Disclaimer: ZOA is a nonpartisan organization that doesn’t support or reject any candidate for office.
By Morton A. Klein
National President, Zionist Organization of America
(August 26, 2024 / JNS) It’s very troubling that President Joe Biden said during his Democratic National Convention speech that “those [anti-Israel] protesters out in the street, they have a point.” Similarly, during her interview with The Nation in July, Vice President Kamala Harris stated that the anti-Israel “protesters” “are showing exactly what the human emotion should be, as a response to Gaza. … I understand the emotion behind it.”
What exactly is the point of anti-Israel, anti-American terror-affiliated rioters? (“Protesters” is way too mild a term for them.)
Their motives are violence, hatred, sexism, and antisemitism, in addition to demands to destroy America and Israel, to support Hamas and to globalize the intifada—meaning murdering and committing violence against Jews everywhere.
According to reports in The Chicago Tribune, Associated Press and NBC, the rioters in Chicago screamed, “F*** this country, burn it down.” They also chanted rhetoric against the police and the Jewish state; called for “the apartheid” (their inappropriate name for Israel) “to go down”; marched straight into police lines protecting the Israeli consulate; refused orders to disperse; and attacked police outside the Israeli consulate in Chicago. A masked rioter set fire to a half-American, half-Israeli flag.
Chicago Police Superintendent Larry Snelling said rioters yelled “vicious, nasty sexually explicit things” at female police officers.
He added that the group outside of the Israeli consulate “showed up with the intent of committing violence and acts of vandalism,” and “physically confronted and attacked” the police officers, leading to a mass arrest of 60 of these rioters.
The Consulate General of Israel to the Midwest also said that it was “appalled to see violence during the protest in front of our offices. … This is anything but peaceful.”
The groups organizing this mayhem in Chicago were the radical, left-wing, anti-Israel, anti-American hate groups Behind Enemy Lines; Chicago Coalition for Justice in Palestine (which appears to be a conglomeration of some of the worst anti-Israel, antisemitic hate groups including Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace); and Samidoun, a subsidiary of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), a U.S.-designated foreign terrorist organization that is responsible for numerous deadly terror attacks in Israel, including the assassination of an Israeli Minister. Samidoun demands the release of Palestinian Arab terrorists from prison and is itself also designated as a terrorist organization by Israel and Germany.
The mission statement of Behind Enemy Lines states that “the empire [the U.S.] is the enemy”; calls for “refus[ing] to accept the legitimacy, normalcy, and permanence of the empire”; calls for ending U.S. support to Israel; and disparages “routinized protests that threaten no one” and instead calls for “a militant anti-imperialist movement” and “mass resistance” (the common euphemism for terrorism and violence).
Shame on Biden and Harris for giving succor, credibility and legitimacy to these dangerous groups plaguing Chicago and elsewhere—all over the world.
Biden’s praising the hateful anti-American, anti-Israel rioters is in stark contrast to the portion of his DNC speech in which he again reiterated his divisive “fine people on both sides” Charlottesville hoax libeling former President Donald Trump.
Trump never supported neo-Nazis or white nationalists, as Biden falsely claimed. Instead, he made it clear that the “fine people on both sides” were those who had different views about the removal of a Robert E. Lee statue. Trump condemned the neo-Nazis in the same paragraph, saying: “I’m not talking about the neo-Nazis and the white nationalists because they should be condemned totally.”
Biden and Kamala should have borrowed that line from Trump and made it publicly clear that these anti-American, anti-Israel rioters “must be condemned totally.”
This op-ed was originally published in JNS and can be viewed here.