America has always been home to radical ideas. After all, we were born out of the most radical idea of all: People didn't need a king to tell them what to do.
That radical idea was actually imported from Europe, where stifling monarchies and slavish devotion to custom created a massive wave of revulsion against privilege and autocracy.
America has always been fertile ground for radicalism. So it's not surprising that Palestinian radicalism would have sprouted among the undisciplined, ignorant youth of America.
Young people in America in the first quarter of the 21st century were searching for a cause. "Occupy Wall Street" was touted by the American media as the "next big thing" in left-wing radicalism, and young people flocked to its banner. But very soon, the movement's incoherence and inconsistencies exposed it as a waste of time, and the young American radicals flitted away, looking for some other cause.
They thought they found it in the "racial reckoning," "Defund the Police," and "Black Lives Matter," a mish-mash of confusing and sometimes contradictory ideas about race that were promoted as a "solution" to white privilege and "systemic racism." That, too, proved an ephemeral experiment as historically high crime rates frightened ordinary people of all races who didn't give a damn about a "racial reckoing," and instead, had a reckoning for Democratic politicians dumb enough to believe their own propaganda about "defunding the police."
The radicalism of Palestinians is different. Americans rarely take up the cause of foreigners, especially causes as alien as that of the Palestinians. There's no American angle, which is why the movement is confined to campuses and other radical-left circles. But the message is amplified because the Democratic Party has taken up the cause of Palestinian "rights" — presumably, the right to kill as many Jews as they wish without censure.
The seemingly unconnected attacks in Boulder, the assassination of the young Jewish couple in Washington a fortnight ago, and the April firebombing of Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro's home point to the worrying fact that Palestinian radicalism has taken a violent, unpredictable turn. Lone wolves, radicalized by the incendiary rhetoric of the antisemitic left and legitimized by Democratic politicians, have brought the Intifada to America's shores.
The Intifada, after all, was never a peaceful movement. Literally meaning “uprising,” the first Intifada (1987–1990) and second (2000–2005) were marked by frequent violence, with the second resulting in nearly 1,000 Israels killed or injured. Any Israeli who lived through the second Intifada will tell you that they still think twice about where to sit on a bus, remembering the ever-present risk of suicide bombings.
That’s what made it so galling when those of us who objected to such chants were dismissed as overreacting to harmless student rabblerousing. Consider the revisionism offered by the University of Virginia’s Daniel Lefkowitz to the progressive Jewish outlet The Forward. Intifada, he claimed, “certainly strikes me as meaning, to Arabs or Arab-sympathetic people, a globalization of a non-violent or minimally violent resistance movement.”
It certainly didn’t mean “non-violent or minimally violent” to Soliman, or to D.C. shooter Elias Rodriguez, or to Pennsylvania arsonist Cody Balmer. And it certainly didn’t mean that to their victims—the casualties of what is beginning to look like the first American Intifada.
Generally speaking, I believe that connecting words with violence is an exercise in futility. When the left tried to connect an obscure political ad from Sarah Palin that showed a bullseye on the congressional district of Rep. Gabby Giffords as "proof" that the right incites violence after Giffords was nearly killed by a mentally disturbed man, even the mainstream media called foul.
But as the antisemitic rhetoric becomes more and more hysterical, blaming Israel for "genocide," and acting on those words to strike back at "Zionists," American Jews find themselves in the crosshairs of a genuine American-made "Intifada."
The point, rather, is that the American radical anti-Israel movement has built the intellectual scaffolding for—and in many cases all but invited—the violence now playing out in places like Boulder. When you call for “Intifada,” you cannot feign surprise when someone takes that call literally. Whatever your legal right to speak, that is the outcome you invoked.
Those are the simple facts. America may be the midwife of radical ideas, but that doesn't mean that nihilistic violence is justified under any circumstances.
The threat is real. The only way to fight it is by full, uncompromising enforcement of the law. Tal Fortgang of City Journal wrote that we must "recognize the escalatory nature of civil terrorism and crush it before it turns into murder."
We can start on college campuses, where weak-willed administrators need to step up and protect their students.
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