Thursday evening, pro-Palestinian protesters called for jihad on federal property. We should take it seriously.
A couple hundred people with Palestinian flags, keffiyehs, and signs descended on the State Department, gathering outside the building’s four entrances. The signs the protesters held in the air bore messages including “End the occupation by any means necessary” and “From the river to the sea.” Posters are posters, though, and it’s hard to get a sense of what these people are like without watching a video. So, watch the video below.
“There is only one solution, intifada revolution.”
“Long live the intifada.”
“Resistance is justified when people are occupied.”
The people saying these chants — likely among those who started rallying “for Palestine” before Israel fired one shot in response to Hamas’s attack — used an American executive agency, the one responsible for representing our government and our people abroad, to call for continued terrorism against the Jewish people. “Intifada” conjures memories of the 1990s and early 2000s in Israel: suicide bombings, buses and pizza parlors exploding, Palestinian terrorists indiscriminately killing Israeli civilians. That is what these people want. That is their goal; they said it themselves. And they used government property to call for it, these valiant activists who lack the gall to show their faces and own their jihadi ideas.
The portion of the clip in Arabic is no less unsettling. That chant, “Bab Al-Aqsa min Hadeed, ma byiftaha illa alshaheed,” translates to “The door of Al-Aqsa is made of iron, only a martyr can open it.”
In 2022, a protest at the Temple Mount in Jerusalem turned violent after Palestinians began throwing rocks and fireworks at the Western Wall and at Israeli soldiers. When the soldiers attempted to control the situation, rioters hid inside the Al-Aqsa mosque. Hamas, which claimed that Israeli soldiers desecrated the mosque when they entered to find and detain the rioters, called its October 7 attack “Operation Al-Aqsa Flood.” And we all know what these demonstrators mean when they say “martyr.”
It wasn’t just the speakers at the rally — like the woman in the video shrieking into a white megaphone — who revealed their rabidity. I tried to talk to one man who said he wouldn’t speak with me because “Zionists control the media narrative.” Another told me he would like the United States to use military force against Israel, arguing that an invasion would stop Israel from committing “genocide” against Palestinians. He couldn’t define that word when I asked and ended the conversation, proceeding to call a black State Department employee an “Uncle Tom.”