Another Pro-Hamas Protest in Austin

As usual, while conservatives go through life "deer in the headlights," leftists get to work.

A week or so after Hamas’s October 7, 2023, attack against Israel, there was a pro-Israel rally of a few hundred people in front of the state capitol building in Austin, Texas.

Two weeks later, there was a pro-Hamas rally at the same location. There was a slightly larger number of people at the Hamas rally, because Austin is infested with leftists, who are always more inclined than conservatives to take to the streets.

Presumably because 71 percent of Jews in America favor the Democrat Party (and many Jews in Israel are leftist as well), some of the Jews at the pro-Israel rally were leftists. One speaker there praised Joe Biden, even though a few days before Hamas attacked, Biden unfroze $6 billion to Iran, the chief sponsor of anti-Israel terrorism, Barack Obama (who gives Biden his marching orders) unfroze $150 billion to Iran, and Democrats have for years funneled Americans’ tax dollars to Hamas through the anti-Israel United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA). It’s irrational for Jews support the political party that supports their mortal enemies. But as a friend says, “you can’t fix stupid.”

Several weeks after the first two rallies, a couple of thousand pro-Hamas Islamists from out of town were brought to Austin in busses for a larger protest. The same thing happened last Sunday, February 4. Several thousand mostly Arabic Islamists, most of them brought to Austin in busses, paraded in downtown.

There were few, if any, Spanish-speakers in or around the parade, but the protestors chanted “Viva, viva, Palestina,” presumably hoping to blunt the recent defection of Hispanic voters from the Democrat Party. Leaders of leftist movements long ago recognized that easy-to-understand devices like rhymes help to keep their simpleton adherents on task. Today’s repetitive, monotonous, vapid popular music performs a similar function.

To the credit of Austin’s police department, hated and defunded by the city’s Marxist-dominated city council, the cops were out in force and kept the protestors along their approved route and off the sidewalks, lest they think they were in New York City and able to vandalize at will.

To protect the capitol building and surrounding area from the protestors, Austin cops were joined by Department of Public Safety (DPS, state police) troopers. The city council can’t defund DPS, so its Marxist council members, notably Vanessa Fuentes, resort to the absurdity that Austin residents are terrified of the troopers, because the troopers arrest people for violent crimes.

The protestors from out-of-town were augmented by a smaller number of locals, mostly females like this and the male equivalent, typical in appearance of leftist activists in Austin.

I didn’t see many “From the River to the Sea” signs at Sunday’s protest, but many of the protestors wore the black-and-white checkered keffiyeh head scarf meant to express support for Hamas in its war against Israel. Also, one unpleasant-looking Austin heiffer, after realizing that I’m pro-Israel in its fight for survival, told me “you will die.” That served as a reminder that about half of Democrats, like their leftist predecessors in Reign of Terror France, Nazi Germany, Bolshevik Russia, Castro’s Cuba, and the various communist dictatorships in the Orient would exterminate conservatives if they had the chance.

An alleged “Marine” in dress uniform, with his keffiyeh atop his bag, told me that he participated in the protest in uniform, which might be of interest to the Corps. He demanded that I not photograph him, and when I continued to do so, called me a “white supremacist.”

The “Marine” then waved down a DPS trooper who happened to be driving by, and asked the trooper to make me stop photographing. The trooper instead told him “you have no expectation of privacy in a public place.” That trooper has at least one fan from out of state. When I told a conservative friend who lives in a Democrat-majority state in the northeast what the trooper told the “Marine,” she said “way to go, Texas!”

After the “Marine” walked away, disappointed that his “truth” was not “the truth,” I told the trooper that I was getting video of the busses to show that most of the protestors were from out of town. He told me that the protestors were “from Dallas, from Houston, from San Antonio, from all over. We have the intel,” meaning “intelligence” (i.e., relevant information possessed in advance).

One of the bus drivers demanded that I not photograph his bus, which some of the protestors were boarding. He was a flabby-belly black guy in his 40s or so, who somewhere along the way had bought into the idea that blacks can intimidate people if they project “attitude.” When I didn’t appear impressed and continued photographing, he gave up his tough-guy act.

Not all protestors and their drivers were bufoons. “Mohammad,” a protestor from Dallas who had dragged his 12-year-old son along with him, engaged me in a civil chat, curious for my perspective. He agreed that Hamas was wrong to attack Israel. However, he asked whether I agreed with U.S. tax dollars being used to support Israel in its retaliation against Hamas. “Yes,” I replied, adding that, because of Democrats, U.S. tax dollars are going to Hamas through the anti-Israel UNRWA.

Referring to the situation in which Gazans who lived in the northern part of the Gaza Strip evacuated, to avoid the battle taking place between Israel and Hamas there, Mohammad asked whether I thought they should be allowed to return to the north. I said “yes,” but only if it can be guaranteed that Hamas and other terrorist groups can be prevented from restoring their foothold there. He didn’t have a coherent response to my point, that Islam is the only religion some adherents of which believe requires them to kill “the infidels.” I should have pointed out that killing non-believers is also a tenet of leftist ideology.

Mohammad’s son, tasked with carrying a protest sign about the U.S. supporting Israel, stood by patiently during my chat with his father. Assuming that he had, at best, only a vague idea of what the message of his protest sign was all about, I urged him to think for himself, and to not let others tell him what to think. He nodded.

Anecdotes aside, the main take-away from the protest is that it was a professional operation. I counted about 25 busses parked on San Jacinto and Trinity, east of the capitol, including this group.

Also, some protestors carried professionally-made signs and the parade was escorted along its route through the streets of downtown Austin by guides wearing yellow vests, separating them from the police lines to their left and right.

It brings to mind Daniel O’Krent’s Last Call, his excellent book on the Prohibition movement, the first few chapters of which are eye-opening in terms of how political organization works and why the Left is dominant today.

O’Krent observes, “It’s a truism of political dynamics that the party of change will always be more motivated than the party of the status quo. The latter may have inertia on its side, but inertia will not hold against the press of passion.”

To reinforce the point, O’Krent quotes George Ade, in The Old-Time Saloon (1931), explaining how the momentum for Prohibition became unstoppable. It was simply that “The Non-Drinkers had been organizing for fifty years and the Drinkers had no organization whatsoever. They had been too busy drinking.”

In other words, while people who want to destroy Judeo-Christian Western Civilization, especially its American iteration, have been working at it tirelessly since the 1800s, and are continuing to do so, conservatives have played golf, gone fishing, watched The Simpsons, and read clickbait articles on so-called conservative websites. If the Left wins, that’ll be the reason why. As a Canadian acquaintance once observed about America, “a country that wants to survive doesn’t behave like this.”