Stephen Buttafuoco and the other 700 or more cheerleaders for Hamas were not content to speak their piece at Times Square unimpeded.
They gathered along the east side of Seventh Avenue and occupied, pun intended, the full block south of 42nd 
Their behavior was unnerving, as they no doubt intended it to be.
Street to bash Israel for creating a Palestinian Holocaust, as they would put it. The Jewish section was sited on the west side of Seventh, south of 41st, to stage a counter-protest.
The 30 of us must have been awfully dangerous. More than 200 demonstrators swiftly rushed onto the opposite side of Seventh Avenue from us, and spent the next hour taunting and shouting at us. As a reporter pointed out to me, they outnumbered us. They were confrontational and clearly tried to disrupt our opportunity to exercise our free-speech rights, even as their friends one block north addressed the crowd without interruption. Nor did we want to interrupt them.
Let’s get this straight: Buttafuoco’s buddies actually thought it necessary to stage a counter-protest to the counter-protest - a rowdy, obnoxious counter-counter-protest at that. Maybe Buttafuoco, no relation to Long Island loverboy Joey Buttafuoco, had joined them. Their behavior was unnerving, as they no doubt intended it to be. I was annoyed that the police allowed them to have their cake and eat it, too.
What comes around, goes around, God willing, as your average Hamas groupie might say. Buttafuoco was arrested six days later for allegedly harassing 700 guests at a Jewish wedding at the Woodbury Jewish Center on Long Island by playing a deafening recording of a chant uttered at the rally.
Interestingly, he could end up with far more prison time than he otherwise would receive because of an unconstitutional law. That would be poetic justice.
Buttafuoco was charged with aggravated harassment as a hate crime for allegedly playing the chant Allahu akbar - Arabic for “God is Great” - so that it terrified guests at the wedding at about 1:00 a.m. on January 4, Nassau County police said, according to the New York Post. He made a recording of the chant at the rally on his cellphone during the early afternoon of January 3. His lawyer, Thomas Spreer, claimed that Buttafuoco, 23, believed he was playing it for a friend and was not aware that the wedding party would hear it.
Buttafuoco was fired by his employer, Morrell Caterers, which works for synagogues around Long Island. Buttafuoco had been working Jewish affairs for Morrell for the last two years, according to the Post.
Buttafuoco might spend extra time in prison because his alleged offense could be considered a form of religious or ethnic harassment. In New York State, the hate crimes law translates into extra jail time. This means an offender’s full prison term punishes not only what he does, but what he thinks.
My view is that a person should certainly be punished for their offense, but not for what they think. That violates a citizen’s free-speech rights. Not that I’m crying for this guy. Perhaps it balances out for the way Buttafuoco’s friends treated us on January 3.
When I learned on the preceding Thursday night that a counter-protest was planned, I decided to take the 2-and-a-half hour train trip from Philadelphia to New York to participate in the rally. The pro-Hamas demonstration constituted an exercise in hypocrisy, rationalizing, bullying and tastelessness; not that I was surprised, due to past experience.
They hoisted aloft the usual array of signs accusing Israel of genocide, with Egypt and the United States complicit in the bombing assaults. Two signs carried drawings of swastikas. As the counter-counter-protest progressed, their numbers multiplied and they surged forward off the curb and into the street, as police pulled a metal barrier outward. The demonstrators lurched their bodies forward as if they were poised to rush us.
At one point, they yelled, “Shame on you!” Two different protesters held up shoes just like the Iraqi reporter who threw two shoes at President Bush. No shoes were tossed, but I spotted two small objects zoom across the street. One looked like a lemon and the second object struck the pavement behind us, fairly close to where I stood. 
Perhaps Buttafuoco will soon become a cause celebre for Hamas’s cheerleaders.
The crowd with the counter-counter-protest was so rowdy that a police horse clomping past along Seventh Avenue reared up and wheezed and knocked against a taxi cab, breaking off the vehicle’s rear-view mirror. Police had gone over to the Arab area - that of the counter-counter-protest - for the obvious need to impose order. An Arab monitor was vigorously pointing to a group of people from where one of the flying objects originated. Apparently, he wanted to avert a negative image.
While Hamas terrorists were sacrificing their lives in Gaza, Buttafuoco apologized profusely during a news conference on Saturday, January 10, in a public plea for mercy. What a martyr.
Perhaps Buttafuoco will soon become a cause celebre for Hamas’s cheerleaders. They’ll combine their demands for the Palestinians and Buttafuoco’s cause and chant: "Free Palestine! Free Buttafuoco!"