Oh what Mehmed IV would have given to have had weapons-grade morons the likes of Queers for Justice in Palestine, Jewish Voices for Peace, or Comador Thunberg and the motley crew of the SS TikToc behind the Viennese ramparts in 1638.
Or better still, individuals such as Mahmoud Khalil and other leaders and members of radical groups. Individuals and entities who actively call for the destruction of the West. Those who openly celebrate and advocate on behalf of designated terrorist organizations.
Indeed, it is not hard to imagine what such actors, some rendered useful idiots in their ignorance, others willing and malicious instigators, would have done.
Mobs of society’s supposedly most enlightened and tolerant, clamoring to dismantle the barricades of the West’s last defense, stumbling over themselves to gleefully open wide the gates to civilizational demise.
Sound familiar? It should.
Since October 8, 2023, as the world began to grapple with what was then just a fraction of the total horror unleashed upon so many that day, the chants had already begun.
Just one day after the worst single attack on the Jewish people since the Holocaust, slogans that so many thought relegated to only the most extremist fringes, erupted in the streets of Western capitals and on the quads of our universities. They have not stopped since.
In Sydney, they bayed “gas the Jews.” Though we were later told the kaffiyeh-clad mob that congregated to burn Israeli flags outside the city’s famed opera house was actually saying “where’s the Jews,” or “kill the Jews,” or perhaps just “F– the Jews.”
In Paris, they chanted “rage comme en Palestine” (rage like in Palestine).
In London, they yelled for “Palestine to be free from the river to the sea,” (never mind the fact that many are unable to even identify the river or the sea in question).
In New York, they proclaimed “globalize the intifada” and “free, free Palestine.” But after all, how many of these young people remember or even know what the intifadas were, right?
In Washington DC, on the blood-stained pavement outside the Capital Jewish Museum, the anthem “free, free Palestine” again rang out, and the intifada was globalized.
In Boulder, Colorado, the intifada was globalized again, as fire rained down upon peaceful demonstrators, including an 88-year-old Holocaust survivor.
The painful reality is, as things stand, this will not be the last entry on this list.
A Patchwork of Vaugeries
The pro-Palestinian banners so many adamantly wave at demonstrations across the globe are themselves a patchwork of vagaries, stitched together by a chameleonic regard for the truth.
Plausible deniability is the name of the game.
“Palestine will be free from the river to the sea” sounds innocent enough? That is, if you leave off the more sinister goal– the whole of the land free of the existence of Israel, liberal democracy, individual rights, and every last Jew, Christian, and Druze in sight.
Likewise, calls for jihad are dressed up as simply ‘internal spiritual struggles’, rather than the attempted subjection of entire populations through violence and terror that the term has historically and colloquially referred to.
When the legal definition of genocide can be disingenuously coerced into a rallying cry to smear the only democracy in the Middle East– whose population of Palestinian-Arabs has grown from a total of 1.3 million in all of Gaza, the West Bank, and Israel in 1948 to a current combined total of almost 7 million– the charge is projected onto buildings.
Only when the term genocide is correctly applied to Hamas, a terror group founded upon a charter that explicitly advocates for the annihilation of the Jewish people, is it characterized as propaganda of the “oppressors.”
And on and on it goes.
However, while some of these rallying cries play at tempering their excesses for a respectable palate, others make no attempt to dilute their poison.
The intifada has already been globalized
Pass by any pro-Palestine protest– an occurrence which has become more and more difficult to avoid depending on where you live– and you will almost certainly hear calls to “globalize the intifada.” It exists in a variety of refrains, “Long live the intifada,” for example, or, for those more phonologically inclined, “There is only one solution, intifada revolution.”
I have lived in Paris for the past three years and extensively covered the overwhelming increase in anti-Semitic and Islamist violence and calls for violence here in France and throughout Europe in the time since Hamas’s October 7, 2023, terror attack on Israel.
I have written about tourists being fatally stabbed and wounded near the Eiffel Tower. A young “radicalized Islamist” in Arras who murdered his former literature teacher during a lesson. A Jewish man stabbed in the middle of the street in his Paris neighborhood. A now-deported imam who spent his sermons castigating “the Jewish people as the enemy” while calling for “the destruction of Western society” at a mosque in Southern France, and so much more.
These are just some of the instances documented to have been inspired by the war in Gaza.
In many cities across the world, the intifada has long been globalized, against both Jewish populations and Western civilization in general.
The Same Venom
Despite the frequency of terror-related violence on this side of the Atlantic, the events that unfolded in DC and Boulder over the past few weeks were no less jarring.
And make no mistake, what we witnessed outside the Capital Jewish Museum in DC and on the streets of Boulder was a form of globalized intifada. These acts were a demonstration to the world, and in particular the US, of what such chants look like when carried to fruition.
It should be noted that shouting these aforementioned slogans does not automatically make one guilty of the same crimes as those who go on to perpetrate heinous acts of terror.
That being said, the recent terror attack in DC, which left two young Israeli diplomats dead, and the firebombing of innocents in Boulder, spotlight several stark realities that we, as the West, cannot continue to ignore.
The truth is, the noxious trough to which so many radicalized demonstrators have been led to water is filled with the same venom that dripped from the mouth of these two suspected terrorists. A fact that multiple witnesses attested to, and video evidence in both cases substantiates.
As one witness to the aftermath of the DC attack, Jonathan Epstein, detailed during a CNN interview just hours after the murders, “I mean, I went to Columbia [University] for grad school and I saw the same thing in his eyes [the suspect’s] as I saw in all of the protesters at Columbia,” Epstein recounted. “Nothing different between him and them.”
When challenged by the CNN host that his words may be “conflating” university protesters with the alleged attacker, Epstein observed that “ they have called for this. They have called for intifada revolution, which is the same thing he yelled last night.”
For those who may still be skeptical or are perhaps in denial as to the veracity of these observations or their mainstream prevalence, consider this. Just days after a pro-Palestinian activist killed Israeli diplomats, Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim, “for Gaza,” Tariq el-Tahrir, a self-described pro-Palestine “student and youth network,” published an open letter in support of the suspect in the DC attack.
The letter refers to the public murder of these innocents, leaving a conference aimed at facilitating cooperation between Jews, Christians, and Muslims to bring aid into Gaza, as “a legitimate act of resistance.” An act that is “fully justified” and “morally righteous.”
It calls on others to “in all cases, raise your voices to echo his [the suspect’s] own words and actions for the sake of justice and accountability.” And identifies the killer and his actions as “a part of our movement, a part of us.”
“It is justified to fight it [the West], by any means necessary, without regard for geography,” the group wrote. “This holds especially true for those of us struggling behind enemy lines, inside the US…”
The letter ends with the same phrase bellowed across the globe since October 8, “GLOBALIZE THE INTIFADA!”
Aside from the reprehensible and entirely amoral views outlined in this letter, two additional observations should be pointed out.
Firstly, the signatories to this vile declaration are not all merely fringe radicals. They represent individuals and groups from multiple nations, such as the US, France, the UK, Canada, and China. These organizations, some of which have links with designated terrorist groups, include Unity of Fields (UoF), formerly Palestine Action US. UoF has been involved in the Columbia University protests and stated the DC terror suspect acted out of “solidarity and love for the Palestinian people.”
Another signatory, the Liberation Caucus of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), is the largest socialist organization in the US. US representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or “AOC” (D-NY), Rashida Tlaib (D-MI), and Greg Casar (D-TX) are all DSA members.
Beyond the prevalence of some of the signatories and their wider affiliations, the content of the letter itself begs a particular question. What is the difference between the repugnant tripe espoused in this letter and the ceaseless cacophony of chants, slogans, and cheers heard at every pro-Palestinian, pro-terror, anti-Israel, anti-West rally?
If you still harbor doubts, swing by your local campus, park, plaza, main street, museum, or whatever location in your community that has been co-opted by these protesters and take a listen. Or failing that, just scroll the page of the nearest Students for Justice in Palestine chapter.
It is time we recognize these parallels and call them out.
Enough is enough!
One of the most profound hallmarks of the West, particularly in the US, is the freedom of speech. And as morally revolting and factually incorrect as these chants are, the right of the protesters to shout them should be upheld where and when constitutionally permitted.
However, the nature of this liberty is such that we also have the freedom to interpret and respond (within legal bounds) to these messages. This is where we must take a more active stance.
The vast majority of these individuals may not be moved to murder as part of their activism. However, their ideology and radical political preferences are part and parcel of the same moral rot as those who have. It is time we stop pretending otherwise.
Those who continue to call for intifada, who demand Israel be excised from the map, need to be called out. Their words should be met with the same opprobrium that a campus KKK rally or Nazi march would be.
We as a society must stop giving passes. We must stop casting an ever-encompassing ‘cloak of charity’ in a feeble attempt to excuse such displays of abject moral depravity. The veneer of impressionable youth, bucking against cultural bounds, must be set aside. It’s time we stop making excuses, running cover, contextualizing, and ignoring this behavior. These individuals must be either condemned for their acceptance of such hate or shamed for their profound ignorance. Because the reality is, this blend of metastatic stupidity and targeted destruction is lethal to us all.
Institutional Rot
Likewise, we must continue calling out the perversion of our cherished institutions into bastions for the most insidious forms of hate. We cannot continue to facilitate by our apathy, the sacrifice of the treasures history has bequeathed us. To relinquish this legacy to the whims of a venal gaggle of radicals cosplaying as the pro-terror, anti-Western, anti-Semitic, anti-Christian, anti-democratic, Jacobins, Bolsheviks, and Maoists that adorn their dormroom posters and Instagram feeds.
Why has the civilization of Socrates, Aristotle, and Aquinas been so unable to instill within these individuals even the most rudimentary understanding of right and wrong?!
We, as a society, have for too long been encouraged to rebrand, rewrite, and even reward those who advocate the destruction of the West, our destruction, and make no attempt to hide it.
A Call to Action
The targeting of attendees at a Jewish Museum function and advocates for the release of Israeli hostages (which no pro-Palestinian protest has called for) suggests a specific anti-Semitic motive to this violence. However, these events, especially the attack in DS, paint larger symbolic picture.
A Jew and a Christian: representatives of the two foundational stones upon which Western civilization is built. The very Judeo-Christian source from which their alleged murderer’s sacred right to chant these slogans derives. Two individuals actively working to help the Gazan population were gunned down in fulfillment of what so many of these protesters have been calling for from the very start.
And so dear reader, I put to you these two requests: recognize and respond.
Recognize, whether you were born into it or actively sought it out, that you are the recipient of a truly profound civilizational inheritance. Recognize that the liberties, the institutions, the virtues, the beauty, and the unparalleled successes we enjoy today were not “manifested” into existence as part of some vapid trend. Nor were they naturally derived. Rather, they persevere despite humanity’s flawed inclinations.
They are the exception, the culmination of thousands of years of hard-fought gains and costly losses. The pernicious and radical ideology that fuels many of these activists and their moral perversion is the default.
Recognize, like the physical representations of our shared heritage, the Notre Dame de Paris, the Palais de Louvre, Westminster Abbey, the Sistine Chapel, the Parthenon of Athens, that our civilization must be maintained and attended to, lest it succumb to ruin and to crumble to dust as so many before it.
Likewise, we must respond. Just as we would any other malady, we must work to correct the spread of this lethal poison. We must label these ideas and chants for what they are and refuse to indulge them when and where we can.
It is with this in mind that I refer you to the opening image, because while the century and actors may differ, the ultimate threat– the destruction of history’s single greatest triumph– remains the same. It is up to us to champion a culture of life over cheers of death.
This ideological rot need not be our future. However, just as our predecessors, we are not promised tomorrow. And if we continue down this path, if we do not attempt to man the civilizational ramparts, to buttress the foundations upon which we exist, then one thing is certain. When history conducts a postmortem of this shameful chapter of our story, the cause of death will read thusly: suicide.
Caleb Klubben is a writer for American Faith.
