One real takeaway from the pro-Hamas protests at the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree lighting: These people are seriously messed-up.
All the usual apparatus of affluent left-wing protests was there — genocidal chants like “From the river to the sea,” an open call for the destruction of the Jewish state (and be damned to its Jewish inhabitants) and even a giant swastika, supposedly to compare Israel’s heroic armed forces to the Nazis who tried to exterminate the Jewish people.
This is what passes for political discourse: The violent, public embrace of utterly bankrupt convictions and ideas.
Who are these people?
Many are plainly kids we’ve failed.
Parents let social media and their cadres of ignorant influencers into their homes to indoctrinate their kids (or worse).
The result is a politics-by-buzzword that only ratchets left, because that’s what’s fashionable.
Schools have become sites of indoctrination in antisemitic and anti-US ideas, starting as early as pre-K and continuing on into the mini-pogrom New York City saw at Hillcrest HS last week.
Two years of lockdown and isolation from normal socialization surely didn’t help.
Above all, these kids are angry and desperately seeking meaning.
A fact mercilessly exploited by a hard core of the actually evil: the enthusiastic Hamas collaborators that are their teachers and online role models.
Do these protestors really think these ugly stunts can win anyone over?
Disrupting the Rockefeller tree lighting — one of the most anticipated and widely enjoyed rituals of New York civic life — has nothing to do with Israel’s justified counterattack against Hamas.
Indeed, as one tree-viewer put it: “Politics has no place at an event like this, but that’s exactly why they do it — to disrupt the status quo, to ruin the things we cherish and take comfort in.”
The intent of these displays is to smash, wreck and frighten, nothing more, and to give vent to that deep-seated anger.
It’s up to our civic and cultural leaders (and parents) to muscle up enough adulthood to actually treat these kids like kids — i.e., to belatedly but firmly train them up in the way they should go.