Democrats Must Avoid Allowing Radicalized Pro-Palestinian Protesters to Ruin DNC

This Fringe Movement is Helping Trump at a Moment Kamala Harris is Ascendent

“When we fight, we win” is Kamala Harris’ effective new campaign slogan. That’s true unless it’s self-destructive infighting. Unfortunately, more than 200 “progressive” organizations are mobilizing an estimated 100,000 anti-Israel protesters at the Democratic National Convention (DNC) this week in Chicago.

These terribly misguided activists are attempting to hijack the convention’s positive and inspiring messages and vibes at a crucial moment when an ascendent Harris is surpassing Donald Trump in key polls. Instead of kumbaya, these nihilists are working to create helter-skelter, reconstructing the disarray that ruined the DNC’s Chicago convention in 1968. In doing so, these agitators are incomprehensibly throwing Trump a life vest at a time when his campaign is drowning in dysfunction.  

The pro-Palestinian organizers arrive in Chicago with a hopelessly muddled message. They will boisterously demand a ceasefire, yet Hamas insouciantly skipped peace talks yesterday in what U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken called, “a decisive moment — probably the best, maybe the last, opportunity to get the hostages home, to get a cease-fire, and to put everyone on a better path to enduring peace and security.”

The Gaza war has killed 40,000 Palestinians and left 40-million tons of rubble, yet, Hamas can’t be bothered to show up for peace talks while its people are starving and living in squalid refugee camps?

Even as negotiators, from several countries, sat at the table hammering out a complex deal that would end hostilities and save Palestinian families, Hamas self-destructively unleashed a suicide bomber in Tel Aviv on Saturday. The Washington Post reported:

Israelis feared the attack presaged a dark shift in the conflict, sparking memories of the second intifada, the armed Palestinian uprising against Israeli occupation between 2000 and 2005 that was marked with bombings in malls, on buses and outside nightclubs.

Can someone coherently explain why we should listen to the caterwauling Chicago protesters bellowing “ceasefire”, when they seem to want a ceasefire infinitely more than the Palestinian leadership in Gaza? Even the slippery Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is no friend to peace, agreed to a “bridging proposal” at today’s talks.

If the Palestinians are so interested in peace, why did Hamas recently install the infamous terrorist Yahya Sinwar as its new leader? The New Yorker reported that when Sinwar was once asked whether achieving his goals was worth the lives of many innocent people, Israelis and Palestinians, Sinwar replied, “We are ready to sacrifice twenty thousand, thirty thousand, a hundred thousand.”

Apparently, Sinwar’s sinister plan isn’t even at the halfway mark—with the Hamas leader willing to heave another 60,000 Palestinians into the meatgrinder of war to indulge his bloody fantasy of toppling Israel. Yet, the suckers in Chicago are protesting under the delusion that Hamas wants to end the hostilities, and everything is Israel’s fault.

Honestly, it’s difficult to understand what they are trying to accomplish in Chicago.  This dishonorable, disreputable movement has already spent a year badgering politicians, berating Jews and harassing students on campus who were merely trying to get an education. They shut down the Golden Gate Bridge, destroyed art, and defaced public property with ugly graffiti. The protesters even shut down the 405 freeway in Los Angeles, although traffic is normally so awful in LA, it’s unclear if anyone noticed.

These rabblerousers have engaged in shrill, and sometimes violent, actions, often shrieking, that anyone who believes Israel has a right to exist and defend itself, is racist and supports genocide. All these obnoxious, dishonest and divisive tactics have done is alienate broad swaths of the American public and lead to a near-wholesale rejection of their “cause”.

It’s important to have perspective and understand just how unpopular these strident voices truly are. A Washington Post-ABC News-Ipsos poll shows that “just 14 percent of Americans say the war between Israel and Hamas is one of the single most important issues in their vote this fall.”

We are in an existential election, with democracy on the line, and the pro-Palestinian movement wants to unceremoniously steal the spotlight away from Harris to help Hamas, which, judging by their ongoing actions, clearly wants the war in Gaza to drag on indefinitely.  

These loudmouths will hit the streets while crooning, “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” clearly meaning the creation of a new Israel minus its Jews. In fact, the original lyrics were, “from the water to the water, Palestine is Arab”, but those inconvenient words had to be altered to appeal to gullible western audiences that were enlisted with oil money to do the Palestinians’ bidding.

These hooligans will claim to be progressive, even as they bolster the tyrant Sinwar, a psychotic sadist who has a special penchant for targeting and torturing LGBTQ Palestinians. This excerpt in the New Yorker was beyond chilling:

Before being jailed, Sinwar had led a Hamas unit called Munazamat al-Jihad wa al-Da’wa, or the Majd—an enforcement squad that punished those who collaborated with Israel or who committed offenses against orthodox Islamic morality, including homosexuality, marital infidelity, and the possession of pornography.

In 2015, he led an effort to punish a Hamas commander named Mahmoud Ishtiwi, who was suspected of embezzlement and homosexuality and was thus susceptible to being compromised.

Khaled Meshal, who was then Hamas’s primary political leader, reportedly tried to de-escalate the situation, but Sinwar was unrelenting. Ishtiwi’s relatives say that he was suspended from a ceiling and whipped for days. “I went through torture that no one has gone through in Palestine, not by the Palestinian Authority, not even at the hands of the Jews, but by Hamas internal security,” Ishtiwi wrote… Ishtiwi was convicted by a religious court and sentenced to death.  

Sinwar is the monster Queers for Palestine and other allegedly liberal groups are in the streets supporting this week--at least when they aren’t busy harassing delegates and Democratic lawmakers. The Free-Press reports Pennsylvania Senator John Fetterman, a staunch supporter of Israel, is skipping this week’s Democratic National Convention, although he denies Palestinian protesters had anything to do with it.

After the way they have stalked him, who can blame Fetterman?

In November, protesters outside the Capitol booed him. In January, anti-Israel protesters descended on Fetterman’s home in Braddock. (The senator took to the roof, waving an Israeli flag.) Online activists called him Genocide John. And every Friday for months, protesters have demonstrated outside his Philadelphia office, chanting, “Let Gaza live,” and “Cease-fire now.” (The protests are called “Fridays at Fetterman’s.”)  

The treatment of Fetterman isn’t unique. This belligerent movement aggressively pursues anyone who doesn’t bow to their whims. Axios reported:

“House Democrats are being asked not to book Chicago hotel rooms under their own names for next week’s Democratic National Convention as thousands of pro-Palestinian protestors are expected to descend on the city.”

This is a prudent security measure. Michael Boyte, a leader with Behind Enemy Lines, said its members need to be “actively confronting the convention.” Their website calls on demonstrators to, “shut down the DNC for Gaza,” which is so undemocratic and authoritarian that Hamas is surely proud of his bullying efforts. The organization is actively aiding and abetting Trump by peddling a poster of Joe Biden with the headline, “International Terrorist” and another of Biden and Harris under the words, “Don’t vote for genocide”, while calling the democratic nominee “Killer Kamala.”  

“We think that their whole convention is illegitimate and criminal, and people should treat it that way,”  Boyte told The New York Times. His wacky organization is critical of the U.S. government and describes itself as anti-imperialist. If that were true, why isn’t he protesting Russia’s imperialist war against Ukraine, or picketing Iran, a country that employs brutal force and coercion to effectively control Yemen, Lebanon, Syria and Iraq, as well as suppresses its own people?

Boyte’s motto, and that of his angry comrades, might as well be, “if there’s no Jews, it ain’t news.”

With any luck, this extremist movement will soon become universally toxic and marginalize itself. It is already ignored by Republicans—except when GOP operatives exploit its images and words to create political propaganda. By the end of the week, this movement will likely have upset most Democrats by trying to sabotage Harris. If Iran attacks Israel, and Israel responds by decapitating their mullahs, Palestinians will lose their terrorist arms dealer. With dwindling options, maybe the Palestinians might finally be inclined toward peace.

In the meantime, Democrats must not kowtow to these crazies unless they want to appear weak, pandering and captive to the most extreme elements of their increasingly unhinged base. The protesters are a loud fringe element that is so feeble they couldn’t even save the careers of congressional squad members Rep. Cori Bush (D-MO) and Jamaal Bowman (D-NY), who were defeated in the primaries by supporters of Israel.

These pro-Palestinian saboteurs (which includes outside agitators who aren’t even Democrats) must be kept in check, lest they undermine Harris and deliver the White House to Trump. Although, it would be poetic justice if the result of this self-serving DNC disruption was to elect The Donald, who would sell the Palestinians down the river and into the sea for a waterfront hotel deal in Gaza.