EDITORIAL: Protesters at the DNC cheer on Middle East terror
As Hamas stooges protested outside the Democratic National Convention on Monday, an enfeebled President Joe Biden took the podium late in the evening and assured the swooning crowd that the terrorist-sympathizing demonstrators “have a point.”
Is the president not aware that many of the groups behind the anti-Israel agitation — shouting their banal slogans about “settler colonialism” — make no secret of their desire to kill Jews and wipe Israel off the map? Perhaps not all the demonstrators seek such an extreme outcome, but by marching side by side with the militant activists who do, they advance the cause of evil.
As Jonathan Chait of New York Magazine writes, “Students for Justice in Palestine called the October 7 attacks ‘a historic win for the Palestinian resistance.’ … The Palestinian Youth Movement saluted ‘the active decolonization of Palestinian land’ and stated, ‘We have a right to resist on our own land.’ Within Our Lifetime declared … ‘We defend the right of Palestinians as colonized people to resist the Zionist occupation by any means necessary’.”
In other words, these radical groups and many of the Chicago demonstrators unapologetically rationalize the massacre of 1,200 Israeli civilians, the brutal rapes of women by marauding Hamas cowards and the seizure of innocent noncombatants — including children — as wartime hostages. This is deranged barbarism masquerading as coherent political thought.
On the very same day Mr. Biden appeased the protesters, Hamas and Islamic Jihad took responsibility for a suicide bombing in Tel Aviv on Sunday. It was a miracle nobody but the bomber died. “The attacker had most likely seen dozens of people gathered at a synagogue and stopped to prime the explosives, but had inadvertently detonated them,” according to a New York Times source, who added that “it could have been a large-scale attack had events turned out differently.”
Once again, we see the stark contrast between Israel and the terrorists. The Jewish state remains under intense diplomatic pressure to reduce civilian casualties. Yet Hamas operates under no such constraints and openly admits to targeting Israeli civilians and neighborhoods for death and destruction while hiding military targets among its own people for propaganda purposes. Yet barely a peep from the “international community.”
Meanwhile Hamas has again rejected the Harris-Biden administration’s efforts to force a halt to the fighting. While Israel was reportedly willing to accept a “U.S. proposal to bridge gaps hindering a cease-fire agreement,” The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday, Hamas officials instead promised more suicide bombing attacks — “martyrdom operations,” in terrorist lingo — against innocent Israelis.
If the Chicago protesters have a point, it’s a deadly and deeply misguided one.