Politics
The Protest Movement is Lost
Political extremism is poisoning the pro-Palestinian movement
The slogans would seem to say it all. “Al Qassam (Hamas’s military wing) you make us proud, take another soldier out.” “We say justice, you say how? Burn Tel Aviv to the ground.” “Ya Hamas we love you, we support your rockets too.” It’s not exactly “give peace a chance,” but that doesn’t seem to be what many of these protesters want. Rather, they want to “globalize the Intifida,” which might better be translated to mean bringing violence and terror to “Zionists,” or Jews, around the world.
Sadly, these are some of the nihilistic slogans recently chanted by pro-Palestinian protesters, activists performatively draped in checkered kaffiyehs, but with little apparent ability to discern the larger meaning, or contradiction, behind their own rhetoric. They may have mastered the political signaling and rhetorical devices of the far-left, lacing their speech with a patois of academic catchphrases like intersectionality, antiracism, and anti-colonialism, but upon closer examination, there’s a hollow core of narcissism and baffling ignorance that’s difficult to understand.
Indeed, many of these masked protesters seem to be unable to form any kind of coherent intellectual or political narrative about themselves or…
