RUTHFULLY YOURS

Most protesters, no matter how deep their disaffection from this country, at least try to hide their anti-Americanism.

That’s not true of the pro-Hamas agitators, who can’t be bothered. Such is their hatred of America — and its symbols, history, and heroes — that they casually engage in profoundly unpatriotic acts of desecration.

In New York City on Monday, on their way to disrupt the Met Gala, they vandalized a World War I memorial in Central Park and a statue of William Tecumseh Sherman at Grand Army Plaza. In Washington, D.C., they’ve vandalized and/or turned into clothes horses for Palestinian flags and garb statues of George Washington, Marquis de Lafayette, Benjamin Franklin, and Andrew Jackson.

En route to the Gala, the pro-Gaza mob stopped to climb and wave Palestinian flags on the memorial to the 107th Infantry and spray-paint graffiti — “Gaza,” “Free Palestine,” and “Let Gaza live.” If there were any doubt about the motive of this shabby act of vandalism, the agitators removed it by burning an American flag at the base of the memorial.

The soldiers of the 107th fought and sacrificed greatly in World War I. If the Central Park memorial, which depicts the soldiers charging into battle, isn’t famous or much noticed on any given day, it is still a significant act of memory that the protesters treated as an ashtray for their tawdry ideological obsessions.

Of course, it is doubtful that many of the protesters know much of anything about World War I, except perhaps that it took place sometime before World War II (assuming that they are aware of both conflicts).

Surely, they simply sought to disrespect anything that looks old, martial, and American.

Regardless of how ill-informed it is, the gesture of going after the memorial and statues of traditional American heroes is still significant. It is an unmistakable statement of hostility to America as such — to its understanding of itself and to its collective memory.

Revolutionaries, whether righteous or malevolent, always go after public statuary.

The equestrian statue of Charles I now at Charing Cross in London was cast during the king’s lifetime, went to the metalsmith to get melted down after Charles lost the English Civil War, then was recovered and placed in its current prominent position after the Restoration.

The huge Lenin statue at Lenin Square in Berlin, erected in 1970, got busted up into 129 pieces and buried in the woods in 1992. The mayor of Berlin was glad to be done with the artifact of a “dictatorship where people were persecuted and murdered.” (Eventually, Lenin’s head got dug out and displayed in a museum.)

Of course, more recently, the BLM riots were the occasion for attacks on Confederate and other monuments and for their removal.

Remaking a country’s statuary landscape is to rewrite its story and change its identity; what we tell ourselves about ourselves — our values, our history, our heroes — establishes who we are.

To his credit, Eric Adams has denounced the vandalism in harsh terms, and so has the NYPD.

The NYPD’s deputy commissioner of operations, Kaz Daughtry, called it a “heinous crime,” explaining that “vandalizing a memorial, a symbol of remembrance and honor, is not only an act of criminal mischief but also a disrespect to the sacrifices of those who served our country.”

Just so. Thankfully, the pro-Gaza militants, a minority within a minority, aren’t in any position to vanquish the World War I memorial or any others. They, in other words, can’t define who we are, but their casual disregard for the respect owed to our forebears and the men who gave everything for this country tells us all we need to know about who they are.