This Is Who the Protesters Are

By Noah Rothman

Friday, September 25, 2026

 

What did the celebrities, activists, and politicians who joined the terrorist-curious group Jewish Voice for Peace outside the U.N.’s headquarters on Thursday, blocking traffic and forcing the reluctant NYPD officers on duty to haul them away in handcuffs, chant? Beyond vacuous slogans alleging that Israel is still — nearly one year after combat operations in Gaza concluded and with an epochal “famine” having been miraculously supplanted by a minor outbreak of childhood obesity — engineering a “genocide,” the protesters defamed themselves further still. “Let Iran live,” they demanded.

 

By this, they must mean the Islamic Republic’s theocratic apparatchiks. What else could they mean? As Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu noted, the professional activist circuit didn’t hold tearful vigils on behalf of the tens of thousands of Iranians the Islamic Republic’s security services slaughtered in the streets not even one year ago. They seem to care little for the women the regime’s morality police maim, blind, or murder. They’re similarly nonplussed by the persecution and summary execution of gays and lesbians — whose rights they’re uniquely sensitive to when oppression can be blamed on Western interests and institutions.

 

When they say, “Let Iran live,” they’re talking to the U.S. and Israel, both of which have gone to great lengths to limit collateral damage in their war against a foe that is soaked with the blood of Israeli and American civilians (targeting errors, which are not war crimes, notwithstanding). So, they must be referring to the Islamic Republic’s figureheads, the occupants of its military facilities and dual-use enterprises, and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps — which is to say, those who quite literally will not “let Iran live.”

 

Nor does this cast of rabble-rousers seem all that concerned about the Palestinian people. Thanks in no small part to their endless hectoring, the war in Gaza ended last October with Hamas still in uncontested control of about one-third of the Gaza Strip. There, that lawless, totalitarian gangster government carries out summary executions of those who are even suspected of representing a political threat to the rump regime. The protesters could care less about that, just as they evince no concern for the welfare of Palestinians living under the thumb of the incompetent kleptocracy that governs the West Bank — at least, not until Israelis become part of that story.

 

Why would we expect one of yesterday’s arrestees, Darializa Avila Chevalier, the Democratic nominee in New York’s 13th district, to care? We have few indications that she was anything but supportive of the Hamas-led slaughter that started the war in the first place. After all, she and her fellow democratic socialists rallied in support of Hamas’s actions on October 8, 2023, while Hamas terrorists were still on the loose inside Israel. She has even walked out of radio interviews when asked to explain the moral inversion to which she’s committed. As the co-founder of a group that promises to “undermine and eradicate America” by translating “resistance in Gaza to unrest and violence in America,” Chevalier’s radicalism is as sincere as it is poisonous.

 

It is well past time to withhold a charitable attitude toward professional protesters like these. We’re told that they are burdened with an excess of empathy, that their hearts are in the right place, that they care deeply for their advocacy even if they are a little fuzzy on the details. Nonsense. These are not altruists. They are consumed with hatred. It is what defines them — what gets them out of bed in the morning. What they seem to want more than anything is to see the U.S. and its allies humbled before our shared civilizational enemies.

 

And they’re not coy about it, either. It’s up to us to listen when they tell us precisely who they are.