River News: Our View

It’s hard to find anything to cheer about in the world these days, harder still to feel one bit optimistic about the future.

In these past few weeks we have witnessed tens of thousands of demonstrators protesting for the Hamas cause in the streets of the United States. That is the cause of brutal oppression — not fascism with a smile, like you see with many American liberals, but an evil totalitarianism aroused to its highest satisfaction by the thrill of the kill.

The blood lust has engulfed many of the baby fascists who incubate on our college campuses. Students and other protesters have openly yelled to “gas the Jews” and have supported the “final solution” — a Nazi slogan which meant the eradication of the Jewish people entirely — or, in its latest incarnation, a Palestine “from the River to the Sea.” 

The mission is so straightforward that even a progressive American college student can grasp it: Pro-Hamas demonstrators seek to dismantle not just a homeland for Jews but one of the only authentic democracies remaining in the world. Along the way they hope to exterminate an entire people.

That’s the mission for which the adoring chants began after the sickening butchering of innocent Israelis and others on October 7, now another day in infamy. 

In other words, with their faces mostly covered, protesters have marched in the streets in support of terrorism and murder and ethnic cleansing. That’s their right, but it’s terrifying and demoralizing, and the worst part is, it is the first time — at least in our memory — that those embracing “the final solution” call themselves progressives.

We shouldn’t be surprised. We will be careful to point out that not all progressives buy into the antisemitic narrative, but disturbingly large numbers do, and they tend to be the same progressives who want government to control every aspect of your life, from how long you can shower to how you cook your food to what cars you can drive. They want you to know that they control children’s education, not parents, and, oh by the way, shut up: Free speech is so 1960s.

So is biology. And so — again, for the first time we can remember — progressives march to erase women and any vestiges of the hard-won rights they have fought so long for. 

When you realize that, for many progressives, the agenda is to end free speech, exterminate Jews, enslave women, and collectivize life at all levels, well, let’s just say that’s not likely to cheer up your day. That many of their “protests” are little more than violent riots shows us the world is seething in its globalism.

And when you realize that many of these progressives control government, it’s even more depressing.

Of course, we tell ourselves the next election will take care of things. The American people believe too much in personal liberty and in authentic social justice — equality of opportunity for all — to let such brutal totalitarianism happen. That’s what we tell ourselves.

And then, the morning after each election, we wake up disappointed that we have lost yet again. At least that’s the scenario since 2016, when, after being stunned by Donald J. Trump at the ballot box, the world’s ruling elite vowed it would never be allowed to happen again.

And it hasn’t.

And then, when all seems lost, something remarkable happens. And so it did last week, when 300,000 people flooded the streets of Washington, D.C., in a long overdue March for Israel. 

Another half-million watched the march online. It was a day of solidarity for the Jewish homeland and for the most oppressed people in world history, but it was so much more than that. It was a day of solidarity for freedom and freedom fighters everywhere.

Refreshingly, people took to the streets unmasked, their faces uncovered in their calls for freedom, a far cry from pro-Hamas protesters who cover their faces, sheathed as they are in their cowardice. 

To compare this week’s demonstration to the demonstrations for Hamas is to clarify what this war is all about. Let there be no mistake, it is not about a final solution, it is about the only solution we can countenance — the destruction of Hamas and the elimination of its leaders and army.

Let us all remember, as many in our own nation clamor for a ceasefire, that a ceasefire is nothing but a call for Israeli surrender.

Let us all remember what Hamas spokesperson Taher El-Nounou said to The New York Times after October 7: “I hope that the state of war with Israel will become permanent on all the borders, and that the Arab world will stand with us.”

Let us all remember that Hamas’s charter unilaterally “rejects any alternative to the full and complete liberation of Palestine, from the river to the sea” and that its original 1988 charter coughed up this jewel: “The time will not come until Muslims will fight the Jews (and kill them); until the Jews hide behind rocks and trees, which will cry: Muslim! there is a Jew hiding behind me, come on and kill him!”

In a 2017 revision, they got rid of this latter language but October 7 shows what the true intention is, and it hasn’t changed since 1988. So those progressives who call for a ceasefire know it will amount to a ceasefire for only one side while the other side plots the next attack in the fight to exterminate Israel. 

The truth is, the only ceasefire that matters is the one when Israel stops fighting because it has wiped the evil known as Hamas from the face of the earth.

At the rally, House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries, a Democrat, stood up as a liberal for Israel and for freedom when he reminded the world just how oppressed in history Jews have been:

“The Jewish people were violently expelled from the Middle East. The Jewish people were systematically murdered by the Nazi regime. The Jewish people were violently attacked by Hamas on October 7th, resulting in the largest loss of Jewish life in a single day since the Holocaust. So we are here, to unequivocally declare, Never Again. Never Again. Never Again. The State of Israel must always exist as a safe haven for the Jewish people.”

There is a larger context to the stakes in this war, and that is why it was so refreshing to see the large turnout: Israel’s battle for survival is first and foremost a fight for life and liberty for the Jewish people, but it reflects a looming fight we all have in the battle against globalist oppression. 

In a very real sense, Hamas — not Palestinians, mind you, who do deserve a state for their homeland — but Hamas represents globalism in the context of a radical international ideology waging war against grassroots democracy. Israel represents the democratic, popular side of humankind in a fragile political ecosystem.

Speaking remotely at the rally, Israel’s president, Isaac Herzog, alluded to that larger context:

“Today we come together, as a family, one big mishpacha, to march for Israel. To march for the babies, the boys and girls, women and men viciously held hostage by Hamas. To march for the right of every Jew to live proudly and safely in America, in Israel and around the world. Above all, we come together to march for good over evil, for human morality over blood thirst. We march for light over darkness.”

And, we add, for nationalism and democracy over globalism.

This week, we hope everyone in their hearts will march for Israel. We hope everyone will march for the honor and memory of the dead and for the hostages. We hope everyone will march in their hearts for the right of Jews to live safely and freely everywhere. And in our hearts, let’s march too for our own freedom and safety.

All are inextricably connected. Those who would murder Jews because of bigotry will not hesitate to murder and eliminate all those who oppose their supremacy and power. They will not stop at antisemitism, is the point. They will not tolerate free speech, or the rights of women, or parental control over the raising and education of children.

The Jewish massacre on October 7 has made it much more clear the battle lines we all face, whatever the name attached to it on any given day: Israel v. Hamas; Jews versus bigotry; morality versus blood thirst, good versus evil; American nationalism and democracy versus globalism.

Only when all the forces of darkness have been annihilated by the forces of light can there be a ceasefire. That indeed is the only ceasefire that matters.