Friday, June 19, 2026
Elder of Ziyon
Days later, OutFront Kalamazoo issued a statement calling the Israeli flag a "harmful symbol" and said it had received complaints from "community members who were hurt, distressed, or angered by the presence of Israeli flags." It announced that it would "begin actively reviewing our policies and procedures to better address situations where political symbolism may create an unsafe or exclusionary environment."
How, exactly, does an Israeli flag create an unsafe or exclusionary environment? Were the Zionists harassing Palestinians? Did they insist that keffiyehs be banned for their association with terror attacks? They did neither. The only exclusionary action in this incident came from the people who want the Jews to hide away part of their self-image, and OutFront calling the Israeli flag "exclusionary" inverts the truth.
To see this clearly, one can imagine the festival included a large number of vegetarians and vegans, and a food booth selling hot dogs. Many vegetarians are offended by the sight and smell of meat, and a good number of animal rights activists consider slaughterhouses to be literal sites of genocide. They are truly hurt by the presence of people selling and eating animal products. The pain is real.
Do they have the right to demand that the booths be banned?
Of course not. It is not a vegan festival. It is a Pride festival, and anyone who wants to celebrate pride should be welcome, because this is not a place for disunity.
So what makes the Israeli flag different from the hot dogs? If anything the hot dogs are worse, because they are not mere symbols of harm — they are the actual remains of dead animals.
Once anyone who is offended holds a veto over the speech, clothing, or conduct of others, it does not take long for people to feign hurt to clear the space of those they dislike, and to recruit like-minded others to complain alongside them. The organizers said there were over a hundred complaints about the couple's clothing, yet Michelle reported seeing very little hostility in person. It is not unreasonable to wonder whether a hundred complaints were organized in minutes on some anti-Israel WhatsApp group. A harm standard rewards exactly that, because it turns the size of the mob into the measure of the harm.
This is a freedom-of-expression issue, and no one is talking about it. That it can happen at all in America is the real problem, not some arbitrary rule about harmful symbols.
So what kind of policy could OutFront Kalamazoo write that would be ethical, consistent, and protective of all its attendees? The standard cannot be the harm someone feels, because feelings are unfalsifiable and the most easily organized feeling wins.
The standard has to be conduct of the attendees, not their feelings. Telling people to leave, to change their clothing, to remove their signs is exclusionary conduct.
The exception is when the speech or symbols themselves are exclusionary. A sign saying "Support Palestine" is fine, one that says "Down with Zionism" is not. A swastika or a Klan hood are, by their nature, exclusionary because they say that they do not want Jews or Blacks to be there, by their leaders' own admission. Those declare that the space is not shared. A symbol that merely expresses who its bearer is, and asks nothing of anyone else, is the festival working as intended. The hot dog targets no one. The keffiyeh targets no one. The Israeli flag targets no one. Each is a person saying "I am here as myself," which is the entire purpose of a Pride festival.
By that rule the vegan keeps his convictions and the carnivore keeps his booth. By that same rule Michelle and Troy belonged at that beer tent, and the people who wanted them gone were the only ones in Kalamazoo actually breaking the rule.
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Reclaiming the Covenant on America's 250th (May 2026) "He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024) PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022) |
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