Jihad Hits Home

By David M. Friend

They chant “globalize the intifada” and “intifada revolution” those students at Columbia, Harvard, Penn and at so many other colleges and universities.

We witnessed their encampments and their building takeovers. Our mealy-mouthed university presidents and their effete task forces made excuses for them and equivocated about their intent.

They concocted protections for them and we were told that their global terror rallying cry really wasn’t meant to promote violence. Antisemitism was conjoined with Islamophobia. Congress was told “globalize the intifada” depended on the “context.”

Then there are the masked protestors that have taken to our cities’ streets and highways, boldly and proudly waving Hamas and Hezbollah flags. They’ve been allowed to disrupt, harass and loudly proclaim their hate. For months, they’ve been the harbingers of the intifada that they were wishing on America.

Well, this past week, their wish came true. The intifada arrived. New Year’s Eve. New Orleans. The French Quarter. The fourteen lives snuffed out by that ISIS enamored terrorist became the “context.”

The United States of America is now the “context.”

They told us it was coming. They told us they hate Jews and Israel, of course, but they also told us they hate America.

Their hatred is real. Their murderous ideology is public. Their plans for jihad are in plain sight.

If you didn’t believe it before, you must now believe we are in the fight for the future of western civilization, not just in Europe, but right here in the United States.

The terrorist that spilled so much blood in New Orleans said it clearly in a Facebook post. He wrote, we’re in a “war between the believers and disbelievers.”

We didn’t need him to tell us. We’ve been hearing it for months, but we’ve been making excuses and dodging the truth.

I hope the tragedy in New Orleans is a wake up call for America to take seriously the chants, the marches and the demonstrations by the jihadist sympathizers.

No more “context” is needed. Now is the time to act. Anti-mask laws need to be passed and enforced. Our police forces must crack down on unsanctioned marches that block streets and highways. Colleges and universities, under threat of losing their federal funding, must ban jihadist groups, expel foreign students that agitate for jihad, and leave them open to deportation. They need to stop taking money from foreign governments that support terrorists. And they must dismiss professors that use their tenured positions, under the guise of academic freedom, as platforms to spread their thinly veiled antisemitism.

Israel has been the canary in the coal mine for years, warning of and warring against the global Islamic jihadists.

Its citizens have been killed, tortured, raped and have been taken hostage. And when Israel fought back, fought back against the jihadists, it was internationally ostracized and its leaders threatened with arrest.

The jihadists in the Middle East and in the United States have to be dealt with through strength and determination. Their twisted ideology runs deep as does their savagery.

We now have real information, even if it’s only a glimpse, into the atrocities suffered by those Israeli hostages that were abducted on 10/7 and that were released or rescued. It comes from a new report from the Israeli Health Ministry. Israeli medical and welfare teams, treated more than 100 of the freed hostages and what they found is horrifying, sickening, and depraved.

The report found that the hostages were bound, beaten and starved. Some were branded with makeshift branding irons. Women and teen boys were sexually abused at gunpoint. Some hostages were kept in the dark, in isolation, for hours on end, denied food, water and permission to go to the bathroom. If any of the hostages suffered from injuries, they were either denied treatment or were treated without anesthesia.

Cruel physical abuse. Brutal psychological torment. Ferocious dehumanization.

That’s what they suffered after 50 days in captivity. Can you imagine what the approximately 60 hostages, still believed to be alive in Gaza after 458 days, are experiencing?

The Israelis have handed the report over to the United Nations. Don’t expect anything to come from that. We know all too well what camp the UN is in, whose side it’s on.

Nevertheless, we cannot be complacent.

At this time, when many of us are making resolutions for the new year, we should resolve that we raise our voices again and again and again for the release of the hostages, and for the unequivocal defeat and dismantling of the terrorist groups that abducted them.

We must renew our demands for the pressure to be ratcheted up on Hamas and its supporters to release them now and unconditionally. There is no moral equivalence between the hostages and the terrorist prisoners being held by Israel. The hostages in Gaza are guilty of nothing.

Their lives are precious. Their time is short and I’m afraid so is ours. We must get the hostages released immediately, and we must unite now to protect the United States from the radical Islamists that have brought jihad to our doorstep.