The U.S. Palestinian Community Network National Coordinating Committee was meeting in Chicago when word came of the Iranian drone and missile strike on Israel.
The reaction was about what you’d expect. When the executive director of the committee, Hatem Abudayyeh, made the announcement, wild cheering and clapping were heard.
The Palestinian activists are blissfully unaware of how Iran treats its Arab citizens. If they knew, they wouldn’t be so eager to cheer them on.
No worries. As long as Iran is trying to kill Jews, the activists are A-OK with the fanatics in Tehran.
“Twelve days ago, Israel brazenly hit an Iranian embassy compound in Syria, violating international law again,” said Hatrem Abudayyeh. “Iran has just responded around thirty minutes ago.”
“They’ve sent drones and missiles against specific targets in occupied Palestine,” said Abudayyeh. “In addition, there are reports of drones being fired from Yemen and Iraq.”
He was referring to the Israeli strike that killed Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Quds Force commander Mohammed Reza Zahedi and six others.
After Abudayyeh finished speaking, protesters began to spontaneously chant “hands off Iran” and what appeared to be a call of “glory to the martyrs.”
After they finished chanting, a conference organizer led them in a chant in Arabic, “From the water to the water, Palestine is Arab.”
She hesitantly translated the slogan into English and explained that it demanded the liberation of the colonized Arab land.
The coalition of far-left activist groups is planning to protest the DNC on August 19, chiefly to demand an end to US aid to Israel.
Other demands include diverting military funding to education, housing, and healthcare, legalizing 12 million illegal immigrants living in the US, and “community control” of law enforcement.
The activists were meeting to discuss plans to protest at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago later this summer. The city is refusing to grant them permits to protest in front of the United Center, but the protesters want a repeat of 1968’s chaos and violence and will demonstrate whether they have permits or not.
“We’ll be marching with or without permits,” said Abudayyeh. “This DNC is the most important one since 1968, also in Chicago when Vietnam War protesters and the black liberation movement organized mass demonstrations that were violently repressed.”
“The march on the DNC will be the largest mobilization for Palestine in the history of the city.”
The city has repeatedly argued in court that Chicago does not have enough police to protect the parade, keep protesters in check and regulate traffic, records show. As the Chicago Department of Transportation denied each protest permit, it offered each applicant the same alternate route: a 2-block march up a tree-lined stretch of Columbus Drive in the middle of Grant Park from Roosevelt Road to Jackson Drive — which demonstrators have rejected, as the site is nearly four miles away from the convention’s headquarters.
Organizers have planned two alternative protests on the Near West Side, one at Union Park on Aug. 19 and another near Addams Park on Aug. 22.
“If the people in this room want to make sure that we get as close as possible to Biden, what we need to do is bring as many people as possible because then it’s gonna be hard to keep us from being able to get close to them,” said Meredith Aby, a lead organizer with the Minnesota Anti-War Committee.
I don’t like the sound of that. Protests to make Biden look bad are fine. But these guys sound like they’re out for blood. That sort of thing doesn’t belong in America.
It looks like it is going to be a long, hot summer.