Lebanese government wouldn’t allow aid to pass through to the Hamas terrorists, but did allow reporters and camera crews through to document the “shivering” of the Hamas leaders.

In a foreshadowing of Egypt’s policy of blockading Gaza, Lebanon kept the Hamas terrorists from entering Lebanon. And the international community and the media placed the blame on Israel, rather than Lebanon, which was preventing them from entering its territory.

The UN Security Council unanimously adopted Resolution 799 condemning the deportations of Hamas terrorists and demanding that Israel “ensure the safe and immediate return to the occupied territories of all those deported”.

The first Bush administration voted for the resolution even though it had shrugged when a year earlier, the Kuwaitis had expelled 200,000 ‘Palestinians’ using tanks and troops.

“I think we’re expecting a little much if we’re asking the people in Kuwait to take kindly to those that had spied on their countrymen that were left there, that had brutalized families there, and things of that nature,” President George H. W. Bush had observed.

Israelis however were supposed to take kindly to the Hamas terrorists massacring them. The Bush administration “strongly condemned” the deportations. Bill Clinton was no better.

“I share the anger and the frustration and the outrage of the Israeli people. And I understand how they feel. They have to deal very firmly with this group Hamas, which is apparently bent on terrorist activities of all kinds,” Clinton, who would soon be taking office, said. “On the other hand, I am concerned that this deportation may go too far and imperil the peace talks.”

“We are not sure that President-elect Clinton and his team fully comprehend the danger from Islamic fundamentalism,” Rabin had observed before his meeting with Bill Clinton.

The Clinton administration mostly certainly did not. But neither did Rabin.

Prime Minister Rabin had only temporarily deported the Hamas and Islamic Jihad terrorists for two years to improve his domestic image and buy some quiet time for peace negotiations. His coalition of leftist and far leftist parties was soon divided between him and future Prime Minister Shimon Peres’s far leftist cabinet coalition. “No one is enjoying the suffering of these people,” Peres said. “Israel deported them, but it did not mean to hurt them.”

The leftist coalition Meretz party called deporting Hamas “a gross violation of human rights.”

Under pressure from the Clinton administration, which warned that it would not protect Israel from UN sanctions, and members of his own leftist coalition Rabin offered to allow the Hamas terrorists back if they promised to “desist from terror and violence for the duration of the peace negotiations”. The terrorists refused to promise that. And so he agreed to take in over a hundred of them now and the rest in a year. Hamas began returning to Israel in 1993. 

The Hamas terrorists only agreed to return due to insufficient TV coverage of their antics.

"High among the reasons given by the Palestinian deportees for accepting Israel's effort to let about half of them back into the West Bank and Gaza next month was the deportees lack not of food or shelter, but of coverage by the news media -- meaning television," the New York Times reported.

30 years ago Israel had expelled the leadership of Hamas and Islamic Jihad, and then took them back in.

Two weeks after Rabin agreed to take back the Hamas terrorists, the World Trade Center was bombed by the Islamic Group which, like Hamas, had come out of the Muslim Brotherhood.

“Our struggle against murderous Islamic terror is also meant to awaken the world which is lying in slumber. We call on all nations and all people to devote their attention to the real and serious danger which threatens the peace of the world in the forthcoming years. The danger of death is at our doorstep,” Rabin had warned. But the world went on slumbering .And so did Israel.

In 2023, Israel and the world have the opportunity to undo or repeat the mistakes of 1993.






Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.

Thank you for reading.

Friday, November 24, 2023

There Are No Innocent Civilians in Gaza

By On November 24, 2023
Ever since Hamas and Islamic Jihad terrorists, along with ordinary Arab Muslims from Gaza, invaded Israel, murdered, raped and kidnapped women and children, the debate has been about how innocent they are. And how easy Israel should be willing to go on them.

In the weeks since, Israel has been lectured about a “disproportionate” response and the urgent need to avoid civilian casualties. That’s a little tricky when fighting an Islamic terrorist group whose only real defensive strategy is hiding behind civilians. Fighting Islamic terrorists without killing civilians is like trying to invade Russia while avoiding cold weather. It’s impossible.

But ever since the Bush administration decided that the real problem in Afghanistan and Iraq was not a cult and a culture of death, but a lack of democracy, our elites have been busy pretending that over a thousand years of terror was due to a lack of free and fair elections.

The Bush administration got its elections in the West Bank and Gaza. And Hamas won. Then Obama got his elections in Egypt and across North Africa, and the Muslim Brotherhood, the parent organization of Hamas and Al Qaeda, won. We’re still dealing with the fallout from that.

‘Democracy’ handed over Iraq and Gaza to Iran. And as a result ISIS emerged.

As Hamas uses ICU patients and babies in NICUs as human shields for its bases, what do the “ordinary Palestinians”, the ones liberals are convinced are innocent parties in all this, think?

A recent poll of Arab Muslim residents of the West Bank and Gaza, known as ‘Palestinians’ circa 1967, conducted by the Arab World for Research and Development (AWRAD) asked them.

74% supported the Hamas atrocities of Oct 7. Of these 59% “extremely” support them and another 15% only “somewhat”. Only 7% were “extremely against” and 5% somewhat against.

That’s 74% in favor of murdering, raping and kidnapping Jews and only 12% against.

Only 7% were ‘extremely’ against murdering and abducting children.

Is this a moral or a tactical objection? Let’s look at the breakdown by region.

83% of those in the West Bank, ruled by the Palestinian Authority, said that they supported the Hamas atrocities. Only 7% were opposed. In Gaza, there was notably less enthusiasm at 63%. But after weeks of bombings and raids, only 20% seem to have decided it was a bad idea.

Why were only 7% of those in the West Bank, but 20% of those in Gaza opposed?

Do those extra 13% of Gazans reflect a people (slightly) more likely to value human life or terrorist supporters who, like their comrades in the West Bank, like it better when someone else is doing the fighting? If the attack had come from the West Bank, would 83% (instead of just 63%) of those in Gaza be enthusiastic about the massacre and beheading of Israelis?

The survey asked a few more questions that got to the heart of it.

A majority believed that the Hamas atrocities were an Islamic response to the “defilement of Al Aqsa” by allowing Jews to set foot on the former site of the Holy Temple.

98% in Gaza and the West Bank said that they felt ‘pride’ as ‘Palestinians’ over the war.

74% expect the fighting to end with the defeat of Israeli forces in Gaza.

Only 17% support a two-state solution while 77.7% want to destroy Israel and replace it with a ‘Palestinian’ state.

Are there innocent civilians in Gaza? Probably a lot fewer than in Berlin or Tokyo in 1944.

The Germans supported Hitler and the Japanese backed the Imperial war machine. Those dissidents and opponents who disagreed not just on tactical grounds, but on moral ones, were a small minority. They’re a far tinier minority among the so-called Palestinians.

The ‘Palestinian’ majority wants a war to destroy Israel fought by Islamic terrorists.

They’re not complaining and crying for a ceasefire because they don’t want a war, but because they’re losing the war that they wanted. They still want the war, they just want to be winning it.

When you spend all of your time dreaming of invading and destroying another country, you may be a civilian, but you’re no more innocent than your average Nazi Party member.

Currently Hamas is a good deal more popular in the West Bank (88% approval rating) than it is in Gaza (59% approval rating), but the Al Aqsa Brigade, the military part of Hamas, scores big in the West Bank (86% approval) and at (69%) in Gaza. Those are numbers Biden would kill for.

And don’t mistake even the nearly 9 out of 10 in the West Bank and 7 out of 10 in Gaza as a lack of enthusiasm for Islamic terrorism.

The Al Qassam Brigades, the direct terrorist arm of Hamas, is at 95% approval in the West Bank and 78% in Gaza.

Islamic Jihad scores 93% in the West Bank and 72% in Gaza.

The Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade is at 88% in the West Bank and at 70% in Gaza.

But let’s go back to democracy. Whom do they want running the place?

75% of those in the West Bank and 68% of those in Gaza want a national unity government of the various Islamic terrorist groups that would naturally include Hamas.

Isn’t democracy a beautiful thing? The ‘Palestinian’ people want to be ruled by terrorists. They want a war. And then they cry to the cameras when the war they demanded actually happens.

That’s what ‘Palestinians’ want and whom they like. Whom don’t they like? Everyone.

98% of the Arab Muslim settlers in the West Bank hate America as do 96.8% of those in Gaza. That’s still better than the UK which is hated by 100% of Arab Muslim colonists in the West Bank and Gaza. They actually hate America and the UK more than Israel which is only at 97.3%.

But don’t feel too bad, Americans, Israelis and Brits, because they hate everyone.

Not a single country, and that includes Iran, gets even a 5% ‘very positive’ rating. 63% don’t like Iran, 27% like it, and only 4% really like it even though it bled itself dry financing their terrorism.

64% don’t like Turkey even though Erdogan, its Islamic dictator, pulled out all the stops for them.

85% don’t like Egypt, 86% don’t like Jordan, 95% don’t like Saudi Arabia, and 95% don’t like the UAE even though these are the fellow Arab Muslim countries that provide aid to them.

Proving that ingratitude is the one consistent ‘Palestinian’ characteristic: 92% don’t like the EU, 88% don’t like the UN, and 69% manage to be against the Red Cross.

Russia, which created the entire ‘Palestinian’ cause and continues to back them, gets some of the best numbers. Only 57% don’t like Russia and 60% don’t like China.

Even more ungratefully, 85% don’t like Western media.

The ‘Palestinians’ have their own dedicated UN agency (UNRWA) and have billions of dollars lavished on them. Their needs are taken care of by the people they hate, America, Israel, Egypt and the UAE, not to mention the UN and the Red Cross, whom they repay by hating them.

If you give them free food, they will really hate you, and if you give them free rockets, they will hate you a little less. The only things they want to do are kill people and then kill some more.

This isn’t a culture or a country: it’s a xenophobic death cult that hates the entire world.

You don’t want them as neighbors or as refugees. Israel is stuck with them. The rest of the world doesn’t have to be. Stop giving them money, stop listening to their propaganda and stop caring.

Our faith in democracy convinced us to waste blood trying to bring democracy to Iraq and Afghanistan. And then we handed Afghanistan to the Taliban on the understanding that they’d run for public office. The State Department is still asking the Taliban to open up elections.

What’s behind this insanity? We refuse to come to terms with the fact that some people are bad. No matter what horrors they commit, we’re certain that it’s only a “tiny minority of extremists” who have “misunderstood Islam” and are surely not representative of the vast majority of peace loving people who want the same things we want and just haven’t been given the opportunity.

The troubling question they don’t like to think about is what if none of that is actually true?

In the Book of Genesis, Abraham pleads with G-d to spare Sodom. The Lord agrees if some righteous people can be found in the infamous city. The patriarch bargains with G-d for increasingly smaller numbers of righteous people until it turns out there is only one. And he has to run for his life before Sodom is destroyed. Modern people are uncomfortable with the story.

We don’t really believe in evil. Even when we come face to face with it we make excuses for it. And evil is then able to manipulate us, to play on our sympathies when it has none for us.

You see there is one piece of good news from that poll.

90% of ‘Palestinians’ would like a ceasefire from the war that 77.7% of them would like to see conclude with the destruction of Israel.

How stupid would anyone have to be to give it to them?






Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.

Thank you for reading.

Thursday, November 23, 2023

Who's Afraid of Thanksgiving?

By On November 23, 2023
There are two annual traditions that make up Thanksgiving. One is the ancient and venerable tradition of thanking the Creator for our bounty while the other is the more recent leftist tradition of turning the day into a festival of grievances, a 'festivus' during which they pick political arguments with family members and launch into screeds about how Thanksgiving is the product of imperialism and colonialism.

The Nation magazine recently proposed replacing it with a 'Truthsgiving' during which we will all confess our crimes and ponder how much better life would be if the Pilgrims had never come to America, and the Nazis and Communists had won WWII and gone on to exterminate 70% of the population of the planet.

Wrecking Thanksgiving, like the family, womens' sports and Star Wars is just one of those things lefties do. The perpetual teenage tantrums that began with Karl Marx and ended with Cousin Jan screaming at the Thanksgiving table about how nobody understands Hamas and how inspiring she found Osama bin Laden's letter are the essence of the movement.

The idea of Thanksgiving is scary to a movement obsessed with power and grievance. The essence of the holiday is gratitude and that requires taking a step back and acknowledging the limitations of our power. From the environment of the planet to every detail of our lives, the Left is obsessed with control, but Thanksgiving, like most religious festivals, is about surrendering that control to a higher power. G-d.



True people of faith are humble. Thanksgiving requires humility and the recognition that we are not ultimately in charge. While we can and should strive, we cannot do everything, and our successes are owed to a force that utterly transcends us and our efforts. But to believe that is to reject most of the objectives of the Left.

The utopian conviction that the purpose of life is to study politics and take power is a poisonous secular religion, more akin to Islam, than to Christianity and Judaism, whose fixation on power stems from the desire, as George Soros and other leftist billionaires have admitted, to play god. And to play god, is to deny that there is an actual Deity, only a chaotic world that has to be ordered by god-like humans.

There's no room for gratitude for the aspiring man-gods, the cults of personality, the mean and cheap little substitutes for religion that speak of love, but preach only hate.

The Left rejects gratitude. As Stalin said, "Gratitude is a sickness suffered by dogs." Resentment is what gives the Left purpose. The more leftists receive, the more they resent. Their resentment is in inverse proportion to their bounty. That is why Western leftists are the most resentful of them all.

Rather than fleeing blessed by prosperity and comfort, they grow arrogant and certain of themselves. The blessings around feed their egos and inflate their narcissism and stir up neuroses so that they alternate between ecstasies of power and catastrophes of doom. They imagine a new world and break the old one.

Gratitude is an antidote to arrogance, it is one of the best defenses against leftism. Teach your children gratitude and you give them a knowledge of G-d, a sense of security and their place in the universe.

Teach them leftism and you teach them to scream at you across the Thanksgiving table.





Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center.

Tuesday, November 21, 2023

Equity, Equality and Hamas

By On November 21, 2023
How did we end up with Hamas rallies on college campuses across America? Start with ‘equity’.

America started out with the idea of ‘equality’ that all people should be treated equally so that regardless of where they started out, everyone had the same rights and their lives had the same value. Advocates for ‘equity’ argue that this was unjust because different people were starting out in different places. What they really needed was a level playing field by imposing ‘equity’.

Diversity, Equity and Inclusion disposed of equality. Its equity agenda dismissed the idea that people would be treated equally. The only way to achieve equality was through an indefinite period of inequality: raising up some people and pushing down others. Organizations, from the White House to Corporate America, vowed to ”embed equity” into everything that they did.

The moral DNA of society was completely rewritten so that everything from freedom of expression to the value of human life had to be weighed in terms of identity politics. Even the most basic moral questions came down to the paradigms of oppressor and oppressed. Right and wrong were determined purely in terms of ‘punching up’ or ‘punching down’.

“Is it wrong to murder, rape and kidnap people?” was a question to which the answer was no longer “yes”, but “were the victims or the killers members of an oppressed group?”

What matters is not so much that Hamas raped, killed and kidnapped kids, but that it appears to be the weaker party in the conflict, the one with backing from leftist figures in good standing, and the one that has the revolutionary vibe that bourgeois radicals love so much.

Siding with Israel or Hamas has become a litmus test for the left of center. It evenly divides liberals from leftists. The dividing line is between human decency and ideology. It’s a familiar moral struggle that played out time and again throughout the twentieth century.

Morality can only exist in a society that believes in equality. Equity is obsessed with outcomes which is another way of saying that it believes that the ends can always justify the means.

“To put it brutally,” Walter Duranty, the New York Times correspondent, busy covering up Communist atrocities in the Soviet Union, famously wrote, “you can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.”

Equity is all about the omelets. It reduces all morality to a political program. Right and wrong is determined by where everyone starts out and where they want to end up. Violence is just another means. Sometimes eggs have to be broken and millions of people have to be killed.

Brutality, rather than something to be deplored, becomes a sign of revolutionary commitment. Only those who truly believe in a new age and are determined to overthrow the existing order will be utterly ruthless, vicious and destructive in the campaign against the system. The worst barbarism is justified as a ‘reaction’ to oppression and a determination to rush out an end to it.

The Left never lets go of bad ideas. It just rebrands them. Equity is just the same old program of promising to make everyone equal through a temporary totalitarian ‘evening out’ period. Under this umbrella, there is no room for individuality or freedom, and the only morality is political.

Radicals claim that equality perpetuates the system while equity disrupts it. The reality is that equality is genuinely dangerous because it disrupts all systems of power while equity is just another means of eliminating individual rights, and replacing it with a system of power.

Expecting people dedicated to this proposition to side with Israel over Hamas is foolish. And those indoctrinated to view the world through concepts like anti-racism, intersectionality and orientalism have been groomed throughout their miseducation to support Hamas. All the tools and the information they have been given have trained them to understand Islamic terrorists as the oppressed, not just in Israel, but in America, Europe, India and all around the world.

This may seem like madness to conservatives and liberals, but if you understand the world as a conflict between the old order and an emerging new order, as leftists and some far righters do, siding with Hamas is wholly reasonable. Not to mention China, Russia and Al Qaeda.

Equity is all about forcibly ‘evening out’ humanity while intersectionality connects all causes.

When abortion rights ralliers carry signs reading, “Palestinian resistance is reproductive justice”, it seems like madness, but it’s a very particular species of ideological madness. The same one that led Communists to defend Nazi Germany during the period of the Hitler-Stalin Pact. Or led the Trotskyists who still form the backbone of the anti-war movement to sabotage the defense industry in the United States and the United Kingdom once WWII was in full swing.

If the only real measure of morality is the oppressor/oppressed or ‘punching up’ and ‘punching down’, then why be selective about who the oppressed ‘punching up’ are? Nazis and Hamas both look pretty good when they’re inflicting defeats on the people you want to overthrow.

Some radicals may be well aware that Hamas Jihadis would be shooting or raping them if they were in the wrong place, but it didn’t especially bother them when their friends ended up on the guillotine or in gulags, or when they were beaten during race riots or killed in Latin America.

Equity requires sacrifices. We can’t all be even until some of us are broken or killed.

Where equality sees us as individuals, equity reduces us to members of a group operating within a political context. Our lives are sacred only to the extent that our death serves a political purpose. Do black lives matter? Only when they’re taken by a police officer, not by the stray bullets of a gang member over a long weekend in Chicago.

College students who cheer Hamas or tear down posters of kidnapped hostages ask themselves what is the political context in which these crimes were carried out. It is the context that matters, not the people. In the right political context, anything can be justified.

The further away we get from equality, the more we find ourselves in this abyss of equity where the only morals are political, the only crimes are political and the only people that matter are political. The cruel god of the leftist is politics. Men, women and children are sacrificed to him, but he yields nothing except a permanent sinecure for the bloody priests wielding the knife.

Equity gazes at the past and the future, but has little interest in the present except as a meeting point of the two. It destroys the present to avenge a poorly understood past and ensure its impossible plans for the future. It dehumanizes people on the promise of humanizing them. It convinces them to support discrimination to end it, to spew hate for the sake of love, and to support mass murder so that all mankind may live in peace.






Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.

Thank you for reading.

Monday, November 20, 2023

The ‘Two-State Solution’ is Terrorism

By On November 20, 2023
“We must keep pursuing peace. We must keep pursuing a path so that Israel and the Palestinian people can both live safely, in security, in dignity, and in peace. For me, that means a two-state solution,” Biden lectured Israelis during his visit.

A two state solution dividing up Israel into a state for the Jews and a state for the Muslim terrorists has been on the minds of Biden, administration officials, EU leaders and the media.

Before his visit to Israel, Biden called Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas and scheduled a meeting with him. Secretary of State Blinken had met with Abbas the day before.

According to an official of Abbas’ Fatah party which runs the Palestinian Authority, “Blinken even demanded before he met with him that there be a condemnation” of the Hamas attacks. But no such condemnation was forthcoming. Nevertheless the media falsely reported that Abbas had disavowed Hamas. In reality, a statement was planted in a readout of a call with Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro without Abbas’ knowledge. When Abbas found out, he had it removed.

Abbas’s actual reaction to the Hamas murder of women and children was to assert the right of the “Palestinian people to defend themselves against the terrorism of settlers and the occupation forces”.

While Biden and Blinken were preparing to meet with the terrorist leader, a terror unit that is part of Abbas’ Fatah party was claiming credit for collaborating with Hamas on the attacks.

A spokesman for the Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades boasted that the “together with the rest of the Palestinian resistance factions” it “carried out several operations behind enemy lines as part of ‘the Al-Aqsa Flood’ battle”, which is the Hamas name for the attacks, and claimed that “we killed and took captive occupation soldiers” as part of a “joint operations room”.

Biden’s alternative to Hamas was actually killing Israelis in coordination with Hamas.

While the Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades appears on the list of foreign terrorist organizations, making it a crime for Americans to fund it, its parent organization, the Palestinian Authority, benefits from massive infusions of cash and political support from Washington D.C.

Last year, Biden met with Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas and bragged that, “I reversed the policies of my predecessor and resumed aid to the Palestinians — more than a half a billion dollars in 2021.”

The meeting between Abbas and Biden didn’t happen on this trip, not because the leader of the free world refused to meet with a terrorist leader, but because the terrorist leader refused to meet with Biden in order to protest Israel’s bombing of Hamas terrorists. Half a billion dollars didn’t even buy Biden a photo op with the terrorist he would like to see running a country.

None of that has stopped Biden and D.C. officials from continuing to talk about the “Two-State Solution” and to warn that if Israel defeats Hamas in Gaza, it must replace it with the Palestinian Authority and its terrorists to begin the cycle of violence and terror all over again.

But Biden didn’t bother to ask the “Palestinians”: 72% of whom don’t support a two-state solution in “which an independent Palestinian state existed alongside an independent state of Israel”. Among the young, there’s only 16% support for coexistence with Israel. 81% of them don’t believe that a permanent peace will ever be achieved. Two-thirds believe that life was better before the Oslo Accords began the two-state solution process and support abandoning it.

If an election were held, Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh would defeat Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas by 58% to 37% which explains why Abbas has not held a presidential election since 2005. After Hamas won legislative elections in 2006, all elections were canceled.

Despite the clear evidence otherwise, Secretary of State Blinken put in a call to Abbas to tell him, “that Hamas terrorists do not represent Palestinians”. He didn’t mention that the only reason they don’t is because the Palestinian Authority won’t hold elections to allow them to.

As the Hamas attacks were underway, Al Jazeera reported that mosque “minarets in the West Bank began making calls of ‘Allahu Akbar’ in an expression of support” and “massive processions set out in a number of places in the West Bank… in Jenin, Tubas, Ramallah… in Hebron, and Bethlehem… to celebrate the ‘Al-Aqsa Flood’ battle.”

The Palestinian Authority’s television rejoiced that “Gaza landed a blow that this occupation will yet remember… We are talking about dozens of detainees and captives, both dead bodies and captive soldiers and settlers… Today they are imprisoned in the Gaza Strip.”

The idea that the values of Hamas are fundamentally different from those of Fatah and the Palestinian Authority, and that those differ from the values of the Arab Muslims living in the territories under their control has no basis in actual fact. Politicians keep repeating these evidence-free claims because the alternative is to admit the grimness of the situation.

The two-state solution is based on a myth and a lie. It defies history, geography, and reality. Decades of efforts to implement it have foundered on the simple fact that the issue is coexistence, not territory, and no matter what impossible maps are drawn, the violence never ends because it does not originate in the wars of ‘48, ‘67’ or ‘73, in Israel’s decision to close the Gaza border once Hamas seized power or in anything that happened in the last two centuries.

The myth that the Palestinian Authority, born out of the PLO, was a moderate alternative to Hamas has long since been exposed as a lie, but no matter how often Arafat and then Abbas showed their true colors, how many innocent people were murdered, the big lie was too big to fail. And now in the face of the worst terrorist attack in Israeli history, it’s still too big to fail.

The only way that Biden and the rest of Washington D.C. can countenance removing Hamas is by replacing it with another bunch of terrorists to maintain the “Two-State Solution”.

But the issue is not just one terrorist group. Hamas and Fatah are reflections of their people.

Twenty years ago, a Hamas terrorist disguised as a woman walked into a Passover seder filled with elderly people, including Holocaust survivors, and set off a bomb, killing over two dozen and wounding over a hundred. Next year, the Palestinian Authority sponsored a soccer tournament in the terrorist’s honor to the approval of 71%. (That same poll found that 74% of ‘Palestinians’ supported Saddam Hussein, 82% viewed Hamas as ‘freedom fighters’ and 79% believed that bombing Israeli restaurants and buses were not acts of ‘terrorism’)

“There is no limit to Palestinian barbarism,” the Israeli government spokesman had bitterly observed. The spectacle of “bleeding and dazed survivors” who were “dragging moaning victims across a marble floor streaked with blood and littered with body parts and crushed matzo” set a new standard for evil. One woman saw “a little girl lying dead on the ground with her eyes wide open”. The latest Hamas horrors were more of the same, only executed on a grander scale.

There is indeed no limit to ‘Palestinian’ barbarism and no limit to the lies that the rest of the world will believe to avoid confronting it. The ‘Two-State Solution’ is the worst of those lies. As the Jewish families massacred by Hamas found out, no one can live next door to monsters who lust for the opportunity to torture, mutilate, rape and kill them. That’s the ‘Two-State Solution’.

Biden’s push for a ‘Two-State Solution’ would hand over Gaza from one Islamic terrorist group to another. The Palestinian Authority provides payments to Hamas terrorists and their families as part of its ‘Pay-to-Slay’ program. It celebrates their atrocities and collaborates with them.

The Hamas butchery finally convinced the Biden administration that the terror group needed to go, but the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade has admitted that Fatah took part in the Hamas attacks. Where did the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade come from? It was founded by a member of Tanzim, another Fatah terrorist group responsible for multiple suicide bombings that was created by Arafat and led by Marwan Barghouti.

While Barghouti is serving several life sentences in Israeli prison, if he were to run for president of the Palestinian Authority, polls show he would defeat the Hamas leader, 60% to 37%.

That’s the future of ‘Two-State Solution’.

The ‘Two-State Solution’ is not an end to violence, it’s perpetual violence. If we want an actual solution, it begins with ending our political and financial support for Islamic terror groups in Israel. The experiment of giving the terrorists an independent state has been tried and failed. The death toll from the terrorists of the ‘Two-State Solution’ continues to grow every year.

The solution to terrorism is not more terrorism, it’s ending terrorism.





Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.

Thank you for reading.

Sunday, November 19, 2023

1 in 10 American Jews Showed Up in D.C. on a Tuesday to Stand for Israel

By On November 19, 2023
On a Tuesday in November, around a third of a million American Jews left their jobs, skipped class and headed to Washington D.C. Some didn’t make it. In Detroit, bus drivers deliberately stranded hundreds of Jews heading to D.C. Others ran into less widely reported problems.

Even among those who arrived, tens of thousands never made it through into the secured area. In the final count, 290,000 people passed through the metal detectors at the ‘March for Israel’.

This was not only the largest ever rally by American Jews, but the largest gathering against Islamic terror.

Having a third of a million people show up at the National Mall is not completely extraordinary. Farrakhan’s Million Man March did manage to turn out 400,000 black people from a total population of 34 million. The ‘March for Israel’ brought over 300,000 out of 4.2 million Jews.

There are an estimated 4.2 million American Jews by religion. 7% of them showed up.

Accounting for the very old and very young who could not have made the trip, that’s 1 in 10 American Jews traveling to be in D.C. on a random Tuesday on fairly short notice.

The demographic equivalent would be 3 million black people, 4.5 million Latinos, 1.2 million Asians and 14 million white people rallying on the National Mall.

While the Million Man March received widespread media coverage at the time and in succeeding anniversaries, and was immortalized in movies like Spike Lee’s ‘Get on the Bus’, the media offered less coverage of the ‘March for Israel’ than it did of far smaller anti-Israel events.

The March for Israel ruined the media’s narrative that American Jews are turning on Israel. And so the media did what it always does: it protected the narrative by spinning and suppressing..

The Washington Post. which recently censored an anti-Hamas cartoon, falsely claimed that only “thousands” had attended the rally even though its own photos clearly showed far more than that. The AP began its coverage with the false claims of “thousands” and later updated it to the still false claims of “tens of thousands”. It’s easy to see from aerial photos that this is not true.

While the Post put the Women’s March, which turned out 470,000 participants, on its front page, it buried the ‘March for Israel’ in its metro section.

But despite the predictable media bias and the flaws of the rally, organized by liberal groups, it was an important statement of where American Jews stand. After weeks of the media providing disproportionate coverage to pro-Hamas rallies of hundreds of people by hate groups like If Not Now, hundreds of thousands of Jews stood with Israel and its war against Islamic terrorism.

In contrast to the pro-Hamas rallies in D.C. where flags were burned and monuments vandalized, the pro-Israel rally was a sea of American flags and attendees sang the anthem. Police officers were assaulted at pro-Hamas rallies and thanked at the ‘March for Israel’.

It wasn’t just across the ocean that the difference between Israel and Hamas was made clear, but right here in America. Pro-Israel rallies don’t break down into violence, vandalism and orgies of hatred for America. It’s the pro-Hamas rallies that turn into riots over and over again.

The ‘March for Israel’ had plenty of flaws. Like most liberal Jewish establishment projects, it sacrificed meaningful commitments for simple truisms (Hamas is bad, Israel is good) even if these truisms are now being disputed by academia, the media and large parts of the Left. Rather than taking a direct position on the issues being debated in D.C., pauses in the fighting, trading a ceasefire for hostages, and whether the PLO will take over Gaza, the march sought the broadest possible unity platform which maximized turnout, but didn’t break new ground.

Some rally speakers pledged support for a two-state solution: meaning an Islamic terrorist state inside Israel, whose existence is the reason for thirty years of terrorism against Israelis. The only Israel they seemed to be willing to support was one willing to give its enemies every possible chance until they finally do something so horrific that fighting back becomes justified.

There was little concept of who the enemy was, apart from Hamas, and what the issue was, apart from antisemitism coming from undefined sources, including on college campuses. And so there was also little concept of what standing for Israel actually meant beyond opposing Hamas. Speakers at the rally expressed pain, grief and determination, but lacked any real focus.

Biden spurned the rally, refusing to send a high-profile official, instead dispatching Deborah Lipstadt, the administration’s antisemitism monitor, but offering no larger presence at the event as another sign that he is moving even further away from his support for the war on Hamas. Other elected officials however showed up as did a whole lot of other seemingly random people.

The emphasis on unity did bring together people you would otherwise have trouble imagining participating in the same event. Not just Speaker Mike Johnson alternating with Democrat House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, but Pastor John Hagee and former Will and Grace star Debra Messing, a baffling appearance by Van Jones who didn’t seem to know which rally he was at, and a musical performance by Ishay Ribo, a major Israeli Orthodox Jewish pop star probably unknown to much of the parts of the audience that binge watches Will and Grace.

While to outsiders, American Jews may seem like members of the same group and reflect familiar stereotypes, the reality is those few millions consist of a dizzying variety of different groups which have little in common with each other and inhabit echo chambers. The ‘March for Israel’ brought together devout and secular, Reform and Orthodox, Christian supporters of Israel and Hollywood celebrities: people whose worlds never really meet.

And it took a major crisis to get at least some Jews from suburban temples and urban synagogues, those who study the Talmud and those who believe in Tikkun Olam, to temporarily stand in the same place and realize that Islamic terrorists, like the Nazis, want to kill them all.

That brief community is not likely to last, just as the unity of unity that brought together New Yorkers after 9/11 fell apart into infighting and routine, but it still is a meaningful moment.

Although it may not last, it is a rehearsal for what needs to happen for all of us, Jews and Christians, people who believe in something and those who believe in nothing, in the face of an enemy that wants to destroy us all.

There is plenty to criticize about the ‘March for Israel’, but the content of the march mattered less than the statement that bringing so many people together to stand up to terror made.

The flaws of the rally were those of American Jews: many still addicted to the illusion of peace with terrorists, incapable of questioning their partisan political allegiances and trapped in their echo chambers, in pain, but failing to understand where the pain is coming from.

But for all its failures of imagination, the March for Israel was representative of American Jews. From the mother of a hostage to a standup comedian outraged at the hypocrisy of his industry hostage, from angry college students to the politicians they hope will save them, the rally was a snapshot of what is wrong with American Jews, but also a reminder that there is hope.

The Left has put out a narrative that American Jews are turning on Israel. Those who are still Jewish, rather than merely possessing Jewish last names, have not. American Jews suffer from a painful ignorance and some of their lost descendants, like Kamala’s stepdaughter, may rally for the enemy, but those who have not given up on being Jewish have not abandoned Israel.

In Washington D.C., representatives of the scattered strands of American Jewry briefly met and stood together in the shadow of enormous hate and evil. And briefly became one.

After the Passover Massacre by Hamas in 2002, one hundred thousand Jews had rallied in Washington D.C. That rally may have been smaller, but resembled this one in many ways.

Elie Wiesel, then still alive, told the crowd that, “this day will be remembered in the history of American Jewry.” It was not. But that failure of memory is a choice. Whether or not this one will be remembered is also a choice. The choice is a matter of commitment and priorities.

If American Jewry is to have a history, it will have to remember and more importantly act.

Nearly 1 in 10 American Jews showing up in D.C. on a random Tuesday is a historic moment. But whether it will change history is up to that third of a million and all the others who watched from home and attended rallies locally. History is made up of the choices that we make.

Will the March for Israel crystalize a wave of commitment in Jewish communities? Will it change how people vote, how they act and the cultural values that they pass on to their children?

Either we make history or we become history.






Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.

Thank you for reading.

Thursday, November 16, 2023

The IRS Refuses to Act Against a Hamas Nonprofit

By On November 16, 2023
It has been 5 years since journalists warned that an anti-Israel nonprofit was lending its tax-exempt status to a BDS group whose coalition included Hamas and other terror groups.

Since that time the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights (USCPR) has held on to its 501(c)(3) tax-exempt status. USCPR’s response to the brutal Hamas butchery of entire families, the rapes and the abductions of children was to state that the “Palestinian people have the right to defend their homeland from Israel” and to retweet messages describing the horrors as a “response” to Israeli oppression and bragging that “Gaza just broke out of prison”.

USCPR, which calls itself the Education for Just Peace in the Middle East in tax documents, had previously been exposed as the “fiscal sponsor” for the Palestinian BDS National Committee which means that when someone donates money to the BDS umbrella group, it uses USCPR’s nonprofit status to make it a charitable tax-deductible donation.

The BDS National Committee referred to the Hamas atrocities as the “resistance of the oppressed” and the “powerful armed reaction of the oppressed Palestinians in Gaza.”

The BDS National Committee’s general coordinator had previously expressed support for Hamas terrorism which is not surprising since the BDS National Committee’s members include a coalition of Islamic terrorist organizations known as the Council of National and Islamic Forces in Palestine.

That includes Hamas.

The Jihadist council features Hamas along with Islamic Jihad, the PFLP and two other terror groups banned by the United States. This terror coalition was the first to sign the call for BDS.

USCPR had previously lost its fundraising account over the Hamas connection, but not its nonprofit status. Both USCPR and the BDS National Committee have defended the horrors committed by Hamas as legitimate. But while many Islamic and allied nonprofits have done as much, the BDS National Committee is unique in its connection to a Hamas-backed organization.

It’s also unique in that the BDS network has been the subject of multiple campaigns to bring this to the attention of the United States government. In 2021, Rep. Burchett expressed concern that money raised on ActBlue by the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel, part of the BDS National Committee, could be “directed to foreign terror organizations” because of the “ties with foreign terrorist groups such as Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad.”

After the Hamas mass killings in Israel, the Hilton Houston Post Oak hotel canceled USCPR’s “Seize the Moment US Campaign for Palestinian Rights National Conference” gala, stating that it “cannot serve as the venue for this event because of the potential risks.” Gov. Abbott tweeted that, “Hilton Hotels in Houston was correct to pull the plug on the U.S. Campaign for Palestine Rights event hosted by Hamas supporters. Texas has no room for hate & antisemitism like that supported by Hamas. No location in Texas should host or sponsor USCPR.”

The IRS clearly does not agree. And so USCPR retains the tax-exempt status that it’s held since 2005. Over that time, the pro-terror group has taken in millions of dollars, including $1.5 million in 2021 alone, and over $1 million in 2020, 2019 and 2018. It also received over half a million dollars from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund which funds much of the anti-Israel Left. And $450,000 from George Soros’ Open Society Foundations. It’s unknown how much money the BDS National Committee may have received by utilizing USCPR’s sponsorship.

USCPR and the BDS National Committee are deeply integrated organizations. A lawsuit by terror victims noted that, “Nasser Barghouti, the brother of BNC founder and Secretariat member, Omar Barghouti, is USCPR’s Treasurer and member of USCPR’s steering committee.” Omar Barghouti had stated that USCPR “is simply the BNC’s most important strategic ally and partner in the U.S.”

Omar Bargouhti, a founder of the BDS movement, has called for the destruction of Israel and endorsed terrorism against Israel. The Barghouti clan includes top Hamas terrorists including a Hamas leader also named Omar Barghouti, now dead, several of whom have carried out attacks on Israelis including the mass shooting at a bus stop in 2018 whose victims included a pregnant woman, as well as Marwan Barghouti, a top Palestinian Authority terror leader responsible for multiple massacres and who is serving five life sentences in Israeli prison.

USCPR and the BDS National Committee are not the only examples of terror-linked groups who enjoy nonprofit status. The David Horowitz Freedom Center had previously profiled Samidoun, which was banned in Israel as a terrorist front group, and was recently banned in Germany after handing out candy in Berlin to celebrate the Hamas atrocities of October 7.

“Holding spontaneous ‘jubilant celebrations’ here in Germany in response to Hamas’s terrible terrorist attacks against Israel demonstrates Samidoun’s antisemitic, inhuman worldview in a particularly sickening way,” German Interior Minister Nancy Faeser stated.

Samidoun was too sickening for Germany, but not for the IRS to let it function as a charity.

In the United States, Samidoun celebrated the Hamas butchery on social media, boasting that “the resistance” is “seizing occupation settlers” and urged support for the “resistance”.

The terror front group was linked to pro-Hamas rallies. And even the Ford Foundation, the New Venture Fund and a number of other major leftist donors announced that they would stop directing money to Samidoun’s fiscal sponsor, the Alliance for Global Justice, which also sponsors some BLM groups. However the IRS has still refused to act against Samidoun. And so Samidoun assures donors that they can make a “US tax-deductible donation today, and donate safely and securely from around the world.” This would not be possible without the IRS.

As the David Horowitz Freedom Center has documented in our ongoing project, Internal Radical Service, the failure by the IRS to enforce the laws against leftist nonprofits has wrecked cities, cost lives and spurred the illegal invasion of our borders. The next step is up to Congress.

Islamic terror groups should not be subsidized by taxpayer-backed donations.

Terror nonprofits are exploiting loopholes and IRS complicity to promote banned terror groups. Hamas should not be a charity. Congress can close the ‘terror loophole’ in the tax code.

And that will make America and the world safer.







Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.

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