Well, thank heavens. Police in New York managed to do with the horde of pro-Hamas, anti-Israel, anti-America soldiers what they couldn’t do at Columbia University: control them, at least for long enough to keep them away from the Met Gala in Manhattan on Monday.
I was worried there for a second. Would the leftist elite have to contend with leftist street fighters? After all, according to the BBC, this year, “A-listers were invited to be imaginative with the 2024 dress code, ‘The Garden of Time,’ which was inspired by a short story of the same name by JG Ballard.”
(Ballard is best known as the author of “Crash,” a transgressive novel about a coterie of Londoners who derive sexual gratification from automobile accidents. From what I could glean from media reports, none of the A-listers was imaginative and/or depraved enough to incorporate that into an outfit.)
However, the desire for A-listers to get dressed up in obscenely expensive Ballardian garb clashed with a mob of protesters who planned to interrupt the gala at the Metropolitan Museum of Art as part of what they called the “Palestinian Day of Rage.”
I’m unclear from that description how it was any different for the roughly 1,000 protesters blocked from disrupting the gala by the New York Police Department, according to the New York Post, since pretty much every day since (and including) Oct. 7 could well be described as a Palestinian day of rage.
Whatever the case, the leftist street-fighting contingent threatened to rumple the flowers of the limousine leftist contingent. So, for once, the NYPD — pardon the pun — nipped trouble in the bud before it started and kept the anarchy away from MOMA.
Thus, unable to disrupt Nicki Minaj, Sydney Sweeney and Cardi B, inter alia, on the red carpet, the pro-Palestinian rioters did the next best thing, at least to them: They burned an American flag while desecrating the World War I memorial in Central Park.
Good work. Way to get us on your side, guys.
In a viral video, a group of protesters can be seen burning the flag in front of the 107th Infantry Memorial statue on the east side of the park, 13 blocks south of MOMA.
The clip of the chaos shows the group chanting “Free, free Palestine!” and “Revolution, revolution!” One man is seen climbing the statue burnishing a Palestinian flag. Another had spray-painted “GAZA” on the side of the memorial.
About halfway through the video, posted by the account FreedomNews TV, the camera shifts to the charred remains of a mostly burned American flag lying on the ground right below the “GAZA” graffiti.
WARNING: The following videos contain images that some viewers will find offensive.
“The protester who lit the flag on fire gave the middle finger to others,” the Post reported. He couldn’t be identified, given that he was wrapped up in the keffiyeh — the checkered Arab scarf that’s de rigueur among pro-Palestinian, anti-Israel agitators regardless of race or creed.
Unlike at the Met Gala, where the pro-Hamas horde was stopped in its tracks by the NYPD, the “chaos” at the World War I memorial “unfolded with no cops in sight,” the report said.
As those on social media noted, this demonstration couldn’t be any more emblematic of the wave of protests in general:
ProHamas supporters burn the American flag in front of a World War II memorial for soldiers killed and defaced the statue while trying to damage it
These colleges that let the anarchy prevail have created this chaos. Zero tolerance for these criminals. Arrests are needed https://t.co/xhMF1cwBov
— Illinois is broke and corrupt (@IsIllinois) May 7, 2024
“It’s all about Israel, but let’s desecrate a World War I memorial and burn an American flag while we’re here” – Agitators with no allegiance to a cause except Orange Man bad and I hate my stepdad. pic.twitter.com/gCQVRX3lc0
— Kevin Dalton (@TheKevinDalton) May 7, 2024
A World War I memorial, this isn’t disrespect, it is sheer loathing. These men died so that the West would be free to commit suicide via mass migration. pic.twitter.com/tkoQXzk9Ku
— Darren Grimes (@darrengrimes_) May 7, 2024
This isn’t about opposing Israel’s “occupation” of territories it hasn’t occupied in decades or supporting freedom and international recognition for a wannabe nation-state run by a terrorist organization.
It’s nothing short of a parade of hatred and loathing of Western values — and those who have given their lives to defend them. More than a little ironic, considering that burning national flags and spray-painting monuments in countries that don’t share those values is met with swift and barbaric “justice.”
These are protesters who rail against the atrocities and brutalities of the “colonizers” in the West — all in the name of lionizing a cause best summarized by the unspeakable actions committed by the murderous terrorists who organized the Oct. 7 attacks on Israel.
These rioters are ninnies who have had their heads filled at our schools and universities with enough anti-Western propaganda that, to them, the killers are the good guys, and the ones defending themselves are the real villains.
Are you proud to be an American?
Why? Ask them, and it’s because America, Israel and the rest of the West sometimes don’t live up to their ideals.
But what are those ideals? Freedom, liberty, equality before the law, justice for all, unnecessary savagery toward none, and the ability to choose who leads us at the ballot box at regular intervals.
Those burning — and cheering on the burning — of the American flag on Monday were throwing their lot behind thugs who do live up to their ideals when they’re allowed to test them out, if only because they’re diametrically opposed to all that we hold dear.
If a movement or a government believes in tyranny, oppression, state-sponsored ethnic hatred, injustice, autocracy and naked disdain for human life, those are easy ideals to live up to — provided, of course, they have the force to back it up.
Hamas’ rule of Gaza is proof that if you have the guns and the goons, the rest falls into place. Their only hindrance to maintaining that iron grip came when they decided to export this vision out of the Gaza Strip and into the rest of Israel on Oct. 7.
Western values generally, and American values specifically, are much more difficult to live up to — and require men and women to, on occasion, fight and die for those values.
By burning a U.S. flag in front of a monument dedicated to those who paid the ultimate price in one of those conflicts, these ideological hoodlums showed what they wanted: Revolution, yes. Freedom, hardly.
The only greater shame is that their leftist celebrity brethren and sistren decked out in their floral garb 13 blocks away at MOMA didn’t have to be confronted with the monstrosity they’ve helped create.
If America and the West are going to commit suicide, the A-listers who helped put the gun to their head should have to at least watch.
