https://www.city-journal.org/article/pro-palestinian-protestors-intifadah-anti-american
Anyone who happened to amble by the downtown Manhattan courthouse in early December, just after a jury acquitted Daniel Penny—the former Marine who put Jordan Neely, a deranged and threatening fellow subway passenger, in a chokehold that led to his death—would have noticed something peculiar.
It wasn’t that the sidewalk was filled with protesters, or that they were chanting slogans that ignored the facts of the situation, presenting Neely—a mentally ill man with 42 previous convictions, including for violent assaults on the subway—as an innocent lynched by a malicious white vigilante for no reason other than his being black. It was, instead, that many of the protesters were wearing keffiyehs, the traditional Arab headwear popular with the pro-Palestine crowd, as well as pins or t-shirts featuring the Palestinian flag.
Approximately 5,674 miles separate southern Manhattan from northern Gaza, and neither Penny nor Neely had anything to do with Israel or the Palestinian cause. Why, then, would the activists who rushed to condemn Penny’s actions as racist adorn themselves with Palestinian paraphernalia?
The answer is stark: because “Palestine,” an entity that has never existed, has always been a codeword for chaos. For many activists, being “pro-Palestine” is not to support the creation of a national homeland for some Arabs side-by-side with the State of Israel; the Palestinians themselves, as former president Bill Clinton recently reminded us, have repeatedly rejected every U.S.-brokered attempt at independence. These radicals are pro-Palestine because they are anti-America, and because they champion violent, sectarian conduct that is anathema to our core values.
If that seems like an unfair characterization, consider Fatima Mohammed, one of the leaders of Within Our Lifetime, a cornerstone of New York’s “pro-Palestine” vanguard. “I pray upon the death of the USA on a public platform,” she tweeted on May 9, 2021, “but yolo [you only live once] I guess.” A year later, Mohammed gave a speech in midtown Manhattan, praying to Allah to grant victory to the jihadis. For her tireless advocacy of violence—against America, Israel, and the Jews—she was elected by her classmates to give the commencement address at the City University of New York’s law school graduation. She dedicated her talk to calling for a “revolution” against the “fascist” NYPD and the American armed forces, both of which, she argued, were merely tools of “white supremacy.”
Her views, alas, aren’t rare among the pro-Palestine crowd. Nerdeen Kiswani, another prominent activist, explained in a speech at a 2021 rally that she and her colleagues have a simple aim: “We don’t need tens of thousands of people to shut down and disrupt this city,” she said. “We have to up the stakes.”