Phyllis Chesler new
Phyllis Chesler newCourtesy

Just last week, pro-Palestinian Arab demonstrators tried to stop Congressmen Richie Torres and Mike Lawler, from speaking about Israeli-Arab peace through the Abraham Accords at the 92nd St Y in New York City.

Approximately twenty to twenty five protestors stood up in waves, one after the other, yelling out "Free Palestine" and "Genocide is not peace." It took about twenty minutes to clear the room. The assembled audience booed them and eventually started yelling "Get them out" and "Yeah, free Palestine from Hamas."

Torres sat on the platform entirely unfazed. Afterwards, he tweeted: "No amount of Astroturf Anti-Israel agitation is going to bully me into supporting a ceasefire that perpetuates the genocidal terrorism of Hamas. I refuse to be intimidated by a fanatical fringe that represents no one and nothing but itself."

This demonstrating-in-waves is hardly original. It is an Islamist/Marxist tactic long in use.

For example, in 2008, female students, members of the Muslim Student Association (a creation of the Muslim Brotherhood), chose to interrupt my friend and colleague Nonie Darwish's lecture about eight Iranian women who were facing execution and about Sharia law. Each hijabbed student sat at the end of each row, cleared their throats rather loudly, and then proceeded to leave, one after the other, for the bathroom. Their interruptions continued as Nonie spoke.

In 2010, ten Muslim students interrupted Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren's lecture at the University of California's Irvine campus. They continued to heckle and shout him down. "Michael Oren, propagating murder is not an expression of free speech" and "Sir, you are an accomplice to genocide." Amazingly, the students were charged, found guilty and sentenced to three years of probation, 56 hours of community service and fines.

For the last twenty years in America outside lecturers, professors, and students have been bullied, cancelled, and shut down all across America. Loud mobs have harassed politicians at their homes, on the street, and while dining out with their families.

These anti-Israel demonstrators have also disrupted High Culture.

In October of this year, at least 1,000 pro-Palestinian Arab hordes demonstrated outside the Opera House in Sydney, Australia. The government had illuminated the House in the colors of the Israeli flag following Hamas's 10/7 brutal terrorist massacre against Israeli civilians.

More recently, at the end of November, climate (!) demonstrators managed to interrupt and delay the performance of Wagner's Tanhauser at New York City's Metropolitan Opera House for one hour. In tried and true Alinsky/Marxist/Black Lives Matter/Antifa/Islamist form, the protesters sat in different parts of the audience and then, one by one, they stood, screamed, dropped banners over the balconies, resisted being escorted out.

Makes sense. Environmentalist poster child Greta Thunberg has moved on from saving the planet to "doubling down on (her) anti-Israel stance, accusing it of "genocide" in Gaza. She has taken to chanting "crush Zionism" at rallies.

I guess all those who need attention go where the action is.

Such demonstrations, delays, and interruptions are precisely what I'm talking about when I say that a Red/Green alliance is trying to destroy Western culture and civilization.

Right now, we are living through near-constant demonstrations replete with drums, megaphones, and loud and aggressive marchers; they are shutting speakers down, blocking the entrances to trains, obstructing traffic by blocking roads and bridges all over North America.

Slowly, surely, our sense of safety in public spaces is being eroded.

These "smaller" but almost continuous interruptions have begun to unravel our democratic rights to free speech, lawful assembly, civil society, and street safety. This is what I mean when I write that Islamists/Marxists are destroying Western culture and our civilization.

They must be stopped