On the morning of May 30th 1972, three Japanese nationals landed in Tel Aviv on a layover stop between Rome and Tokyo. The three men, neatly dressed, calmly collected their carry-on luggage, exited the plane, and entered Lod airport (now known as Ben Gurion airport).
Upon entering the crowded baggage claim area, they quietly opened the violin cases they carried, removed submachine guns, and tried to kill as many people as possible. They murdered twenty six people, most of whom were Christian missionaries from Puerto Rico, and injured eighty people.
Most people associate terrorist attacks in Israel, or against Jews, with radical Jihadists or delusional Neo-Nazis. The Japanese men that carried out this slaughter were neither. They were members of the Japanese Red Army, trained and equipped by the Marxist and revolutionary faction of the PLO, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. The attack was carried out as part of an international effort for a leftist world revolution. In the words of the lone surviving perpetrator, Kozo Okamoto, “to support and defend the cause of the oppressed.”
The attack at Lod airport is an example of a radical, revolutionary ideology motivating and inspiring a violent atrocity. This is genocidal anti-Semitism.
On January 16th, 2015, a video of Marc Lamont Hill was published to Youtube. The video opens with him solemnly staring straight into the camera. Behind him, we could see members of the group the Dream Defenders standing in eerie silence, almost reverence, holding hands.
Mr. Hill begins to speak, “We came here to Palestine to stand in love and revolutionary struggle with our brothers and sisters. We come to a land that has been stolen by greed and destroyed by hate. We come here and we learn laws that have been cosigned in ink but written in the blood of the innocent, and we stand next to people who continue to courageously struggle and resist the occupation. People who continue to dream and fight for freedom. From Ferguson to Palestine, the struggle for freedom continues”.
In the extended video, the statement is followed by a song, spoken-word pieces and a ritualistic chain dance. The ceremony concludes with loud proclamations, “Palestine to Ferguson, end the occupation!” and “Ferguson to Palestine we fight to free our nations!”. And he is standing in Nazareth, well within 1948 Israel recognized by the UN whiile saying it.
Based on this video alone, one could conclude that Marc Lamont Hill and his fellow activists have developed a toxic perspective of the Israel-Palestine issue. How can one see any connection between Ferguson Missouri and the Palestinian people in Gaza and the West Bank?
It seems, like the members of the Japanese Red Army, they are embracing a revolutionary belief that the liberation of all people is being obstructed by the existence of a Jewish state. Israel, the international Jew, won’t allow the rest of the world to be free.
If that seems to be a bit of a stretch, Marc Lamont Hill affirmed this very position in his bizarre speech at the UN’s annual International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian people. In the speech Mr. Hill, in addition to condoning violent Palestinian resistance and trying to parallel historic racism in America to Israel, makes the case for a global campaign of intersectional struggle against vague power structures and ultimately Israel.
He emphatically states, “We must form a solidarity project, we must struggle together in order to resist because state violence in the United States, and state violence in Brazil, and state violence in Syria, and state violence in Egypt, and state violence in South Africa, and state violence in Palestine are all of the same sort.”
What sort is he referring to? What is the unifying factor in every conflict in the world? Marc Lamont Hill doesn’t tell us, and I suspect that’s because one does not exist. There is not a single fix for all of the ills of history and the injustices and challenges we face in the present.
Revolutionary thinkers, whether right, left, fascist or communist, always present a narrow framework of the world. They cannot, or will not, accept the unfortunate truth that the world is a complex place, and as happened so many times in history, their fierce and relentless pursuit of a world that suits their ideology ends in destruction and death.
I will let Mr. Hill’s own concluding words illustrate the inevitable result of this worldencompassing and revolutionary ideology, “Justice requires a free Palestine, from the river to the sea”. This is genocidal anti-Semitism.