Pro-Hamas Riots in US are Carbon Copy of BLM Violence

Palestinian supporters carry placards while shouting slogans as they cross Brooklyn Bridge during a demonstration demanding a cease-fire on Saturday, Oct. 28, 2023, in New York. (AP Photo/Andres Kudacki) (AP Photo/Andres Kudacki)

Behind the chaos of street protests lies a calculated strategy to radicalize and recruit for a leftist revolution.

By Daniel Greenfield, Gatestone

Reasonable people, usually old school liberals, still don’t understand the Left. And so they also don’t understand what happened to their movement, their party and their country.

A quarter century of smashing Starbucks windows clearly has nothing to do with Gaza.

They don’t care about black lives, the lives in Gaza or Iraq, or the lives of the poor: these are just the pretexts that provide them with moral superiority so they feel justified smashing things.

The pro-Hamas riots are a carbon copy of the BLM riots. Like the eco-terrorists, who have taken to vandalizing classical art in museums, their goal isn’t persuasion through awareness, it’s terrorism.

Individual causes, environmentalism, LGBTQ rights, Gaza, Iraq, income inequality, unions, Wall Street, abortion or criminals, are just gateway drugs to radicalize a base for the leftist revolution.

Blocking traffic or airports isn’t really about ending Israeli attacks on Hamas, but about inflicting misery on Americans and making the leftist perpetrators feel powerful and self-righteous by expressing their malice. Don’t think of these as protests; think of them as initiation sessions like those of gangs and cults in which new members prove themselves by hurting someone.

Blocking school buses, ambulances and people coming home from work, or shouting, “shame on you” at kids with cancer is just part of the radicalization process. Its purpose is to make the activists cause pain while being so emotionally detached from their victims that they not only feel nothing when inflicting pain, but that doing so makes them morally superior.

The process produces people capable of not only blocking traffic, but planting bombs.

Communist revolutionaries have exploited wars and food shortages to seize power, only to then inflict even worse wars and food shortages.

But following the Cloward-Piven model, leftists only make things worse. The purpose of leftist governments is to destroy countries by exacerbating every social, economic, geopolitical and cultural problem until they have brought societies to their knees and can seize total power.

Revolutions need causes, but the only real cause of a revolution is its own power. Or as George Orwell wrote in 1984, “One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship.”

DEI educational activists may not be as blatant about it as Hamas, but they share a similar goal of radicalizing a base until it is willing to commit any atrocity and still consider itself morally superior. The processes that produced men willing to rape and murder for Islam in Israel are also producing men and women in the West who are willing to cheer that and to wage war against their own societies in order to protect those rapists and murderers.

After Hamas supporters were caught screaming “shame on you” at children receiving cancer treatment at a Manhattan hospital (“make sure they hear you, they’re in the windows”) some people wondered what they were trying to accomplish.

Questions like that only reveal the vast gap between the pro-Hamas mob and everyone else.

The pro-Hamas protests, allegedly in pursuit of a ceasefire, but in reality celebrating Hamas and now Houthi terrorism, have picked random fights with Starbucks, Christmas tree lightings and Alec Baldwin, to name a few. They are not so much for anything as they are against things.