The Dam Breaks

By Noah Rothman

Wednesday, June 12, 2024

 

The display of moral depravity put on by the so-called anti-Israel demonstrators who descended on an exhibit in downtown Manhattan memorializing the victims of the October 7 attack on the Nova Music Festival is no longer especially remarkable. Their chants celebrating the ritualistic massacre of Jews had become all too familiar.

 

That orgy of reptilian bloodlust — “Long live October 7th,” read one indicative banner — was akin to demonstrations in which mockups of Joe Biden’s severed head featured prominently. It wasn’t especially distinct from the protests on college campuses, city streets, and subways in which activists sought to purge Jews from their vicinity chanting “Globalize the intifada” and “Death to the Zionist state.” It wasn’t any more menacing than the demonstrations that sought to block emergency traffic on vital roadways, place obstacles in the path of outbound aircraft, or lay violent siege to the Democratic Party’s political headquarters.

 

The maladjusted cretins who have made their desire to see more dead Jews plain, whose advocacy warms the heart of Hamas chief Yahya Sinwar and steels his resolve to offer more Palestinian civilians up for the slaughter (per his own admission), only behaved as they had for months.

 

But there was something about Monday’s demonstration that broke the Democrats, whose tolerance for this sort of anti-social activism appeared nigh boundless.

 

“I condemn those celebrating the innocents killed on October 7,” embattled Democratic representative Jamaal Bowman declared. “This dark day was the largest attack on the Jewish community since the Holocaust. Celebrating it is antisemitic and unacceptable.”

 

His sentiments echoed Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s. “The callousness, dehumanization, and targeting of Jews on display at last night’s protest outside the Nova Festival exhibit was atrocious antisemitism,” she said. “Antisemitism has no place in our city nor any broader movement that centers human dignity and liberation.”

 

The Biden White House raced to the front of the growing parade. The brandishing of Hezbollah flags and chants of “Long live the Intifada” outside the Nova memorial were “outrageous and heartbreaking,” said White House spokesman Andrew Bates. It was “horrifying behavior” which, along with antisemitism, “has no place in the United States.”

 

Vice President Kamala Harris’s husband, Doug Emhoff, went further still. “It makes me sick,” he said of the protests at a New York fundraiser for Democratic candidates. These “vile and inhumane” demonstrations have “got to stop,” he added. “This is completely out of control.”

 

Emhoff’s observation is laden with implication. If the situation over which the administration in which his wife serves prominently is “out of control,” what obligation does that observation impose on Democrats in a position to do something about it? What does it say of this administration and its allies in state and municipal government who let it all get this far?

 

It’s tempting to attribute these unequivocal statements of condemnation unburdened by false equivalences to the oft-referenced but under-supported scourge of Islamophobia overtaking the country or Israel’s overzealous pursuit of its own self-preservation to belated pangs of conscience. But the pivot to something resembling moral clarity coincides with public polling suggesting that Bowman’s Democratic voters are set to eject him from office and deep-pocketed Democratic donors are closing their wallets. As the Israelis have shown, much to the chagrin of their Democratic critics, an existential crisis stiffens the spine.

 

And yet, the attempt by prominent Democrats to make some — indeed, any — examples of the witless thugs to whom they’ve sought to ingratiate themselves is a welcome pivot. It may come too late to prevent the public from concluding that the menace, violence, and vandalism these protesters have gotten away with for months is an enterprise abetted by the Democratic municipal officials who’ve turned a blind eye to them. But it’s a heartening sign, if only because it suggests a growing revulsion among the quiet majority of voters who have been forced to endure these nascent pogroms.