The Hamasniks are coming to power

It’s good to give people the benefit of the doubt. Even idiots deserve a little slack. But there’s one mob I’ll never do that for – the 8 October people. These are the people who marched against Israel before the blood of Hamas’s pogrom was even dry. The people who were on the streets calling the Jewish state a Nazi regime before it had even counted its dead. Unbelievably, one of these 8 October lowlifes now looks set to get a seat in the US Congress.

Her name is Darializa Avila Chevalier. She’s a member of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). This week, she caused a big upset in the Big Apple by defeating the five-term Democratic congressman for NYC’s 13th Congressional District – Adriano Espaillat – in the Democratic primaries. Given this district is deeply Dem territory, covering Upper Manhattan and parts of the Bronx, she’s all but a shoo-in to win in the general election in November. She’ll be off to Washington.

Not bad for someone who just two-and-a-half years ago was mingling with scum who displayed swastikas and burned the Israeli flag to taunt the Jewish State in its darkest hour. On 8 October 2023, Ms Chevalier, a goggle-eyed Israelophobe, joined a mob in Times Square who were screaming blue murder about the Jewish nation. As the Jews of southern Israel were still succumbing to the wounds inflicted on them by the Islamofascists of Hamas, as Israeli women were still reeling from Hamas’s sexual atrocities, these Ivy League pricks were all but celebrating. ‘Fuck Israel’, they said, as broken Israelis were being wheeled into morgues following the worst act of anti-Jewish violence since the Holocaust.

Like all the 8 October gatherings that shook and shamed the West, the NY one was horrendous. One attendee proudly held up a swastika on her iPhone. It wasn’t enough that a new species of fascist had just laid waste to Jewish life – the Jews had to be reminded of the old fascists, too. The mob chanted for the destruction of Israel, all the way ‘from the river to sea’. They were echoing the rancid ideology of the Jew-killers who had just invaded Israel – that the ‘Zionist entity’ is a uniquely wicked state that must be annihilated.

The ‘protest’ was called by Ms Chevalier’s political movement – the DSA – the day before. Yes, on 7 October, at 1pm. Think about this: the young women of the Nova festival were still hiding from the rapists of Hamas when these young ‘progressives’ in NYC were plotting a ‘Fuck Israel’ rally. Jewish kids were still sitting bewildered by the butchered bodies of their parents as the silver-spoon radicals of Bushwick mapped out their carnival of Israel-hate. We saw similar in the UK: the Palestine Solidarity Campaign applied for permission to march against Israel while Israelis were still being stabbed, shot and burnt to death.

In response to the storm over her 8 October behaviour, Ms Chevalier says she was agitating against what Israel might do in response to Hamas’s anti-Semitic terror. She says she knew there would be an ‘outsized reaction’. Imagine hearing about the rape and murder of Jews and thinking: ‘Oh shit, how are the Jews going to respond?’ Imagine hearing of the worst pogrom in 80 years and saying: ‘I hope the victims of this fascist slaughter don’t overreact.’ It is the very definition of moral depravity.

Indeed, no mob better encapsulates the crisis of our civilisation than the 8 October people. From the bigots who danced and let off fireworks outside the Israeli Embassy in London to the Islamist headbangers who chanted ‘Fuck the Jews’ outside the Sydney Opera House to that DSA gathering with its swastikas and incinerated Stars of David, these weren’t ‘pro-Palestine’ rallies – they were pro-pogrom rallies. It was an unholy alliance of moneyed socialists and regressive Islamists celebrating the extermination of Jews. It was as horrific as if people in NYC and London had poured on to the streets to whoop for Kristallnacht.

It gets even worse for Ms Chevalier. She was for years an activist at that leafy hotbed of turbo-smug progressivism, Columbia University. She was a co-founder of Columbia University Apartheid and Divest, a whackjob outfit that gushed over Yahya Sinwar, the chief architect of the Jew slaughter of 7 October. It hailed him as a ‘hero of the revolution’ and called on Columbia students to ‘reflect on how we can make ourselves more like him’. Imagine thinking you’re an anti-fascist as you emulate a fascist who put to death more Jews in one day than anyone else had since the Nazis.

These were the Hamasniks – the bored hyper-entitled adultescents of the American left who saw in Hamas’s savagery the sexiness of purpose and agency. Who wilfully mistook Hamas’s imperious barbarism on behalf of the Islamic Republic for an act of ‘anti-imperialism’. Who viewed the murder of those ‘settler-colonial’ Jews as being on a spectrum with their own juvenile, philistine purging of books by white men from their palatial campus libraries – that is, as an act of decolonisation. The keffiyeh was the Hamasniks’ uniform, hatred of Israel their religion, a resuscitated Socialism of Fools their rotten legacy.

And now the Hamasniks are coming to power. Chevalier is not alone. Two other Dem socialists won primaries in NYC this week: Claire Valdez and Brad Lander, both voluble loathers of Zionism. All three were heavily promoted by NY mayor Zohran Mamdani. It seems his virulently anti-Zionist rich-boy Third Worldism is elbowing aside the more moderate wing of the Dems. Mamdani himself might not be an 8 October person – he didn’t attend that sick rally – but his wife is. In fact she’s a 7 October person: on the day of the pogrom itself she liked social-media posts calling it a heroic act of ‘resistance’.

DSA members love to pose as Marxian warriors for working-class people. Yet the evidence suggests Ms Chevalier did far better among affluent Dems than she did in black, Hispanic and working-class communities. Let’s be honest about what these people represent: that grating bourgeois exhaustion with the very idea of America and with the virtues of Western civilisation. Far from repping the working classes, it is the common sense of working-class communities that will need to be brought to bear against these campus crazies who are now off to DC.

Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. His latest book – After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation – is available to order on Amazon UK and Amazon US now. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy.