Caroline Glick
For the past two months, the progressive city of Portland in the progressive State of Oregon, has been the scene of chaos and rioting. The liberal media have misleadingly characterized the riots as “peaceful demonstrations.”
Night after night, hundreds of “peaceful demonstrators” have vandalized and destroyed stores and other businesses, transforming downtown Portland into a war zone. Over the past five weeks, the focal point of the violence has been the federal courthouse.
“Peaceful protesters” from Antifa and other radical groups have been attacking the federal courthouse in Portland with incendiary devices including pipe bombs and commercial grade fireworks. Federal officers charged with guarding the courthouse have been blinded with lasers and attacked with stones, metal balls shot from slingshots, bricks and two-by-fours, among other things.
The rioters are backed in their efforts by city and state officials as well as national Democrats who have castigated federal forces protecting the courthouse as “occupiers,” the “Gestapo” and of course “stormtroopers.”
As for the alleged “kidnapping” of peaceful protesters, local journalist Andy Ngo explained this week that Pelosi’s statement channeled Antifa propaganda.
Ngo told Fox News, “That’s an Antifa talking point that is being repeated by sympathetic media.”
The demonstrations against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu which have been going on for weeks outside the Prime Minister’s Residence in Jerusalem, with satellite demonstrations in Tel Aviv serve a similar function in Israel. Like their American counterparts, the Israeli demonstrations are massively and sympathetically covered by the media, and enthusiastically supported by politicians from leftist parties. Like their American counterparts, they are disruptive and incredibly loud.
The Israeli protesters aren’t as violent as their American peers, but their messages of hatred of Netanyahu are violent and there have been some violent incidents, which seem to be growing, over the past week or so. Certainly, the number of death threats against Netanyahu and his family published by leftists on social media has grown steeply over the past several weeks.
The protests in Israel serve the same purpose for their Israeli organizers as the American ones do for their organizers. The demonstrations in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv are being conducted to incite hatred of Netanyahu, as the enemy of the people and to instill the sense that the country is spinning out of control.
Just as Pelosi and her colleagues demonize law enforcement officers trying to restore order and safety in places like Portland, Seattle and Chicago, the media and Netanyahu’s opponents in Knesset condemn the police for any effort to arrest demonstrators. If federal officers are “stormtroopers,” the police outside the Prime Minister’s Residence are the “personal protection force for the Netanyahu family.”
There are stark differences between the U.S. and Israeli left which point less to the goals of the protests than to the threat they pose to the long-term stability of both societies. The main difference is the ideological nature of the two lefts.
The American left has an ideological/religious bent. Progressivism, the creed of the American left is a hybrid of political rather than economic Communism and totalitarian messianism. It is anti-American and anti-Semitic. And while its popularity has grown, it doesn’t enjoy the support of anything close to a majority of Americans.
In Israel, in contrast, the left is post-religious and ideologically bankrupt. Its two gods – peace and surrender – came crashing down twenty and fifteen years ago, respectively. The failure of the Camp David peace summit in July 2000 and the start of the Palestinian terror war in September 2000 killed the religion of peace. The left’s “unilateral withdrawal” god was shattered when months after Israel expelled its citizens from Gaza and handed the area over to the PLO in August 2005, Hamas seized power and embarked on a war against Israel that has yet to end.
Although bereft of an ideological message to sell the public, the left in Israel has considerable power. Its control over Israel’s deep state – including the entire legal system – is far more comprehensive than the American left’s control over its state apparatuses.
The Israeli left controls most media organs the universities and cultural institutions. It has a limitless funding foreign governments and private foundations in Europe and the U.S.
No matter who wins in November, it’s hard to see how the situation in the U.S. will stabilize and how order will be restored. The rise of progressive politicians at the expense of moderate Democrats indicates the radicalization of the American left is not a flash in the pan. One electoral cycle won’t fix what has been broken incrementally over five decades.
In Israel, in the absence of an ideological left, the main and most tangible danger posed by the demonstrations is that one of the incited protesters will try to kill Netanyahu and his family. Threats to assassinate the prime minister and his wife and children have proliferated on social media as the massively and sympathetically covered protests have grown more incendiary.
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