I am generally skeptical of arguments that try to connect political rhetoric (even if it’s violent) to actual real-world violence. Human beings can’t be programmed to kill or commit violent acts simply by being exposed to violent rhetoric. The process of “building an assassin” is far more complicated and takes a lot longer than a few snippets of recorded threats.
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Mentally unstable people may be more susceptible to such messages, but it’s still a stretch to directly connect the incendiary words to a violent act.
But what if the time period involved spans years? What if the violent rhetoric is replayed constantly? The same slogans, the same images, the same relentless attacks on the senses might eventually wear down resistance and send some individuals down a very dark path.
That’s the thesis of Charles Fain Lehman, fellow at the Manhattan Institute and senior editor of City Journal. Lehman posits the notion that the pro-Hamas, pro-Palestinian protesters that have roiled college campuses and U.S. city streets for the last two years are a different breed of radical who use violent rhetoric as a spur for violent actions.
“A steadily grinding radicalism ratchet brought us to this moment, and did so consistent with the principles of extremist activism,” writes Lehman. Both rhetoric and political violence are justified by the same principle. They are a means of resisting oppression.
This idea stretches back to the 19th century, when anarchists in Europe and the United States acted out what was called the “propaganda of the deed”—bombing campaigns meant to inspire the people to revolutionary consciousness. During the late 1960s and early 1970s, American radical groups like the Weather Underground and Black Liberation Army carried out bombings and violent attacks, which they saw as a continuation of—rather than a break with—the civil rights struggle of the 1960s. Then-influential figures like Malcolm X and Howard Zinn argued that non-violence cannot always achieve necessary social change, and that sometimes more aggressive action is required. Groups ranging from the environmentalist terrorists to the anarchists of the 1990s helped carry this tradition into the present day.
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Obviously, not everyone who protests believes that violence is a legitimate means to effect social change. But more than any other extremist group on American soil, the core of the pro-Hamas movement seeks to use violence as a means to achieve its goals.
Members of Hamas and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) consider violence an essential part of liberation; Hamas’ declaration of principles describes “armed resistance” as the “strategic choice for protecting the principles and the rights of the Palestinian people.” And for decades, violence—in the form of the destruction of the “Zionist entity”—was the goal of most Arab states. While Arab-Jewish relations have partly thawed in the post-Camp David/Abraham Accords world, the eliminationist agenda still bubbles below the surface of much organized activism, as well as throughout the broader Middle East—especially in Iran’s sphere of influence.
Hamas is not interested in a “two-state solution.” It has no desire to co-exist with a Jewish state. As Lehman points out, this view is still widely held in the Arab world, and specifically, among a majority of “peaceful Palestinians” who danced with joy on October 7.
Palestinians on October 7th celebrating as they spat, hit, and abused Israeli hostages and dead bodies brought to Gaza by Hamas, acting like barbarians and savages.
This society is rotten to its core.
I’ll never let the world forget this. pic.twitter.com/NCwrLkoOzt
— Vivid.🇮🇱 (@VividProwess) May 2, 2025
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The rhetoric of the pro-Hamas protesters is part of an amalgamated whole that sees some protesters engaged in legitimate speech, some acting as rabble-rousers, and some planning or executing violent acts.
All elements of the movement work toward a single goal. It doesn’t matter if there is violence or not. The violent ones know that the dupes and useful idiots will scream about First Amendment rights, while people will continue to be injured or killed.
Note how apologists, including most of the American left, dismiss the real-world implications of the “From the River to the Sea, Palestine Will Be Free” chant. “Oh, it’s just overheated rhetoric” or “It’s just ‘aspirational.'” Meanwhile, anyone with two brain cells working knows exactly what the pro-Hamas protesters are demanding, and it isn’t singing “Kumbaya” with Israeli settlers or giving milk and cookies to Israeli kids.
But in the revolutionary lexicon of Hamas, the ambiguity is key.
This ambiguity, though, is the whole point: Otherwise peaceful students advocating for “intifada” lend moral legitimacy to those who actually do the “uprising.” They can, in other words, help launder radicalism while maintaining plausible deniability, in their own eyes and in others’. But those chants endorsing violence don’t just disappear into the void; eventually, some protesters who started out peaceful will think through the implications of their views and escalate to more “diverse” tactics. As writer Najma Sharif infamously wrote on X on October 7, 2023, “What did y’all think decolonization meant? vibes? papers? essays? losers.”
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The last few weeks have shown that pro-Hamas partisans know exactly what “decolonization” means.
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