As woke illiberalism replaced live-and-let-live liberalism as the animating ideology of the American Left, the state of Israel has increasingly found itself on the outs. Never mind that modern Israel was founded by, and for three decades politically dominated by, a bunch of left-wing socialists. Never mind that Harry Truman, an iconic liberal Democratic president, became the first world leader to recognize the fledgling Jewish state a mere 11 minutes after it announced its independence in 1948. None of that history matters on the left anymore, after wokeism supplanted liberalism.
In the fatuous neo-Marxist dichotomy of modern wokeism, Jews are deemed a "white," "oppressor" class; Muslims, by contrast, are deemed a "brown," "oppressed" class. To be a leftist in good standing, then, necessitates supporting the latter over the former -- and, therefore, supporting Palestinian Arab jihadism over the Jewish people's eternal will to survive. To the woke, the Palestinian Arabs' quest to annihilate the Jews of Israel represents a vogue and chic cause -- just like Black Lives Matter did five years ago, and just like same-sex marriage did five years before that.
The apotheosis of this bemusing sentiment was the Hamas massacre of Oct. 7, 2023. Sure, babies were beheaded, women were raped, beautiful young music festival attendees were butchered, and Holocaust survivors were executed in their homes -- but "Palestine" was being "decolonized," and every good leftist knows you have to break a few eggs in order to make an omelet! The ends always justify the means, as Saul Alinsky famously taught. Accordingly, in the words of disgraced Cornell history professor Russell Rickford, the Hamas massacre was "exhilarating" and "energizing."
The imperative now, as thousands of young jihadis infesting America's university campuses have made clear, is to spread the "love": to "globalize the intifada" and, in the words of the radical leftists who congregated in Times Square in New York City earlier this week, to foment a worldwide "intifada revolution." The more, the merrier: Sharing is caring, after all!
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Alas, Americans now know exactly what "globalize the intifada" and "intifada revolution" means, in practice: Bourbon Street, New Orleans, around 3:15 a.m. local time on New Year's Day. There, a U.S. Army veteran-turned-radicalized Muslim convert by the name of Shamsud-Din Jabbar drove a rented pickup truck into a jam-packed crowd of New Year's partiers. The truck was packed with weapons, improvised explosive devices and -- you guessed it -- an ISIS flag. The tragic human cost of this one intifada mini "revolution" was at least 15 dead and more than 30 others injured.
That's quite a few "eggs" -- with no discernible "omelet" in site.
While Jabbar's full radicalization story is not yet known, we do know he was active in a Houston mosque called Masjid Bilal. Following the Big Easy massacre of one of their congregants, the mosque took to social media to instruct its members not to respond to the FBI if approached, and to instead direct all inquiries to CAIR. That would be the Council on American-Islamic Relations, which was once described by an FBI counterterrorism chief as a "front organization for Hamas that engages in propaganda for Islamic militants." In 2007, CAIR was listed by the FBI as an unindicted co-conspirator during the case against the Holy Land Foundation -- the largest terror financing prosecution in Department of Justice history.
But hey, at least Islam is an "oppressed" religion, right?
For many years, political elites deluded themselves into thinking that the existential threat posed by radical Islamic jihad was somehow limited or contained. Leaders became overconfident after the (long-overdue) assassination of Osama bin Laden in Pakistan and the successful campaign against ISIS a few years later. As for Hamas and Hezbollah? Israel's problem, not ours! (Perhaps we might consider asking the families of the victims of Hezbollah's 1983 bombing of the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut for their thoughts on that.)
Elites, in short, convinced themselves that radical Islam was no longer a major problem. They deemed it far more pressing to focus on the "domestic terror threat" posed by Christian grandmothers praying outside abortion clinics -- or parents speaking up at school board meetings about racial and gender indoctrination in their children's schools. As for the U.S.-Mexico border, which the 9/11 Commission strenuously recommended we secure in its final report over two decades ago? Fling it wide open, baby! What could possibly go wrong?
Well, New Orleans -- that's what could go wrong. And tragically, that's what will continue to go wrong until this nation once again seals its porous borders and once again becomes serious about confronting the jihadist threat. Perhaps Israel -- home of the exploding Hezbollah pagers -- might even share some advice, if anyone here cares to ask.
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