The Anti-Israel Hooligans Have Lost the Plot

By Judson Berger

Friday, January 05, 2024

 

Sooner or later, the anti-Israel agitators will start throwing soup and mashed potatoes at things.

 

Their antics lately have made as much sense as those of the Just Stop Oil and copycat climate activists, around that point when they decided it was better to piss people off with befuddling stunts (soup, potatoes) while posing obviously false choices to society (e.g., What’s more important to you, the planet or a Van Gogh?) than earnestly advocate their position.

 

The position of those cheering on Hamas has been heinous from the start. But when they marched on America’s campuses and downtowns with placards declaring “By any means necessary” and “Resistance is justified,” their cause and purpose were painfully clear. Not so today. They began to veer into absurdity last month, when demonstrators marched on a Philadelphia falafel shop co-owned by an Israeli-born chef and accused its kitchen of genocide (incidentally, I visited said falafel shop last week and could find no evidence of the Zionist conspiracy, only perfectly composed hummus). Then during the holiday stretch, demonstrators scrambled to block traffic outside major airports, including New York’s JFK and Chicago’s O’Hare. This, while protesters tried (and failed) to disrupt Christmas itself. Caroline Downey reported on statements made at one New York rally, which we can largely recognize as being composed of English words but read like the output of an exhausted AI bot trained on Daily Stormer content:

 

“Zionism is antisemitic,” one attendee at the march said. “Hamas, and long live the resistance.”

 

Whatever you say.

 

Then there was, as Jay Nordlinger flagged, the effort to target retailer Zara and accuse it of complicity in, again, genocide over an ad campaign that supposedly evoked scenes of Gaza destruction — but didn’t actually, considering the campaign was conceived and put together before the war began. The episode was ridiculous, both at the time and in hindsight. Any logical cohesion behind anti-Israel protesters’ actions could be seen fraying then and there, any core purpose spitting out strands of severed sense like rubber from a fresh-cut balata golf ball. Fast-forward to the end of December, and Jimmy Quinn finds protesters in New York City flat-out endorsing an Iran-backed terrorism campaign:

 

“Yemen, Yemen, make us proud. Turn another ship around!” is the newest protest chant heard during anti-Israel marches in New York City, clearly referring to the attacks that the country’s Houthi rebels have launched against shipping vessels in the Red Sea.

 

It’s safe to say these guys have lost their own plot. The anti-colonialist freedom marchers are now run-of-the-mill chaos merchants, rooting for whichever Tyler Durden–esque actor burns brightest while causing mayhem of their own. Where the “movement” goes from here is anyone’s guess — but we can assume its followers will keep lashing out at anything with a vague connection to Israel or Jews (remember the war on Sabra?).

 

The antics would be easy to dismiss, even laugh at, at this stage — if not for the result they seek, which is for Israel to lay down arms and welcome the next horrific phase of Hamas’s “flood,” and if not for the threat, as Noah Rothman explains, these antics pose to the public. Their increasing disconnection from reality and evidence, including the embrace of false-flag and other conspiracy theories, is another troubling aspect. Countering some of this misinformation, the New York Times recently published a deeply reported and wrenching account of Hamas’s use of sexual violence, contra the insistence of October 7 truthers that the stories of rape and mutilation are apocryphal. Even if the marchers have lost their focus, nobody should forget that this is the conduct they justify, the “any means” they endorse.