As a native New Yorker, I was sickened when hordes of jihadis and leftists besieged the Park East Synagogue in Manhattan on Nov. 19. That house of worship is part of the fabric of New York City—and now it is symbolic of an America under invasion by alien tribes and grievances. The Times of Israel offered a solid account of the protest:

The demonstrators gathered outside the Park East Synagogue in Manhattan to protest against an event held by Nefesh B’nefesh, an organization that helps Jews immigrate to Israel.

Around 200 demonstrators chanted “Death to the IDF,” “We don’t want no Zionists here,” and, “Resistance you make us proud, take another settler out.”

“From New York to Gaza, globalize the intifada,” they chanted, to the beat of a drum.

A protest leader told the crowd, “It is our duty to make them think twice before holding these events. We need to make them scared. We need to make them scared. We need to make them scared.” …

The two groups were largely kept separate by police, but some shouting and shoving matches broke out on the sidelines.

A man in a kippah cursed at a protester, who shouted at him, “You’re part of a death cult.” Another woman shouted, “F***ing Jewish pricks,” while others called the Jewish demonstrators “rapists,” “racists,” and “pedophiles.”

X lit up with footage showing the angry mob preventing Jews from entering their own house of worship.

Incoming mayor Zohran Kwame Mamdani’s response was pitch-perfect post-colonial gaslighting—a few crocodile tears shed to maintain his liberal bona fides, and a potent spurt of poison. “The Mayor-elect has discouraged the language used at last night’s protest and will continue to do so,” said Mamdani’s press secretary, Dora Pekec. “He believes every New Yorker should be free to enter a house of worship without intimidation, and that these sacred spaces should not be used to promote activities in violation of international law.”

Nefesh B’nefesh does not encourage settlement outside of Israel proper (i.e., in the West Bank), so it’s unclear what “international law” is broken by helping Jews move to their national homeland—theirs both by ancient heritage and recent right of conquest. But the left has inflated phrases such as “international law” and “genocide” like Weimar Reichsmarks, to the point that you need a wheelbarrow full to buy a stale loaf of dudgeon. European Union judges just ruled that Poland’s rejection of foreign same-sex marriages violates “international law.” Democrat lawmakers call the enforcement of bipartisan immigration laws “ethnic cleansing,” while Catholic bishops compare ICE officers to Nazi SS officers. The language of moral concern has been corrupted into dog whistles and gibberish.

Unlike some on the right, I don’t revel in Schadenfreude when I see liberal Zionists hoisted on their own petard. Yes, it is galling to see the likes of Sen. Chuck Schumer (among countless others) endorse “Blood and Soil” ethno-nationalism for Israel, while demanding multiculturalism and the Great Replacement for America.

But is it really comforting to see Jews instead embrace a consistent policy of suicidal white guilt, and join the jihadis out on the streets screaming at the synagogue, wishing for Israel a fate as bleak as South Africa’s or Zimbabwe’s? Instead, I wish more American Jews were like David Horowitz, who applied pretty solid Buchananite nationalist principles to both countries. I hope to see right-wing parties in Europe and Israel cooperate in the fight against global jihad. I groan when, instead, I see right-wing Americans adopting third-world slogans and tactics, and Tucker Carlson hosting the likes of George Galloway. Christians in Lebanon and Iraq once adopted this Ba’athist tactic, hoping to win goodwill from jihadis by outbidding them in the anti-Zionist auction. Little good it did them in the long run.

When I watched the footage of the Park East protest, I didn’t see “the Israel Lobby” getting a bloody nose. I saw a third-world-style attack on an American city—something akin to the migrant attacks on Christmas markets in Germany that have resulted in city after city canceling that medieval Christian tradition, in deference to Islamic colonists who already act like overlords. I thought of the Muslim mobs that surround Christian cathedrals and block European streets, engaging in “public prayers” that, in fact, are meant as naked assertions of dominance—like mountain gorillas marking their territory with body fluids. When some rather uncivil right-wingers disrupted a display of this kind recently in Florida, taunting Muslims with bacon, they were charged with felony hate crimes, some of which carry multi-year sentences in prison. Some religions are more equal than others.

Foreign citizens and foreign quarrels are coming to our shores, causing strife, trashing venerable institutions, and fracturing the hard-won religious peace that largely prevailed in the West after the Thirty Years’ War, which made  Western dominance over much of the globe possible. I shudder at the efforts of Catholic Integralists and some Christian Nationalists to reverse this historic, and deeply humane, accomplishment by once again politicizing religion—going beyond the worthy effort to codify the Natural Law, and attempting to impose through the State the dictates of dogma. Leave such despotic dreams to the men in the sweaty turbans.

Even as I fumed about the jihadi attack on the synagogue, I couldn’t help thinking back to a similar assault on Western religious freedom in my hometown—an event too few remember.

It happened in the build-up to Christmas, on Dec. 10, 1989. As the Catholic League records the event:

That was the day when gays crashed the Sunday 10:15 a.m. Mass, celebrated by Cardinal John O’Connor. ACT UP activists interrupted the Mass, handcuffed themselves to the pews, blew whistles, shouted obscenities and spat the Host on the floor.

ACT UP, or the “Aids Coalition to Unleash Power” (one of the cringiest acronyms in history), claimed in its leaflets and fliers that Cardinal O’Connor was culpable for the deaths of homosexuals infected by AIDS, because the Church would not take part in the distribution of condoms—as if Catholic men who ignored the Church’s firm condemnation of sodomy would somehow stop short of disobeying its ban on the use of condoms in marital intercourse. This logic is even more tortured than the claim that Park East Synagogue is complicit in the “genocide” that some allege happened in Gaza.

The composition of the mob was different in 1989 than it is today, thanks to our reckless importation of millions of disgruntled Third Worlders in the intervening years. But the spirit was the same—a spirit of vandalism and thuggery, of weaponizing claims of victimhood in order to terrorize ordinary citizens trying to freely exercise their religion. 

I wonder if liberal Jewish New Yorkers who approved of the “progressive” protest at St. Patrick’s in 1989, and were stunned by the Park East assault, made the connection in their minds. I hope a few did and repented.