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Frank Miele
Frank Miele, the retired editor of the Daily Inter Lake in Kalispell, Mont., is a columnist for RealClearPolitics. His newest book, “What Matters Most: God, Country, Family and Friends,” is available from his Amazon author page.
“Death to America!” We are used to that chant. Maybe too used to it.
If you are old enough, you heard it in 1979 during the Iranian hostage crisis when supporters of Ayatollah Khomeini invaded the U.S. Embassy in Tehran.
Since then, it has been a recurring theme of Islamic fundamentalism, along with “Death to Israel.” Khomeini even went so far as to declare the United States “The Great Satan” in order to goad Muslims into a religious fervor aimed at destroying America.
Since then, we have heard “Death to America” shouted thousands of times around the globe. When the World Trade Center was destroyed in a terror attack in 2001 and thousands of innocent lives were taken there and at the Pentagon and on an empty field in Shanksville, Pa., the jarring chant was heard from the West Bank, from Gaza, from Somalia, and across the Muslim world.
But now it is closer to home. In fact, the chant of “Death to America” is being heard on American soil, and it is being written off by some naive commentators as First Amendment-protected speech. No big deal. We were told by a Supreme Court justice once that the Constitution is not a suicide pact, but if so, then how can we tolerate the anti-American rhetoric of thousands of newcomers as “free speech” when their goal is plainly the destruction of America?
To be specific, “Death to America” was heard earlier this month at a Dearborn, Mich., rally held on al-Quds Day, an anti-Israel holiday invented by Khomeini years ago. At the pro-Palestinian rally, speaker Tarek Bazzi attacked Joe Biden for his support of Israel in the Gaza War but added, “It’s not Genocide Joe that has to go, it is the entire system that has to go. Any system that would allow such atrocities and devilry to happen and would support it – such a system does not deserve to exist on God’s earth.”
Dearborn is the largest Muslim population center in the United States, so it is no surprise that anti-Israel rhetoric is heard there, but what we saw in the days following suggests that we are not just under attack with hateful words but also with actions that can only be described as seditious.
On April 15, pro-Palestinian protesters shut down the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco. That same day, in Oregon, traffic was shut down in one direction on Interstate 5 by protesters wielding Palestinian flags. Roads were also shut down in Seattle and Chicago to block air travelers from accessing terminals at the airports in those cities. This was a coordinated effort, and it promises to be the first of many, “with the aim of causing the most economic impact” in the U.S. and elsewhere in order to persuade nations to abandon Israel.
Welcome to the global intifada, yet another disastrous result of the Biden administration’s porous border and feckless foreign policy.
Intifada refers specifically to two separate uprisings of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank over the past four decades, but more broadly, it pertains to the continued resistance of the Palestinians to the existence of Israel. When they shout “Death to Israel,” they mean it. It should be a top priority of Congress now to determine whether they mean it when they shout “Death to America.”
The rise of pro-Palestinian hatred in the United States should not be a surprising development to anyone. Even before President Biden opened the southern border to millions of unvetted “newcomers,” as the global elites like to call the invaders, there has been a reckless U.S. policy going back two decades to resettle Muslim refugees from Iraq, Libya, Somalia, and Afghanistan in the U.S. heartland. And because immigration policy no longer treats assimilation as a worthwhile goal, many of those refugees are loyal to their homeland and their religion much more than to the nation that offered them safety and security.
I suppose that is an inevitable result of the globalist agenda of border dissolution and the merging of disparate populations for the purpose of sharing wealth and assuaging billionaires’ guilt.
But it is only inevitable if the rest of us tolerate it.
In the meantime, the Palestinians have learned the lesson of how to play the victim card. With the support of the left-wing media, they have worked tirelessly to convince the world that the bloodthirsty killers of Hamas are actually heroic freedom fighters. This is not by accident. Since the Hamas invasion of Israel on Oct. 7, Palestinian advocates have been calling on their supporters to “globalize the intifada,” a phrase that “calls for people from around the globe to participate in rising up against Israel.”
According to the American Jewish Committee, “Calls to ‘globalize the intifada’ contribute to the sense that people around the world need to take action against supporters of Israel around the world. Many protests have been peaceful, still some have taken violent action against Jews and their institutions. There are numerous examples of the usage of the phrase such as at a demonstration in Times Square, in front of the Consulate General of Israel in Manhattan, in central London, at Harvard University, and even on Eastern Parkway in Brooklyn, not far from Crown Heights, a neighborhood with a very large Hasidic Jewish population that is the home of the Chabad-Lubavitch movement.”
Just last week, pro-Palestinian students held a disruptive protest at Columbia University on the very day when the university’s president, Minouche Shafik, was being grilled by members of a U.S. House committee about the rise of antisemitism on campus. Shafik testified that “One of the issues that we are actively debating now is to actually clarify where language crosses the line from protected speech to discriminatory or harassing speech.”
As Islamic protests escalate over the next few months, that is a debate that should be quickly concluded, not just at Columbia but across America. If protesters disrupt civil society and threaten violence or insurrection, there should be no doubt about the resolve of a free society to fight back. The Department of Justice does not exist solely to prosecute Trump supporters. Attorney General Merrick Garland had better act quickly to suppress the very real insurrection about to blow across the country, or else he and his president will reap the whirlwind.
This article was originally published by RealClearPolitics and made available via RealClearWire.
