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The heart of New York can never be the stage for anti-Israel activists to galvanize people from around the globe to participate in violence.
By: Jonathan Harounoff
We’re just days into 2025, and the customary pleasantry of “Happy New Year” hardly feels appropriate considering recent events near and far.
Conflict in the Middle East rages on 15 months after Iranian-backed Hamas terrorists in the Gaza Strip infiltrated the border and raped, butchered and looted their way through communities in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, killing 1,200 people and taking 251 men, women and children hostage back. About 100 captive men, women and children have been held in brutal captivity since then.
The Houthis, a relatively unscathed member of the Islamic Republic of Iran’s “axis of resistance,” continue to lob rockets at Israeli population centers. War-torn Sudan is experiencing the “world’s worst hunger crisis,” according to the United Nations. The Taliban is intensifying its war on Afghanistan’s women, depriving them of education, work and health care. Russia’s three-year war in Ukraine goes on unabated.
Stateside, Americans are starting to get a glimpse of what “Globalize the Intifada” looks like. That insidious slogan that has been shamelessly chanted regularly on U.S. college campuses and in the streets of major American cities since Oct. 7 turned into horrific action last week.
Just three hours after the start of 2025, Shamsud-Din Jabbar, an American citizen from Texas and U.S. Army veteran inspired by ISIS (the Islamic State), rammed a rented Ford pickup truck into revelers on Bourbon Street in New Orleans’ famed French Quarter, killing 14 people and injuring dozens more. To remove any doubt about his sympathies, an ISIS flag was proudly displayed on the back of the vehicle.
The use of vehicles to commit acts of terror comes straight out of the playbook of terrorists in Israel. Dozens of car-ramming attacks by Palestinian terrorists against Israeli soldiers and civilians have been recorded in recent decades. Just last month, in fact, a terrorist injured one person in a vehicle-ramming incident in Bnei Brak.
Not even 24 hours after the New Orleans attack on New Year’s Day, hundreds of demonstrators flooded Times Square in New York City not to show sympathy for the victims of this act of domestic terror but to cry: “There is only one solution, intifada revolution!”
The rally was organized by the Palestinian Youth Movement, the Party for Socialism and Liberation, and the People’s Forum. The heart of New York can never be a stage for anti-Israel activists to galvanize people from around the globe to participate in violence and glorify terrorism.
Other keffiyeh-clad demonstrators chanted “Zionism is cancer,” “Resistance is glorious, we will be victorious” and “No war on Iran.”
Intifada (Arabic for “uprising”) is associated with a first round of random violence by Palestinians in the late 1980s to the early 1990s. That was followed by a much deadlier wave of violence known as the Second Intifada (2000 to 2005), when more than 1,100 Israelis were bombed, shot, stabbed and blown up while riding buses, eating in restaurants and situated in other civilian areas throughout Israel.
Today, warnings that “the West is next” no longer apply. It’s here in the United States and will require the same level of counter-terror alertness that followed the multiple attacks by plane on Sept. 11, 2001.
Perhaps this new year’s resolution should be to denounce cries of “Globalize the Intifada” for what they are: a reprehensible and unhinged call for violence. Words matter, especially when such vile statements lead to callous killing in America and abroad.
(JNS.org)
Jonathan Harounoff is Israel’s international spokesperson to the United Nations and author of forthcoming release Unveiled: Inside Iran’s #WomanLifeFreedom Revolt.
