The Red Triangle Crusade claims another martyr
What drives foreigners to sacrifice their lives on behalf of a country many will never visit?
In November I warned about the potential for real violence in the US and elsewhere through a letter to the pro-Palestine investigative journalist Glenn Greenwald. Three months later as the war continues to rage in Gaza, new episodes of radicalized violence roil the West. I waver sometimes while wondering about the motives of the activist left and their allies who support Palestine. Do they excuse the poisonous beliefs and actions of their crowd as a result of pragmatism or simple ignorance? Before I continue let me first address any misconception about what this is about: NO, I am not here to attack your First Amendment right to criticize or vulgarly condemn the State of Israel nor any other nation, group or individual. I am not going to blame Greenwald, who I still think does good work on many fronts, nor any of the actual lowlife idiots in the pro-Palestine crowd like Jake Shields. I have always stood for a broad interpretation of Americans’ free speech rights even if it means asking others to tolerate ideas and statements that in and of themselves are deeply intolerant and objectionable.
But what I did warn about in the November letter was actual violence. Last week a confused and likely mentally sick individual attempted to commit a mass shooting at the Lakewood Church in Houston with the word “Palestine” scrawled on her rifle. This person had many arrests and was hospitalized for mental health issues as recently as 2006. Ganesse Moreno is certainly not the victim of the attack she carried out, but she is a casualty of the pied piper activism that has swept America and other western nations into a frenzy where individuals that have no personal connection to Palestine or the war in Gaza have committed themselves to its cause in a manner almost befitting religious conversion.
Only months before October 7 an article in the Middle East Eye proclaimed that the world had “abandoned” Palestine. The irony is that the author, Alain Gabon, is a French-born professor of French Studies at Virginia Wesleyan University. He and countless other academics are a reflection of a world that is actually abnormally focused on Palestine. There have always been others from outside that have tried to “help” the Palestinians, and at the same time the Palestinian leadership has been too arrogant and short-sighted to help their own people by accepting a compromised peace deal. Hence the Palestinians always end up needing more help because their situation becomes more severe and their advocates demand more attention.
If all Gabon and like-minded activists are doing is advocacy it’s not a problem. What should be of concern are those outliers like Ganesse Escalante. Here are some quick examples of other noble westerners who thought their idealism would lead to positive change and instead only became casualties.
Patrick Arguello was a Nicaraguan American who graduated from UCLA only to volunteer for the Sandinista rebels in his parents’ homeland, but was rebuffed. His searching for a place in the the worldwide revolutionary movement brought him to the Marxist-Leninist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, for whom he hijacked an El Al flight Sept. 6, 1970. Passengers and a security guard resisted, resulting in his death and the capture of his partner, the much more famous Leila Khaled.
Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, best known as “Carlos the Jackal” is a Venezuelan who at one time was the most wanted terrorist in the world. The son of a communist father and Catholic mother, “Carlos” joined the struggle first by studying at Moscow’s Patrice Lumumba, but quickly dropped out, surfacing in Beirut and volunteering for the PFLP. For them he committed several terror attacks including the failed assassination of banker Joseph Sieff, car bombings, and attacks against foreign embassies. He has been imprisoned in France since 1994.
The JRA trio (Japan) - On May 30, 1972 three passengers deplaned from an Air France flight from Rome at the Lod Airport in Israel, withdrew Czech made automatic rifles and grenades from their luggage, and proceeded to murder 26 people and wound another 80. Of the dead, 17 were Christian pilgrims and US citizens from Puerto Rico. One of the three survived the attack, Kozo Okamoto, who like the others was a member of the communist Japanese Red Army. The JRA had splintered off from the Japanese leftist activist scene in the late 1960s and become known for its bloody schismatic internal fighting and cult-like behaviour, but how did they come to commit this act of wanton violence so far from home? In 1971 its founder Fusako Shigenobu and her husband, one of Okamoto's accomplices in the attack, moved to Beirut in order to take part in world revolution and support Palestinian liberation. Like with Carlos the Jackal and Patrick Arguello, their purpose was to carry out violent attacks for the PFLP and use their non-Arab identities to evade Israeli security screening. Okamoto was released in a prisoner swap in 1985 and both he and Shigenobu remain alive today. In 2022 the PFLP held a ceremony with Okamoto present to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the attack.
Wilfried Böse and Brigitte Kuhlmann (W. Germany) were two members of the communist terror group Revolutionary Cells (RZ) who hijacked Air France Flight 139 on June 27, 1976 from Athens to Israel and rerouted it to Benghazi, Libya, where they released some hostages and added a group of PFLP fighters. They then flew to Entebbe, Uganda on June 28. For several days they conducted negotiations with Israel and other western countries for the release of imprisoned comrades from theirs and other revolutionary movements. However, on the night of July 4 having extended deadlines, both Kuhlmann and Böse were killed in an Israeli commando raid along with five other terrorists (4 hostages, Israeli Col. Jonathan Netanyahu, and 45 Ugandan soldiers). While the successful rescue is one of the most famous special forces actions in military history and has been portrayed in at least four films, the two RZ antagonists' names are largely forgotten by history, however unlike many of the others mentioned in this article Böse at least has been portrayed on the screen by the legendary German actor Klaus Kinski.
The PFLP mounted a revenge hijacking the following year, hijacking Lufthansa Flight 181 from Spain to Frankfurt and eventually landing days later in Mogadishu, Somalia five days later. Unlike in Uganda, Somalia's government was not interested in aiding the terrorists, and they assisted a West German commando raid that killed three of the four hijackers and rescued all of the hostages.
Rachel Corrie (USA) - Corrie was a nonviolent activist for the International Solidarity Movement whose death happened during an earnest effort on her part to help Palestinians in the Gaza town of Rafah by obstructing the bulldozing of a home. However, her death on March 16, 2003 became a lightning rod for other activists when the Israeli operator did not stop and she was crushed to death. IDF investigations cleared the soldier, claiming she had not been in his limited field of view and therefore he likely was unaware that she was in the way, however her ISM colleagues, other pro-Palestine activists, and her family have alleged that it was a deliberate killing. It must be emphasized however that she and the other activists had spent the day using their bodies as human barriers to the earth moving equipment, often putting themselves in danger of being injured, and that subsequent eyewitness reports could not agree on whether she was standing or sitting in front of the D9 bulldozer that killed her.
The Mikes Place duo (UK) - After midnight on April 30, 2003 a blast ripped through revelers at the crowded Tel Aviv bar Mikes Place, a known hangout of English speaking residents of the Israeli city. A second bomber attempted to detonate his device at a nearby hotel but failed and was ultimately found dead more than one week later. As this was the Second Intifada, suicide bombings were a common tactic of the various Palestinian terror groups. The identities of these two bombers were by no means common: Asif Muhammad Hanif of London and Omar Khan Sharif of Derby, both British citizens of Pakistani descent.
You might notice something about the people on the list: Besides the already mentioned fact that none of them have any connection to Palestine or Israel, only two of them were Muslim. The remainder were educated young westerners, often motivated out of a sense that their enlistment in Palestinian cause would solve the worst injustice of their time. So why should this worry us? Even though this phenomenon is more than 50 years old and has shown no signs of solving any problem, the Palestinian cause is if anything more popular among westerners in 2024 than ever. I've written in previous newsletters that trends are showing a shift in support from Israel to Palestine in the United States, in particular among youth. This is also true in other western states such as Australia and the United Kingdom. In Spain a plurality (31%) support the Palestinian cause compared to 12% who support Israel. Yet more Spanish citizens believe their government supports Israel over the Palestinians than vice versa despite the fact that Pedro Sánchez's government has steadfastly opposed a number of Israeli initiatives including adding to its funding of the UN Relief Works Agency after it was accused of providing cover to terror activity in Gaza.
This provides fertile ground for the next Genesse Escalante. She is certainly not the first violent Palestine sympathizer to commit an act of violence in the West during the current Gaza War. Last month Bezhani Sarvar, a security guard, opened fire and threw a Molotov cocktail at Edmonton City Hall. Fortunately no one else was harmed and he was arrested. One of the motives was his desire for others to rise up and stop a genocide in Gaza. In November a confrontation between dueling demonstrators resulted in the elderly Jewish demonstrator Paul Kessler being killed, allegedly by the pro-Palestine Ventura County Community College professor Loay Alnaji. There have also been sporadic incidents of anti-Palestinian violence like the stabbing of a middle aged Palestinian man leaving a rally in Austin, TX on Feb. 6.
Thankfully these incidents are rare, but it should not allow for complacency. Many other low-level violent incidents happen that do not rise to the same gravity as those described above, such as assaults against pro-Israel demonstrators and a reporter at a city council meeting in Melbourne, Australia just this week. So what do we do about it? I encourage everyone involved in advocacy on behalf of either cause to emphasize that freedom of speech should also mean a commitment to non-violence, but another problem persists. The pro-Palestine movement has a one-sided commitment to free speech. Also this week Dr. Jeffrey Blutinger, a Jewish studies professor at Cal State - Long Beach, was forced to adjourn a planned speaking appearance at San Jose State early due to disruptions by pro-Palestine activists. Blutinger's topic had been a discussion on how to reinvigorate the two state solution and bring peace between Israel and Palestine, but this was insufficient for those that picketed and heckled him.
The combative and confrontational nature of pro-Palestine organizations like Students for Justice in Palestine, Within Our Lifetime, and Al-Awda lends itself to further radicalization. Jeffrey Stevens of Fort Wayne, IN was recently arrested for making a series of violent threats against Jewish Americans and government officials. But Stevens didn't start there, he had a long track record as a pro-Palestine activist and reporter for Arab American News. He even founded a pro-Palestine advocacy group called the Azarias Project. In a recent podcast interview, flanked by Palestinian and Lebanese flags, Stevens expressed exasperation when asked by the host how a protest he was about to attend that day would be different from the others before it. Is this why he went from mere activism to illegal threats? He and his comrades have been posting, marching, and otherwise agitating since the outset of the Gaza War for a ceasefire, yet we are now more than four months in and the situation has only worsened for his side. As Hamas forces are whittled down and reduced to a smaller area, the endgame is becoming increasingly dire for them and the Palestinian cause as a whole. Does this mean that more sympathizers will become violent? Hopefully not, but they certainly have a long history of precedents to draw on.