Anti-Semites Hold Hateful Demonstration in Seattle; Pro-Israel Rallies Disrupted in Los Angeles, Boston
by Joshua Levitt
An anti-Israel demonstration in Seattle to oppose Israel’s week-long response to Hamas’s rocket fire called for the destruction of the Jewish state, with protesters waving signs equating Zionism with Nazism, shocking Jews who came upon the rally at Seattle’s Westlake Center on Saturday. The Seattle protest came as pro-Israel rallies were interrupted in Los Angeles and Boston by violence at the weekend.
Seattle-based blogger Michael Behar, author of The Mike Report, on Sunday wrote: “Protesters screamed anti-Israel slogans calling for the destruction of the Jewish state while waving signs and marching through the downtown sidewalks.”
“But this was more than a rally in opposition to Israel or her defensive operations,” Behar wrote. “The signs being waved and the chants hollered constituted a shocking public display of shameless Jew hatred right in the heart of Seattle. Signs comparing Jews to Nazis were commonplace.”
The rally, organized by Voices for Palestine, pushed their twisted narrative of Israel trying to revisit the Holocaust on Palestinians, with signs reading, “Zionist Israel = Nazi Germany” and “Stop the Holocaust in Gaza.”
Behar wrote that protesters also revisited other anti-Semitic themes, including the blood libel, that Jews kill Christians to drink their blood, even more ironic because of Kashrut laws that forbid Jews to eat any animal blood.
“While you may have thought that blood libel accusations are a relic of the past, in fact the slander was alive and well in downtown Seattle this past Saturday,” he wrote, noting that one poster depicted “a Jew eating a gentile child along with a cup of blood to wash it all down.”
The angry protest in Seattle was matched by more hate in Los Angeles, where a peaceful pro-Israel rally in front of the Federal Building, in Westwood, was interrupted on Sunday by at least three men wielding Palestinian flags on long wooden sticks that witnesses said they used to attack Jews, the Los Angeles Jewish Journal reported.
The violent men sped away in a truck after police attempted to intervene, but the Jewish Journal reported police were able to catch them after they were pulled over for a “felony traffic stop.”
The Los Angeles rally attracted 1,200 Israel supporters who were met by an opposing group of 200 protesters across the street.
In Boston, a protest outside Israel’s consulate became violent on Friday when 100 anti-Israel demonstrators “swarmed” some dozen Israel supporters, The Times of Israel reported.
“There were eleven of us here, and that was not enough,” Aviva Malveira, a recent Boston University graduate told TOI.
Malveira said she was wrapped with an Israeli flag, in what she called a “tiny pro-Israel island,” surrounded by protesters, as the Jewish students sang the Israeli national anthem “HaTikvah” and Hebrew song “Oseh Shalom” (“Make Peace”), further inflaming their opposition, a group of mostly women and children carrying signs about “Israeli apartheid” and “war crimes.”
Malveira, who works for Israel advocacy group StandWithUs, said, “Some phones were knocked out of our hands, Israeli flags were yanked, and a whole lot of disgusting things were shouted at us.”
Chloe Valdary, a non-Jewish African-American and vocal pro-Israel supporter from the University of New Orleans was also at the rally and pressed charges against an assailant with the Boston Police Department.
“They surrounded us, they swarmed us,” Valdary wrote on Facebook.