Two decades ago on 9/11, I stood on the rooftop of my apartment building near downtown Brooklyn and watched the twin towers of the World Trade Center burn.
The attacks that killed 2,977 Americans that day were staged by the pro-Palestinian terrorist group al-Qaida.
Afterward, we never saw thousands of people take to the streets in support of Palestinians— they wouldn't have dared.
Yet, in the three weeks since Oct. 7, the worst terrorist attack on Israel in its history, thousands of Americans and immigrants have taken over our streets in support of Palestinians. Implicitly or explicitly, they are supporting Hamas, the terrorist group that slaughtered 1,400 people in Israel on Oct.7, most of them unarmed civilians.
As a percentage of the population, it was as if 42,609 Americans had been killed on 9/11---by our next-door neighbors.
Does anyone think we would have agreed to a ceasefire?
The death toll includes 33 Americans, and perhaps nine others still being held hostage with 200 others kidnapped by Hamas.
Shame on every one of these protesters.
By Oct. 16, Pro-Palestinian demonstrations had occurred in New York, Los Angeles, Washington D.C., Boston, Dallas, Pittsburgh, Tucson, Portland, Oregon., and Dearborn, Michigan, as well as in Canada in Vancouver, Calgary, Edmonton, and Montreal, says one tally by Al Jazeera.
New York City holds the second-largest population of Jewish people, some 1.6 million people in a city of 8.5 million. (Israel's population is at 9.4 million.)
New York has been wracked by pro-Palestinian marches that have descended on United Nations Plaza, Times Square, Grand Central Station, and Washington Square Park.
On Saturday, thousands of anti-Israel demonstrators took over the Brooklyn Bridge, one mile from my home, chanting "From the River to the Sea, Palestine Will be Free!"
Israel lies between the Jordan River and Mediterranean Sea.
Where else is it supposed to go?
Protests also have been staged at Columbia University, Cooper Union, and New York University, and Harvard, Indiana University, Arizona State, California State Long Beach, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Newsweek reports. And in London, Sydney, Paris, and other cities around the world.
The demonstrations have increased in response to Israel's fierce counterattack, amid Hamas claims that 8,000 people, most of them women and children, have died in Gaza since it began.
It's a terrible toll — and one that never would have happened if Hamas never had slaughtered 1,400 innocent Israeli lives.
"Everything now is about how many innocent Palestinians are dying," Tal Hartuv told me in an interview. She is an Israeli citizen who was viciously stabbed in Jerusalem by a Palestinian terrorist in 2010.
"I had 13 machete wounds. I had over 30 broken bones. A collapsed lung, a dislocated shoulder, crushed sternum, a broken shoulder blade that sliced in my diaphragm. And I had bones splintered in my lungs."
Years later, she works to heal and avoid retaliation and revenge — and she asks why Palestinians are unable to do the same.
"I'm watching social media. . . your own terror-loving supporters, this so-called Squad, who, by the way, I think they should be arrested and charged for incitement to terrorism," she says.
"You know what it was like as a Jewish person? It was a blood libel."
For a thousand years from the 5th to 15th century and beyond, Christians stoked attacks on Jews by spreading the lie that Jews used the blood of Christian children for making matza: this was a "blood libel."
The media often avoid using the word "terrorists" to describe the attackers deployed by Hamas, meekly calling them "militants" or "Palestinian fighters."
Yet these men killed entire families, murdered babies, and committed rape, decapitation, and mutilation, and the desecration of dead bodies.
They filmed their acts of terror to terrify others. Fighters?
This is what the protesters and the media ignore — or endorse.
Some are sincere.
Some are driven by their hatred of Jews.
Most of them, however, may be marching in lockstep with their peers on campus and in Antifa, Black Lives Matter, and the ultra-radical wing of the LGBTQ+ movement, none of whom have anything in common with Palestinians in Gaza.
They do it because it’s the fashionable thing to do.
It makes them feel like heroes, though they accomplish nothing, other than to shield Hamas from blame and fan the hatred of Israel.
Dennis Kneale is a writer and media strategist in New York and host of the podcast, "What's Bugging Me." Previously, he was an anchor at CNBC and at Fox Business Network, after serving as a senior editor at The Wall Street Journal and managing editor of Forbes. Read Dennis Kneale's reports — More Here.
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