KINSELLA: Pro-Palestine protestors have become what they claim to oppose

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What happens when the oppressed become the oppressor?

Because – make no mistake – that’s what has happened since October 7, 2023.

At the start, the pro-Palestine contingent protested the actions of Israel’s government. They protested against Israel’s military, the IDF, and its use of force in the Gaza Strip. All of that was constitutionally protected. While their rhetoric could be excessive – alleging “genocide,” for instance, without any proof whatsoever – they were allowed to do what they did. It wasn’t antisemitic, per se.

As the weeks and months went by, as the war dragged on – mainly due to Hamas’ refusal to lay down their arms, and due to their refusal to release the hostages – Palestine’s acolytes in the West grew impatient.

They started to advocate for a global revolution (“Intifada”). They started to demand that Jews be removed from their ancestral homeland (“From the river to the sea”). They started to use symbols (the red hand, the red triangle) that literally advocate murder.

And they, themselves, changed. They devolved into a dark, dangerous pro-Hamas adjunct. They fully became what they had so often accused Israel of: a violent, intolerant cabal of thugs. Capable, even, of murder, in places like Washington, D.C. or Boulder, Colorado.

Along the way, they started to terrorize kids and families who had gone to see Santa Claus in a shopping mall. They blocked major roads. They vandalized. They started to attack places linked to Jews – even hospitals. And some of them even started to firebomb or shoot up synagogues and Jewish schools. (All in Toronto.)

At that point, they became what they had claimed to always oppose. They had become haters who use force. Against everyone, anyone, who got in their way. To get their way.

Which is the literal definition of terrorism, by the by: using force to achieve some political end.

On the weekend, on a sunny and beautiful Sunday, some people shut down Ottawa’s big pride event. They actually did that: they blocked the road on which LGBTQ people were peacefully walking. They did that right on Parliament Hill, at the centre of our democracy, demanding that Ottawa Pride “boycott” Jews. In culture, in academia.

The event was cancelled.

If the haters possessed any self-awareness at all, of course, they’d take a look in the nearest mirror, and see that they have changed. They would see that they have become something else. Something bad. But they won’t.

Pride, for those who don’t know, champions gays, lesbians, and trans people. The ones who were denied jobs, or hotel rooms, because of the way they were. The ones who would often be beaten and sometimes killed for being who they were.

When they fought back against their oppressors – for the first time, outside a bar in Greenwich Village in 1969 – their uprising would come to be known as pride. Pride in being, at long last, who they are. Pride in being how God made them.

Now, pride parades aren’t allowed in Palestine. The Palestinian criminal code says that anyone who “commits an act of sodomy” faces up to a decade in prison, because it’s “acting against the laws of nature.”  The United Nations has actually helped resettle LGBTQ people facing persecution in Gaza and the West Bank.

Says the UN’s Human Rights Council: “LGBTQ persons living under Palestinian Authority and Hamas control suffer severe persecution and ostracism. Many Palestinian homosexuals end up fleeing to Israel.” And: “Testimonies from gay Palestinians who managed to escape recount harrowing torture by both family and PA/Hamas security forces, often successful attempts to coerce them to inform on others, forced marriages and death threats, among other things.”

A few years back, a Hamas commander, Mahmoud Ishtiwi, was executed.  His crime? He was suspected of being gay.  Even though he came from a long line of Hamas terrorists, even though he commanded 1,000 other terrorists, three bullets were pumped into his chest. Before that, they tortured him for several days – whipping him, hanging him from the ceiling with wires.

How, you might ask, can the people who shut down Ottawa’s Pride parade not know these things? How can they now do what they (falsely) claim Israel is doing – cancelling others?

It takes a lot of hate to reach that point. It takes a lot of self-delusion.

The antisemites have reached that point. They have become what they claimed to oppose.

They, the ones who protested oppression, have become the oppressors.