Surrounded by Raging Protesters at a Jihad Jamboree
On January 13, I attended the March for Gaza in Washington, D.C. I wondered, who are these protesters marching in solidarity with Hamas? Hamas is the terrorist group responsible for the October 7 massacre of more than 1,200 innocent Israelis, including children, and the capture of 240 hostages, including Americans. Surely some of these protesters would also demand through their megaphones that “Hamas, free the hostages now!” or that “Hamas surrender now!” As Israel stated many times, there would be a ceasefire if Hamas released the hostages.
It was my first event after ankle surgery. I went alone, so I needed to keep a low profile. Several blocks away from Freedom Square, where the protest began, I heard the chant “ceasefire now!” in the background.
I came across about 50 people parading in the street, led by a well nourished American black woman with long dreadlocks. From her megaphone she belted out, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!” Here in the nation’s capital, I heard a call for the genocide of the Jewish people.
What intrigued me at the march were two distinctive LGBT flags flapping in the breeze among the screaming protesters. I thought, “Don’t these marchers understand that homosexuality is a capital crime under sharia law, and Palestinians who openly express their gayness are often killed?” Yet, in Israel, the very country they accuse of genocide, homosexuality is not only legal, but openly embraced. In fact, many LGBT Palestinians have sought asylum in Israel. As I pondered the irony, I noticed that the marchers, with their professionally made signs, changed their loud mantra to “intifada revolution,” a call for violent revolution and overthrow of Jewish Israel.
Closer to Freedom Square, the crowds thickened to an estimated total of around 10,000. There were throngs of Muslim immigrants from all over the world. Many brought their families, and I tried to avoid bumping into their baby strollers. Food trucks lined the streets, with the protesters using a nearby park as a giant picnic ground. The number of young women at the march surprised me. I talked with one Afghani girl, about 20 years old, who had no qualms calling for a Jewish genocide. Later, I met “Aisha,” a university student from Morocco, holding a sign that said, “Abandon Biden.” She apparently had no problem criticizing President Biden, yet if she was in Morocco with a sign that said, “Abandon King Muhammad VI,” she would be arrested and sentenced to many years in prison. Another woman from Russia held a sign that said “Sugardaddy Bundy AKA Biden. Stop giving Israel my money.” When I asked her how she found out about the march, she said, “No English.” Impressive for a Russian Immigrant, who doesn’t speak English, to be so knowledgeable about the 1970s American serial killer Ted Bundy.
Protests are like the weather; they can change quickly. One minute, I was in a group of families and felt safe. Another minute, the crowds pressed into me, and I couldn’t move. I became concerned about my ankle, but then realized that this was the least of my problems. I heard a large group of young men shouting, “Allahu akbar!” Several keffiyeh scarf–wearing men had climbed atop a bus stop platform, also shouting, “Allahu akbar!”
My goal was to get out of there as quickly as possible. I gently pushed through the crowd down the street, ultimately standing next to a young clean-shaven Palestinian man named Khaled. Khaled told me that he was from the Jenin Refugee Camp. I said, “Oh, wow, you guys are tough.” He looked surprised and said, “You know about Jenin?” Followers of Israeli news will know that the crowded Jenin refugee camp is a hotbed of terrorist activity, frequently subject to Israel raids. What he said next amazed me: “I was born in the U.S., but my parents moved us back to Jenin.” I thought: “Isn’t Jenin a refugee camp? Why on Earth would a Palestinian family living a life of freedom in America willingly move their children back to a terrorist-filled refugee camp?” The media programmed me to believe that refugee camps were places people wanted to leave and not go back.
As we continued talking, I asked if there were gays living in Jenin. “Oh, no, that’s not allowed,” he quickly responded, shaking his head. “You definitely wouldn’t want to advertise that you’re gay in Palestine.” The young man may have said this because he remembered what happened to Ahmed Abu Marhia, whose severed head was found on the side of the road in the West Bank after Islamists murdered him for being gay in 2022.
As I walked to a less crowded corner of the protest area, I met “Tom,” a Caucasian man from Seattle with long curly hair. Tom stood next to a table with signs and brochures representing the International Socialist Alternative, a radical socialist organization, calling for the end of capitalism. Tom rambled on about how capitalism is bad and how the U.S. and Europe should embrace Marxism and enforce a complete embargo on all ships coming or going from Israel. I asked Tom, “Then how will the Israelis get their food to eat? Tom coldly replied, “Well, that’s a good question, isn’t it?” Tom also told me that he moved to D.C. to be an environmental consultant with the EPA, focused on environmental justice issues. As I began to walk away, Tom assured me that he would never work directly for a colonial government like the U.S.
The protest was a display of the failures of the Obama/Biden administration’s immigration policies — policies that have opened our doors to virulently antisemitic immigrants from the Islamic world who have no intention of embracing our freedoms, but instead insist that Americans embrace Islam.
On the March for Gaza website was a list of endorsing organizations, including the Israel/Palestine Network of the Presbyterian Church (PCUSA), along with a litany of radical Marxist and Islamic Organizations. In less than an hour, I saw protesters screaming for the annihilation of Israel, other protesters calling for revolution to overthrow the Israeli government for defending their people. Yet in the midst of all that hatred, not once did I hear anyone say “free the hostages, or “overthrow Hamas.” The question that lingered in my mind was, “Why would a mainline Christian denomination actively support Marxist and antisemitic organizations that call for genocide and the destruction of our capitalist society?” The red-green alliance between Western Leftists and Middle Eastern Islamists is alive and well.
The next morning, I read that, the night before, White House staff had to be moved after pro-Palestinian rioters damaged anti-scale fencing and hurled objects at the police. This comes just two months after rioters vandalized the White House fence and spraypainted graffiti reading, “Death to Israel” and “Glory to our martyrs” on buildings near the Israeli Embassy. Yet never once has anyone in the administration said a word about “insurrection.”
Hugh Iwanicki is a former Foreign Service officer and expert on Middle Eastern affairs. He is the author of Shock & Alarm: What It Was Really Like at the U.S. Embassy in Iraq. Hugh brings attention to the plight of persecuted Christians throughout the world and can be reached at iwanickih@yahoo.com.
Image: scottgunn via Flickr, CC BY-NC 2.0.
MUSLIMS WILL DESTROY FRANCE AS THEY HAVE SWEDEN AND SOON WILL ENGLAND!
Demographic Decline: France Sees Lowest Number of Births Since WWII
The number of births in France has fallen to its lowest level since the Second World War in a grim indicator of Western demographic collapse.
Figures released this week from the National Institute of Statistics and Economic Studies (Insee) reported that 678,000 babies were born in France last year, a decline of 48,000 over 2022 and the lowest of any year since 1946.
As with other countries in the West, France has long faced a declining birth rate, falling nearly every year since 2010 when 832,799 babies were born in the country, approximately 20 per cent higher than in 2023. However, according to Insee, the speed of decline has been increasing, with the birth rate standing at 1.68 children per woman in 2023, compared to 1.79 in 2022 and 1.99 in 2013.
A rate of 2.1 babies per woman is typically considered the baseline requirement for a modern nation to maintain its population rate. While France was well below this rate, the population did not in fact decline, given a 6.5 per cent decline in deaths, which stood at 631,000.
This was driven by an increase in life expectancy to 85.7 for women and 80 for men, representing a 0.6-year increase for women and a 0.7 per cent rise for men over 2022. While welcome news, the ageing population will likely put further strain on the pension and healthcare systems, with one in five people in France now being 65 years of age or older and one in ten being 75 or older.
The population, which grew by 0.3 per cent to 68.4 million, also increased due to mass migration, with 183,000 foreigners becoming residents last year. Neo-liberal governments, including in France, have often touted immigration as the solution to demographic decline and as a means to prop up their generous welfare states.
However, there has been growing resistance towards mass migration in France and throughout Europe, given the negative social and economic impacts of importing large populations of foreigners, such as devaluing the cost of labour and increased strains on government as well as the risk of terrorism, with France experiencing two Islamist terror attacks since October.
Amid growing public discontent, President Emmanuel Macron made concessions to Marine Le Pen’s populist National Rally (RN) to pass immigration reform, which increases the government’s ability to deport illegals and other criminal migrants as well as reducing migration by cutting access to social welfare benefits to foreigners.
This week in a rare press conference held at the Élysée Palace, President Macron addressed the issue of demographics, which he described as the “taboo of the century”. Macron said that his government would seek to introduce a six-month “birth leave” for new parents and announced that “a major plan to combat this scourge” of declining birth rates will be forthcoming.
Rather than seeking to import foreigners to solve their demographic issues, culturally conservative European countries such as Hungary and Poland have introduced pro-family policies to help parents economically.
For example, under the previous Law and Justice (PiS) conservative government, Poland implemented a “maternal pension” to show “gratitude and respect” for women who have raised four or more children. Meanwhile, Hungary has seen success in boosting marriage and birth rates by enacting economic incentives for mothers such as granting lifetime tax exemptions for women who have four or more children.
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has argued that governments throughout the West have been engaging in national “suicide” by adopting “Great Replacement” policies, a theory coined by French writer Renaud Camus, who argued that globalist politicians view their people as cogs rather than individual humans and therefore can merely be replaced with mass migration.
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