Darializa Chevalier, the winner of a Democratic congressional nomination in New York City, participated in a demonstration celebrating Oct. 7, 2023.
By Rafael Medoff
The New York Times this week described Darializa Chevalier, the winner of a Democratic congressional nomination in New York City, as “a critic of Israel’s treatment of Palestinians.”
Later in the same article, however, the Times noted that Chevalier attended a pro-Hamas rally in Manhattan “just a day after the Oct.7, 2023, attacks by Hamas that killed 1,200 people.”
Celebrating the mass murder, torture, and rape of Jews is not “criticism of Israel.” It’s antisemitism. Who says so? Then-president Joe Biden; that’s who.
Writing on X on June 14, 2024, the president condemned what he called “the horrific acts of Antisemitism this week.” Those acts were “abhorrent,” he wrote. They didn’t “just threaten Jewish Americans,” but “all Americans.” And they “threaten our fundamental democratic values.”
What were the incidents that Biden defined as antisemitic? He cited four types: “vandalism targeting Jewish homes,” “attacks on Jewish faculty at college campuses,” “harassment of subway riders,” and—most notably—“a demonstration celebrating the 10/7 attack.”
That’s what Chevalier and her fellow demonstrators were doing on October 8, 2023. They were not protesting against “Israel’s treatment of Palestinians.” After all, not a single Israeli soldier had yet stepped foot in Gaza. The demonstrators were celebrating the massacre.
At Chevalier’s rally and so many others that followed, the participants openly cheered the Hamas slaughter as “resistance.” They hailed dead terrorists as “our martyrs.” They called for “the liberation of Palestine by any means necessary.” They circulated cartoons glorifying the killers who crossed into Israel on paragliders.
Biden’s statement was consistent with the definition of antisemitism that was crafted by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA), which includes eleven specific examples of antisemitism. The first example on the list is “Calling for, aiding, or justifying the killing or harming of Jews in the name of a radical ideology or an extremist view of religion.”
Then-president Barack Obama’s administration adopted the IHRA definition in 2010. It has since been endorsed by 47 countries and hundreds of local governments, organizations, and institutions around the world.
Celebrating the mass murder of Jews is not “criticism of Israel.” It’s antisemitism.
(Dr. Medoff is director of The David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies, and the author of more than 20 books about Jewish history, Zionism, and the Holocaust.)
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