#couple very obvious typos in the original including swapped letters & double instances of words

[notaplaceofhonour]

When Hamas themselves compares the student protests to the October 7th massacre by calling it the “Student Flood” (referencing their name for the massacre, “Al-Aqsa Flood”), and sees in them the destruction of Israel and its people, you don’t get to tell Jews we are imagining it when we see that they are violently antisemitic in nature.

We fully understand that the majority of students are not personally assaulting anyone, so you can stop waving that piece of rhetoric around like it means anything. Every single student at every single protest could be perfectly “peaceful” in the sense that they personally never lay a finger on another person, and the rhetoric & narratives being spun out of them would still be steeped in deeply antisemitic rhetoric & tropes that provide & launder justification for violence that make it considerably more likely that someone else will.

We understand this when the right wing does it. Most QAnon posters & members of right wing activist groups like Moms For Liberty or Gays Against Groomers aren’t actively assaulting Jews & queer people, or even directly saying they think all Jews & queer people are inherently evil (it’s just “the Cabal” & “groomers”). Hell, even most January 6th protesters weren’t actively committing felonies.

That doesn’t change the fact that their conspiratorial thinking is steeped in anti-queer, antisemitic, and anti-democratic narratives which provide motive for violence. When right wing “lone wolf” shooters shoot up schools & synagogues & mosques, we understand how the extreme rhetoric of their political spaces have led them to seeing their violence as completely justified & necessary. That is what stochastic terrorism is.

When calls for Global Intifada, more October 7ths, and Palestine “from the River to the Sea” are so ubiquitous that hardly a single protest can go by without them; when imagery of fighters with AK-47s keeps getting plastered around college campuses; when so many of the groups organizing these protests are spreading Khazar Theory, Blood Libel, and the like (and even those who don’t are linked arm-in-arm with those who do); when the core narratives at the root of the infographics shared in the movement erase Jewish history, monolithize Israelis, & misrepresent Zionism as something from the Protocols of the Elders of Zion; when their rhetoric provides justification for discrimination on the basis of religion, ethnicity, or nationality against Jews or Israelis; when Hamas sees these protests as not only advantageous to their regime, but a key part of its strategy, giving it the same branding as their massacre—you do not get to tell us they are not making us unsafe.