Since October, anti-Israel protests have grown even more intense. In Washington, DC last week, demonstrators at the White House broke through a temporary fence and threw objects at police officers, while in New York City they yelled “shame” at cancer patients. Hannah Meyers suggests that part of the appeal of these displays—which after all are unlikely to help the people of Gaza—are the license they give to bad behavior:
What are the protesters calling for? An immediate Israeli ceasefire. Whom do they represent? An enormous coalition of jackasses. . . . In 2024, New Yorkers need to stop tolerating those who think the fun of disrupting the system is more important than everyone else’s daily lives.
Like cities nationwide, the Big Apple has been sliding down a slope from tolerating jerks to letting them ruin the joint. . . . But low-level offending matters. And while we should work to balance community and law-enforcement responses to bad behavior, pretending that such infractions are no big deal is to let the jackasses win. And winning they are: multiple overlapping policy and political shifts, each diminishing our seriousness about low-level crime, have enabled New York City’s masked, belligerent, solipsistic demonstrators to get away with mayhem.
How are we, as a society, going to grapple with resurgent terrorism and open warfare in the Middle East if we can’t even show masked jackasses on the Brooklyn Bridge that they are out of line—not to mention that they are breaking the law?
More about: Anti-Semitism, Crime, New York City