WhatsappFar from deserving Jewish support, the protests against enforcing the law regarding illegal immigration are another aspect of the same anti-Western campaign demonizing Israel.
(June 11, 2025 / JNS)
If the images coming out of Los Angeles this past week seemed familiar, it was no accident. As the left took to the streets of America’s second-largest city, images displayed some of the same thuggish tactics, masks, keffiyehs, signs and even flags being waved by those participating in other iterations of the “progressive” mindset that are familiar to the pro-Hamas mobs that have been demonstrating on college campuses since Oct. 7, 2023.
Much like the way Greta Thunberg, the Swedish environmental extremist, switched her focus from trying to destroy the economies of the developed world in the name of “saving the planet” to supporting the destruction of Israel (as seen in her performative stunt trying to sail to Gaza with a paltry amount of goods), so, too, are many American leftists diverting their efforts to another issue, at least temporarily.
For a short while, their priority is not the cause of erasing the Jewish presence “from the river to the sea.” Instead, they are proclaiming the importance of open borders and demonizing efforts by President Donald Trump to close them, as well as to deport those who have broken the law by entering and remaining in the United States without permission. And, as with their devotion to the Palestinian cause of eliminating Israel, they are claiming the mantle of “human rights” while doing so.
Crossover riots
The crossover between these causes is no coincidence. The cause of undermining U.S. sovereignty is not as disconnected from the war on Israel as some might think.
Many political liberals, including Jews, may think that open borders and the cause of immigrants, illegal or not—while at the same time opposing Trump—is a religious or political obligation. But the effort to flood the United States with economic migrants from Central and Southern America, and elsewhere, is in no way analogous to the era of Jewish mass immigration to North America or the flight of Jews from Nazi-occupied Europe.
More to the point, the notion that anyone ought to be allowed to cross into the United States, regardless of their legal status, is not a question of human rights. It’s an assault on the right of a sovereign nation to defend its people and identity against those who, as the foreign flags being waved as part of the unrest indicate, believe that the American republic deserves no respect because it is an irredeemably racist construct. It’s connected to the same toxic woke catechism of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) that has racialized and divided society, along with the toxic neo-Marxist ideas of critical race theory, intersectionality and settler-colonialism that seek to overturn Western civilization and that fuel antisemitism. So, it is little surprise that the LA riots bear a striking resemblance to other protests organized by the left.
It’s true that not all of those who are opposing efforts of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency to arrest illegal immigrants care about the effort to “free Palestine” and oppose the existence of the one Jewish state on the planet. Indeed, many traditional liberals, including Jews, think there’s something immoral about enforcing immigration laws, even when it involves court orders for deportation for people who have already received due process and then some.
The hypocrisy at work here is mind-boggling.
Those who were adamant about supporting the rule of law during the U.S. Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021—and not unreasonably outraged about those who protested the certification of the results of the 2020 election who entered federal property without permission and assaulted police officers—take a very different view of the concept now.
When it comes to those who have broken immigration laws or are willing to riot, assault the police and destroy private property on behalf of those who have done so, the left is not so punctilious. Now, they pooh-pooh the riots, blaming it all on Trump. They claim that the violence and destruction were minimal, and that there was no need to mobilize the National Guard or call in Marines to stabilize a situation that local authorities were unwilling to control.
The “nothing to see here” argument was, however, undermined by the curfew imposed starting on Tuesday night in parts of the city by the feckless Mayor Karen Bass.
‘Mostly peaceful?’
Americans who are willing to see evidence of the destructive and hateful nature of protests that involve mobs confronting authorities, assaulting police officers and causing damage in the streets that can be more easily characterized as insurrection rather than following in the footsteps of the non-violent civil-rights movement of the 1950s and ’60s aren’t likely to accept that line. But as in the summer of 2020 with the Black Lives Matter movement, and even in the chaos that took over many campuses in the 20 months that Israel has battled Hamas in Gaza to quash terror and get back its hostages, the willingness to excuse violence by those who are engaged in violent protests is a given for contemporary progressives.
Of course, the political left took the same attitude a few months before Jan. 6, when it characterized the massive riots across the country following the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis in May 2020 as “mostly peaceful.” Those mass protests in cities across the United States centered on the myth that police were recklessly hunting down and killing African-Americans. And they cost at least $2 billion in damage to property (the largest toll recorded in any civil disturbance in U.S. history) and 28 deaths. The casualties also included 900 police officers injured while defending public order and government buildings.
Over the course of the last five years, a lot has changed. The peak of woke madness seems to have passed with Trump’s 2024 election win. Yet progressives feel that they can rally much of the country behind them on the issue of the illegals by portraying the administration’s efforts to enforce the law, as the president promised he would during the campaign, as heartless cruelty to innocent people.
That fits in with the narrative of the Jewish left, epitomized by the statement of Rabbi Sharon Brous, a prominent liberal activist in Los Angeles, who smeared Trump as being analogous to the “authoritarian” Pharaoh of the Exodus from Egypt.
The assertion that Trump is acting as an authoritarian is ludicrous. Whether individuals support him or not, protecting federal authorities as they go about their legitimate duties is his responsibility. That’s especially the case when the city of Los Angeles and state of California were, in keeping with their unconstitutional and absurd “sanctuary” status, acting as if they were neutral when it came to maintaining order.
Leave aside the political blunder involved in Democratic officeholders and their supporters who essentially take the side of rioters and those who assert that the law doesn’t apply to them while waving flags of other people’s countries, including the ubiquitous Palestinian banner. The mischaracterization of this problem fails to take into account the damage that the erasure of the border does not just to the rule of law but to working-class Americans, whose wages are depressed by the influx of low-wage migrants. It has further hiked the price of housing and burdened communities with having to attend to many illegals who require health care, housing and welfare assistance.
More than that, the opposition to Trump’s effort is rooted in the notion that Western concepts of sovereignty and law, which are based on the Bible and Jewish tradition, are essentially racist and illegitimate.
Linking the protest movements
Even Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO of the Anti-Defamation League, recently remarked that you can draw a straight line between the “Occupy Wall Street” Marxist protests of more than a decade ago to those of BLM, calls for defunding the police, to those “From the river to the sea” chants about destroying Israel. That insight comes a little late for a leader who endorsed an antisemitic BLM movement in 2020 and allowed his organization to be compromised by staffers who embraced DEI doctrines that undermined Jewish rights.
That same line can be extended to the left-wingers who took to the streets in LA clad in similar gear and with comparable contempt for Western values as those he mentioned.
As Tablet magazine noted, the LA protests are being supported by the same progressive alliance of Democratic Party funders, unions and street-level radicals as those other disturbances. As the Center for Security Policy’s Kyle Shideler says, “the left is a self-perpetuating ecosystem” in which the “connective tissue” between activists on various issues and their more mainstream supporters has created a seamless rotation between their various causes.
In this way, it’s easy to see that despite the seeming distance between the pro-Hamas mobs and those who claim they are merely embracing the stranger and the needy, those who think there is some sort of Jewish imperative to support open borders have been duped by radicals who mean them harm.
The conflict over illegal immigration is just one aspect of a far broader struggle against the Western canon and the values of the American republic that involves woke racism and the movement to demonize Israel as an illegitimate “settler” state.
Even as American Jews rightly focus on the threats to their safety that have been manifested in a series of terror attacks following a surge of antisemitism linked to progressive anti-Zionism, they should not ignore the clear signs that this is connected to the violence in Los Angeles. Standing up to that mob is just as essential as facing down those targeting Jewish students.
