Douglas Murray

Douglas Murray

Opinion

Why do clueless Hamas supporters keep getting away with disruptive protests? Arrest them!

If your print copy of The New York Post was slightly delayed yesterday morning you can blame the “peace” brigade.

The same people who have spent the last few months blocking bridges and stopping New Yorkers getting to work yesterday morning targeted one of this paper’s printing works in Queens.

The plant also prints The Wall Street Journal, Newsday, USA Today and the New York Times.

The protestors seemed especially angry about the last of these. Though I’m tempted to say that they deserve each other.

In the early hours of the morning these protestors lay across the road and put a barricade in the middle of it.

They also put up a sign saying “Consent for genocide is manufactured here.”

Wearing Palestinian bandanas and other terrorist-chic the protestors sought to disrupt the operations of the free press. All to demonstrate their opposition to something that isn’t happening.

Because of course there is no “genocide” in Gaza. There is a targeted military operation in a heavily built-up area where Hamas hide behind the civilians and also dress as civilians.

In any case, what military operation there is could stop at any moment if the terrorists of Hamas just handed back the more than 100 Israeli hostages who they are still holding.

But you never hear calls like that from these activists. Because human details don’t disturb them. Any more than facts or reality do.

As it happens there are genocides happening around the world. For instance there are the efforts by Islamist militias to slaughter, maim and kidnap Christians in Northern Nigeria.

That’s just one attempt to try to eradicate a people which I have seen with my own eyes.

Just this week almost 300 schoolchildren were once again kidnapped from their schools in Northern Nigeria, this time in Kuriga.

There is currently a ransom demand of more than $2,000 per child for them to be released.

But demonstrators in New York don’t care one bit about children being kidnapped and killed in northern Nigeria.

Perhaps they don’t care about black people. Or Christians. Perhaps they just don’t care about anything unless they can blame the Jews.

None of these people came out to stop the free press over the targeting of Syrian opposition by Bashar al-Assad for the last thirteen years.

They’re not bothered by the 300,000 people killed in Yemen — by people who are now targeting American ships.

None of this bothers them. In order to want to turn out at 1 a.m. in Queens you have to claim to be concerned about a non-existent “genocide“ in Gaza.

Aside from the hypocrisy of this the most galling thing is that these demonstrators keep getting away with it.

Not content with disrupting the Macy’s Day Parade in November the protestors moved a few weeks later to disrupt the lighting of the Christmas Tree at Rockefeller.

Then in January they blocked the Brooklyn, Manhattan and Williamsburg bridges, choking up the whole city.

A month later and they were blocking traffic on the Brooklyn Bridge, the Holland Tunnel and the Queens-Midtown tunnel.

Because as everybody knows you can’t stop a war in the Middle East unless you’ve stopped people getting to work through the Holland Tunnel. That’s the fastest way to make Israel surrender for Hamas and forget about its hostages, for sure.

One problem will such protests is that they have nothing at all to do with the right to free speech — as protestors always claim.

The first amendment doesn’t allow you the right to sit in the middle of the Brooklyn Bridge during rush hour.

Nor does it allow you to stop the printing and distribution of the organs of free speech — the press.

But like fanatics across the ages, these people think anything goes. Because they think the whole world revolves around them and should adapt to all of their juvenile and ignorant views.

Still, it’s not a happy position for the police to be in. On Thursday morning police went to the scene in Queens and an officer told the demonstrators to disperse or face arrest for trespassing.

But the protestors stayed until 3:30 in the morning — two and a half hours after they arrived. And no arrests were made.

Just one problem of which is that this means they will do it again and again.

Personally I’d like to ask the protestors answer a few questions.

What’s their military plan for getting the Israeli hostages back? What’s their plan for stopping Hamas from its stated aim of repeating the 7th October again and again until there are no Jews left?

Do these protestors have a masterplan? Or haven’t you thought about that?

The answer is that of course they haven’t. They never do.

It’s always the same with radicals. Like BLM. Like the people who said “Burn it all down.” Like the people who said “Believe all women.”

They know what they hate. But they never have any idea of what they’d do the day afterwards — if they got what they say they want.

It requires adults to know that. And that’s one thing these kids certainly are not.

Whoopi for double standards!

I wonder what outrage would have exploded if someone on “Outnumbered” on Fox had said the following: “I have to say this before we go: I don’t believe Biden is actually out there. I think that’s an AI of him. I think a lot of that has been AI. That’s just my opinion, but that’s what I think.”

Would people have said “Well that’s just her opinion — fine”? I doubt it.

I suspect we would have been treated to whole forests of columns about Republican conspiracy theories and how widespread they have become.

But of course it wasn’t a conservative host who said that, and it wasn’t Biden who was named.

It was what Whoopi Goldberg said, speaking yesterday on “The View.” And she was talking about Trump.

Keep in mind how outraged Democrats get if anyone questions whether Joe Biden is still all there. Now imagine the fury if people started saying “Actually, he isn’t there at all.”

That’s double-standards at work, right there.