By Daled Amos
According to the Anti-Defamation League, Students for Justice in Palestine "hailed and defended" the massacre, and "some, like the SJP chapter at Columbia University, have published social media posts that openly support acts of terror against Israel." The ADL points out that:
many of the organization’s campus chapters have explicitly endorsed the actions of Hamas and their armed attacks on Israeli civilians and voiced an increasingly radical call for confronting and “dismantling” Zionism on U.S. college campuses.
The Democratic Socialists of America were no less enthusiastic in their defense of Hamas. The ADL writes that the DSA, Salt Lake City Chapter:
published a “Statement on Palestinian Liberation” on October 7, expressing their “unwavering solidarity with the people of Palestine in their decades long fight for national liberation” and urging Americans “to stand up against settler-colonial, Zionist apartheid.” The statement proclaimed the group’s full support for the attack on Israeli civilians, writing that “it is not terrorism or anti-semitism to fight against this injustice.”The day after the attack, The Times of Israel reported how quickly anti-Israel groups jumped to endorse the massacre:
In New York, the pro-Palestinian groups Within Our Lifetime, Samidoun, Decolonize This Place, Al-Awda and others announced rallies on Sunday in Times Square and on Monday at the Israeli consulate “to defend the heroic Palestinian resistance.”
WOL enthusiastically said that “supporting Palestinian liberation is supporting whatever means necessary it takes to get there. Freedom has only ever been achieved through resistance.”
Just three days after the massacre, The Harvard Undergraduate Palestine Solidarity Committee came out with a statement defending Hamas. The statement declared that they “hold the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence,” and excused the murders on the basis that “today’s events did not occur in a vacuum.”
The Secretary General of the UN, Antonio Guterres, also equivocated, in his remarks to the UN Security Council three weeks later, that "it is important to also recognize the attacks by Hamas did not happen in a vacuum."
While radical anti-Israel groups did not hesitate to come out in support of the Palestinian terrorists and the atrocities that they committed, it did not take long for others to hedge on their condemnations and assign responsibility to Israel.
It is shocking to see how uninhibited anti-Israel groups were to excuse the attacks, and how others--whom we might have expected better of--were quick to fall in line with the message of the ongoing pro-Palestinian riots that defended the mass murders.
The question arises: just how far will some go to defend murder, outside of the events in the Middle East?
It sounds like a ridiculous question, especially in the context of Western values. Still, you have to wonder, especially when Americans came out in defense of the recent murder of Brian Thompson, the CEO of UnitedHealthcare. Luigi Mangione was charged with first-degree murder in furtherance of terrorism in Thompson’s death.
As shocking as Brian Thompson's murder is, the reaction to it is even more unnerving.
According to Emerson College Polling, 68% of voters said the murder was unacceptable, while 17% found the action acceptable. Digging deeper, the poll found:
“While 68% of voters overall reject the killer’s actions, younger voters and Democrats are more split — 41% of voters aged 18-29 find the killer’s actions acceptable (24% somewhat acceptable and 17% completely acceptable), while 40% find them unacceptable; 22% of Democrats find them acceptable, while 59% find them unacceptable, this compares to 12% of Republicans and 16% of independents who find the actions acceptable, underscoring shifting societal attitudes among the youngest electorate and within party lines,” Kimball said.
Of those in the 18-29 year old age group, 41% found Thompson's murder acceptable to some degree. To a large extent, these are the people protesting on college campuses and on the streets in defense of Hamas terrorists.
Social media was full of posts approving the murder. Alex Goldenberg, a senior adviser for The Network Contagion Research Institute at Rutgers noted that “the surge of social media posts praising and glorifying the killing of UnitedHealth CEO Brian Thompson is deeply concerning." But, according to Goldenberg, some people online went beyond approval:
“We’ve identified highly engaged posts circulating the names of other healthcare CEOs and others celebrating the shooter. The framing of this incident as some opening blow in a class war and not a brutal murder is especially alarming.”
The justification given for the murder was that insurance companies are primarily interested in making a profit, even if Americans are killed by denying them coverage.
Politicians and public figures chimed in.
“And people wonder why we want these executives dead,” Taylor Lorenz, a former New York Times and Washington Post journalist, wrote on Bluesky a few hours after the CEO, Brian Thompson, 50, was gunned down in Manhattan by a man with a silenced pistol. After a backlash, Lorenz later posted, “no, that doesn’t mean people should murder them.”
Senator Elizabeth Warren chimed in:
Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., said in interviews this week that the murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson was wrong but also served as a "warning" of sorts that "you can only push people so far."
"We'll say it over and over," Warren said on MSNBC. "Violence is never the answer. This guy [Luigi Mangione] gets a trial who's allegedly killed the CEO of UnitedHealth[care], but you can only push people so far, and then they start to take matters into their own hands."
“This is not to say that an act of violence is justified, but I think for anyone who is confused or shocked or appalled, they need to understand that people interpret and feel and experience denied claims as an act of violence against them,” the congresswoman told CBS News’ Jaala Brown on Thursday.
...AOC’s comments drew a slew of backlash from those who are fed up with those excusing the cold-blooded murder, lovers of the accused killer, Luigi Mangione, and posters across the Big Apple warning other CEOs that they’re next on the hit list.
And sure enough, if you do a search, you will find responses that echo the Secretary General's excuse for Hamas, applied now on social media to Luigi Mangione:
o This act of violence did not occur in a vacuum. UnitedHealth Group, and its subsidiary UnitedHealthcare, are corporate behemoths on a scale the world has never seen.
o You are trying to simplify it because it makes the situation easier in your head if you think of it in black and white, but as always, it did not happen in a vacuum.
o It doesn’t mean that I endorse the assassination of Brian Thompson; it means that I empathize with John Quincy Archibald [reference to movie John Q.]. This murder didn’t happen in a vacuum.
o Many people see Luigi Mangione as a hero because they understand, consciously or not, the fundamental violence of the system in which we live. Luigi didn’t act in a vacuum; his actions were born of desperation, anger, and a sense of moral reckoning.
The point is that this attitude, this support for murder as acceptable, may be part of a trend.
Remember when Representative Maxine Waters egged people on to violence against people associated with the Trump Administration:
I have no sympathy for these people that are in this administration who know it’s wrong for what they’re doing on so many fronts. They tend to not want to confront this president or even leave, but they know what they’re doing is wrong. I want to tell you, these members of his cabinet who remain and try to defend him, they won’t be able to go to a restaurant, they won’t be able to stop at a gas station, they’re not going to be able to shop at a department store. The people are going to turn on them.
They’re going to protest. They’re absolutely going to harass them until they decide that they’re going to tell the president, ‘No, I can’t hang with you.’
At the time, Legal Insurrection pointed out that Americans were responding to Waters and her call:
o DC Socialist Group Chases DHS Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen Out of a Restaurant Shouting, “Shame!”
o “Justice-minded” Website Doxes Sr. White House Advisor Stephen Miller
o #TheResistance crosses another line, confronts DHS Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen at home
o Sarah Sanders Kicked Out of Virginia Restaurant Because She Works For Trump
o Florida AG Pam Bondi Accosted By Protestors At Tampa Movie Theater
Those incidents, and the provocations, have ceased. But with Trump starting his second term and the continued anti-Israel protests, there is no way to know if "moral indignation" will be used to excuse more violence.
As Erich Fromm wrote:
There is perhaps no phenomenon which contains so much destructive feeling as 'moral indignation,' which permits envy or hate to be acted out under the guise of virtue.
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