What does Thanksgiving have to do with Israel’s defensive war against the Islamic jihadists who would, if they could, destroy it utterly and establish in its stead a 23rd Arab state? Nothing whatsoever, but the most deeply held characteristic of leftists is that they’re totalitarians. No aspect of life is to be allowed to escape their intrusion, and everyone must demonstrate their obeisance to the leftist agenda at all times and places, or else. Even the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade in New York City is not to be spared.
The New York Post reported Thursday that pro-Hamas demonstrators “tried to ruin the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade for the second year running Thursday, with cops quickly swarming in to make mass arrests.” The protest took on a note of absurdity as the leftists “entered the parade route at W. 55th Street and Sixth Avenue, stopping the Ronald McDonald balloon in its tracks — and prompting loud boos from parade-goers screaming at the group of about 20 to move.”
Ronald McDonald? Were the protesters displaying their disgust at Donald Trump’s celebrated stint as a McDonald’s fry cook? Or was it just a coincidence that the balloon their stunt halted happened to be that of the mascot of the lone fast food chain to break with the culture’s woke lockstep long enough to allow Trump to stage his campaign event at one of its franchises?
Whatever the case may be, the protesters proceeded to sit down in the middle of the street, so as to block the parade. Some were carrying a banner that admonished paradegoers: “Don’t celebrate genocide!” Now, this actually might have been approaching something close to context, as it is a staple of leftist mythmaking that Europeans only subdued the North American continent by means of a remorseless genocide of the noble, peaceful, entirely sinless natives. Yet in a display of incoherence that is remarkable even coming from leftists, who are not the most linear of thinkers on the best days, that doesn’t seem to have been the fake genocide that the demonstrators had in mind.
That much is clear from the fact that as NYPD officers hurried onto the scene in order to arrest the protesters and clear the way for the parade to resume, some of the self-righteous totalitarians screamed “Free, free Palestine!” Now, you might think they were at the wrong parade, as Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade has not historically been known to focus very much on Israel and the fictional genocide of Palestinian Arabs. But the left politicizes everything and attempts to turn everything toward its own narcissistic obsessions, and so the parade was not to be spared.
Secure in their knowledge of being on the right side of history, or so they think, some of the protesters did not retreat from the scene with alacrity when the NYPD confronted them. The Post notes that a few of the assembled leftists had to be “pulled away and flipped over onto their stomachs to be handcuffed,” while those who were holding the cheerful “Don’t celebrate genocide” were caught on video “scuffling with cops before they thrown onto the ground and handcuffed on top of their crumpled-up sign.”
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Even in deep blue New York City, the crowd was in no mood to celebrate the courage of protesters disrupting the parade in order to stand against the nonexistent genocide of a nonexistent ethnicity: “Many in the crowd chanted ‘USA! USA! USA!,’” improbably enough for Gotham, “as the protesters were quickly taken away.” And soon everything was put right again, with "the balloon line leader telling the audience, ‘Ronald McDonald, everybody!’” as the balloon of the Hamburger Joint of Freedom started to move again.
Among those who were not pleased was New York’s embattled Mayor Eric Adams, who on Wednesday night recalled that the same pro-jihad entities had tried to disrupt last year’s parade, and declared: “I really want to take the moment to tell those grinches that believe they are going to disrupt the parade that it is not going to happen.” Well, it did anyway, but the disruption was mercifully brief, and so Adams is to be forgiven for assuming that the Grinch, who gets almost as much bad publicity these days as Adams himself does, would wish to steal Thanksgiving as well as Christmas. The parade went on. Ronald McDonald floated through Manhattan. All was well in the land of the free and the home of the brave.
