What I learned at a terrorist rally

By Daniel Greenfield, Frontpage Magazine

Just as every cell in the human body has a complete copy of our genetic code, so too every terrorist rally is a microcosm of the entire movement threatening America, Israel, and the world.

The mob that converged on Congregation Adas Torah in a Jewish neighborhood in West LA was smaller than the thousands that had terrorized communities in New York and London, but all the elements that make up the pro-terror side were represented outside the synagogue.

The PLO terror flags waved by the rioters represented more than just the cause to destroy Israel, but the red-green alliance: the Marxists and Islamists who marched under its banner.

There were the embittered red diaper babies with ragged gray curls over worn t-shirts, scowling middle aged Muslim men off from their day jobs as government employees or laundromat managers, the UCLA ‘bros’ with blonde hair, ski goggles, and keffiyahs, and the Muslim twenty-something young men who came masked, armed and eager for violence.

The mob besieging the synagogue on Pico Boulevard past which a children’s parade had recently passed to celebrate the Lag Baomer interregnum between the biblical Passover and Pentecost came accompanied by all the infrastructure developed over the years of leftist riots.

The younger leftist thugs wore ski goggles and masks, carried skateboards and metal water bottles, ‘legal’ weapons typically seen during Antifa clashes, and some were likely among those who had previously terrorized Jewish students at the UCLA terror encampment. And it did not take much time before they were assaulting Jewish community members in the neighborhood.

The terrorist supporters had brought their own legal aid with them in the form of the sneering ‘observers’ from the National Lawyers Guild, a Communist Cold War era organization, in their caps and shirts.

They also had human shields in the form of activists in black face masks holding up handwritten signs claiming that they were Jewish and opposed to the Jewish State.

A handful of women (who were by far the minority) circulated between the Jewish community members the LAPD officers and the terrorist supporters to also provide cover for the repeated terrorist assaults in the ‘chicks out front’ doctrine from the Marxist riots of the 1960s.

In a small scale recreation of the Gaza war in the middle of Los Angeles, Muslim teenagers and men masked in keffiyahs gathered near an alley and launched sorties, attacking Jewish community members, then using bear spray to cover their retreat, hiding behind the women, the leftist activists and the ‘Jewish’ opponents of Israel who turned around and played victim.

The stakes might be smaller but here was Hamas, here were the Jewish targets, and here also was the support infrastructure of leftists activists, lawyers and ‘journalists’ covering for them.

The whole Islamic terrorist strategy of Jihadists masking up, attacking, and then hiding behind human shields was playing out on a normal street between two synagogues, a tailor shop, a dress shop, a watch repair place, and several restaurants.

The microcosm of clashes outside the synagogue became a citywide and then a national story.

Public officials were forced to condemn it, but the media, led by the LA Times, whitewashed the attacks, quoted officials from CAIR, whose leaders had celebrated the Oct 7 atrocities by Hamas, and then editorialized against security for synagogues and a terror mask ban.

By the time the LA Times, the rest of the media, and the leftist allies of the Islamic thugs were done, attacking a synagogue and assaulting Jewish community members had become a virtue.

Much as the only person to face serious charges after the Hamas encampment at UCLA terrorized Jewish students was a Jewish high school student, so too the only person arrested by the police when terrorist supporters attacked a synagogue was a Jewish community member.

The ‘Israel’ model was playing out the same way in L.A. And it can play out this way anywhere.

That is the most important lesson of the assault on a previously unknown synagogue in a neighborhood that most people ignore while passing between Santa Monica and Downtown LA.

Many of us take comfort in the idea that the horrors we’ve seen in Israel are a local phenomenon. We believe that occasional acts of terrorism can happen in America, but not the endless slow burning generational conflicts that define life in Israel and the Muslim world.

What is happening in Israel is not an aberration but the essence of the Islamic conflict strategy.

Israel can be anywhere. And every country with a large Islamic colonizing population and Marxist activist class will face the same problems. America is not ready for the fight of its life.

After Oct 7, Islamists and Marxists launched a bid to mainstream Islamic violence.

Before the Hamas attack on Israel, Islamic violence in America was mostly made up of terrorist attacks by individuals or very small cells. The exceptions occurred on college campuses.

Islamist organizations advocated for terrorists but did not actively engage in street violence.

All of that has changed now.

The attack on the LA Synagogue was part of a larger wave of Islamic street violence that is no longer confined to college campuses, but has spread into Christmas tree lightings, parades, coffee shops and random public spaces.

What some view as the ‘BLM-ization’ of the Hamas cause is more than that. It’s the inevitable next step before the rise of domestic terror groups.

Large scale Islamic protest violence, known as the ‘Intifada’, enabled the Islamic terrorist groups in Israel. The ‘cartoon’ protests and other forms of Muslim street violence in Europe enabled the wave of terror attacks attributed to foreign groups such as ISIS.

The Oct 7 Hamas rallies in America are bringing together the Jihadists who will carry out large scale attacks in America. And the Marxists who will enable them and cover up for them.

After 9/11, we smashed Al Qaeda’s networks and the Islamic terror group along with counterparts like ISIS resorted to online recruitment in America and Europe.

The problem was that it was all too easy for the FBI and other law enforcement organizations to pretend to be ISIS.

Many aspiring Islamic terrorists in America ended up sharing their plans to shoot up churches and synagogues with informants. Others had to ineptly launch attacks on their own.

Successful Islamic terrorist attacks were carried out by Jihadists who acted on their own and did not try to join ISIS online or who had a trusted family member to help them, like the San Bernardino husband and wife team and the Boston Marathon bomber brothers.

Islamic street violence after Oct 7 is likely to change all that by creating a cadre of Muslim men who have committed crimes together in the name of Islam and know they can trust each other.

The normalization of Islamic street violence under the leftist umbrella is a national threat.

What we have been seeing in America since Oct 7 is the emergence of a new terror movement.

And what I saw outside a synagogue is that the terrorists of tomorrow are enabled by the Left.