Yossi Schwartz ISL (RCIT section in Israel/Occupied Palestine), 18.06.2024
Last week, the so-called progressives in the Democratic party took off their masks.
On June 10, activists led by Within Our Lifetime (WOL) staged protests across New York City, including a demonstration against the October 7 Nova Music Festival Massacre Exhibit. The Exhibit was Zionist propaganda aimed at justification of the genocide, and the festival was criticized as a rave next to a death camp by WOL’s leader Kiswani.
That night, the homes of Brooklyn Museum officials, including Zionist director Anne Pasternak, were painted with protest symbols. Activists had long targeted the Museum for failing to recognize the Genocide of the Palestinians and break all ties with Israel.
The hypocritical US President Joe Biden, who provided bombs for the genocide in Gaza, condemned on Friday these actions as “horrific acts of antisemitism” that are threatening “all Americans and our fundamental democratic values.” The great values of slavery and the genocide of the Indians, the war of Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan.
The pro-Palestinian protest movement has long mocked the mainstream Democrat Party, casting it as complicit in the genocide in Gaza, and has refused to vote for Biden in his November reelection bid. They have scorned the president as “Genocide Joe,” disrupted a March 28 fundraising event in Manhattan, picketed the White House on June 8, and plan to disrupt the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in August.
Echoing Biden, congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said on social media on June 11 that “the callousness, dehumanization, and targeting of Jews on display at last night’s protest outside the Nova Festival exhibit was atrocious antisemitism – plain and simple.”
Really? Are settler colonialists who live on land stolen from the Palestinians who live as refugees are innocent? People who served in the oppressive Zionist army, as most Israelis do, are innocents?
Another member of the squad, Jamaal Bowman, also said that he condemned those “celebrating the innocents killed on October 7.”
“This dark day was the largest attack on the Jewish community since the Holocaust,” said Bowman. “Celebrating it is antisemitic and unacceptable. Peace cannot be achieved by weaponizing our tragedies against each other.”
Really? On October 7th, 1100 Zionists, one-third of them soldiers, were killed. Can you compare it to more than 37,000 Palestinians, most of them women and children? If you call the killing of 1100, including 300 soldiers, the largest attack on the Jewish community since the Holocaust, what would you call the killing of more than 37,000 Palestinians?
Members of the city council’s Progressive Caucus condemned the protests. Council members Crystal Hudson and Lincoln Restler issued a joint statement in which they said that the protests had crossed the line and targeting Pasternak was a “gross display of antisemitism.
These imperialist politicians forget that the Palestinians are the real Semites, unlike the Ashkenazi Jews, who are Europeans, and the army of the European colonialists is killing the real Semites.
No wonder all of them are members and supporters of the Democratic Party. This is their real place. When Ocasio-Cortez defended her voting record against military budgets for Israel, Columbia Students for Justice in Palestine said that they didn’t want her at the protest encampment at the university because she had “backed the Iron Dome,” in the 2021 voting.
The American workers and the pro-Palestinian masses need a different party that stands for socialist democratic Palestine from the river to the sea and for socialist America instead of the rotten imperialist order.