Last week, a North Dakota court ordered the environmental organization Greenpeace to pay $667 million in damages for libel, vandalism, and acts of violent obstruction aimed at halting the construction of an oil pipeline. The ruling sets an important precedent: coordinated forms of disruptive protest that go far beyond anything that might be characterized as speech will be punished. (Greenpeace, by the way, has also accused Israel of genocide.)

Greenpeace’s actions seem to fit the description of what Tal Fortgang calls “civil terrorism,” and aren’t so different from the tactics employed recently by anti-Israel groups. Fortgang explains what addreses the problem these tactics pose as one of criminal law:

Masked criminals attacked several Citibank locations in New York City one night last September. They brandished no guns and demanded no cash. Instead, they squeezed epoxy and cemented stickers on debit-card readers, damaged door locks, and vandalized windows with profanities and threats of future violence. Rather than keep their identities hidden, the marauders filmed their work and posted it to their enterprise’s Instagram page.

Over the last few years, but especially since Hamas massacred Israeli civilians on October 7, 2023, this type of organized criminal mayhem has increasingly become part of American life. The criminal bands that have arisen act for ideological reasons. They operate where they believe that they have the most latitude: on college campuses and in Democratic-controlled jurisdictions. And their beliefs are overwhelmingly leftwing: radically environmentalist (“Just Stop Oil”), anarcho-socialist (Antifa), and, most often, anti-Israel.

Fortgang notes that the movement employing these tactics

includes groups that openly support, and likely coordinate with, foreign terror organizations and hostile regimes. . . . In July 2024, Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines confirmed that Iran is encouraging and funding some of these demonstrations.

Because civil terrorism utilizes illegal activity, the beginning of a policy agenda to fight it must start with enforcing existing laws—and investigating reasonable suspicions of wrongdoing.

Addressing a recent meeting of the Palestine Liberation Organization’s Central Committee, Mahmoud Abbas criticized Hamas more sharply than he has previously (at least in public), calling them “sons of dogs.” The eighty-nine-year-old Palestinian Authority president urged the terrorist group to “stop the war of extermination in Gaza” and “hand over the American hostages.” The editors of the New York Sun comment:

Mr. Abbas has long been at odds with Hamas, which violently ousted his Fatah party from Gaza in 2007. The tone of today’s outburst, though, is new. Comparing rivals to canines, which Arabs consider dirty, is startling. Its motivation, though, was unrelated to the plight of the 59 remaining hostages, including 23 living ones. Instead, it was an attempt to use an opportune moment for reviving Abbas’s receding clout.

[W]hile Hamas’s popularity among Palestinians soared after its orgy of killing on October 7, 2023, it is now sinking. The terrorists are hoarding Gaza aid caches that Israel declines to replenish. As the war drags on, anti-Hamas protests rage across the Strip. Polls show that Hamas’s previously elevated support among West Bank Arabs is also down. Striking the iron while it’s hot, Abbas apparently longs to retake center stage. Can he?

Diminishing support for Hamas is yet to match the contempt Arabs feel toward Abbas himself. Hamas considers him irrelevant for what it calls “the resistance.”

[Meanwhile], Abbas is yet to condemn Hamas’s October 7 massacre. His recent announcement of ending alms for terror is a ruse.

Abbas, it’s worth noting, hasn’t saved all his epithets for Hamas. He also twice said of the Americans, “may their fathers be cursed.” Of course, after a long career of anti-Semitic incitement, Abbas can’t be expected to have a moral awakening. Nor is there much incentive for him to fake one. But, like the protests in Gaza, Abbas’s recent diatribe is a sign that Hamas is perceived as weak and that its stock is sinking.