Escalation is in the air as Americans wonder what’s the next act for radical pro-Palestinian activists who throughout 2024 sought to paralyze public events and college campuses.
A pro-Palestinian group called the “Escalate Network” now advises its followers the next step is to intensify its tactics against American society itself. Their website seeks to rally the faithful issuing their slogan, “Heed the call: Escalate!”
The organization urges national paralysis. “The people of Palestine have called for this movement to escalate its pressure. We are here to answer that call and help this movement ESCALATE. We want this movement to break out of the confines of universities, to spread throughout society, paralyzing the economy that is driving the genocide of the Palestinian people, and has made all of us complicit in decades of colonial war.”
So, what can we expect from Palestinians and their progressive allies? Is the summer of violence about to begin?
Fortunately, we can obtain some valuable insight from the revolutionary activist Saul Alinksy who in 1971 wrote a powerful guidebook for revolutionary organizers titled, “Rules for Radicals.”
“Rules” was a powerful and influential manual about how to wreak chaos and havoc in American society. In the 1970’s it became the “bible” for New Left radicals.
Today I want to do a deeper dive into Alinsky and what it means for our future and for our nation. This is Part IV of my series on this activist/author and his ideas about revolutionary strategy. He’s bold, direct and alarming.
I’m familiar with Alinsky as I once was a New Left activist who lived with Chicago 8 defendant Rennie Davis and befriended many prominent radical organizers including fellow activists Tom Haydn, Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, among many.
I have since moved toward conservatism, but the lessons I learned from Alinsky still resonate today. We see them playing out throughout our nation and in Europe with the eruption of militant, in-your-face, pro-Palestinian demonstrations. We should pay attention to what this New Left prophet wrote.
One of Alinsky’s key piece of advice is that radical activists must instill fear of their potential power. “Always remember the first rule of power tactics: Power is not only what you have but what the enemy thinks you have.”
This is one of his most insightful and powerful observations. So today, not only are university administrators cowed by the college demonstrators, but so too is President Biden, his Presidential campaign and parts of the Democratic Party. Each group continues to award more power to the protesters.
Over the June 8 weekend, we may have gotten a glimpse into the next stage of the Palestinian escalation strategy. Then, Students for Justice in Palestine posted video of their supporters furiously building tents and other structures on hallowed National Mall in the nation’s capital.
Meanwhile other Palestinian demonstrators tried to surround the White House with a red ribbon. The White House erected special fencing. Other Palestinian demonstrators taunted and attacked National Park Service officers and defaced monuments near the White House.
Adding to their fury: the dramatic Israeli rescue of four hostages who were being hidden in a heavily populated refugee camp in Gaza. All those freed were captured by Hamas at the Nova festival on October 7.
We now know that many aging New Left and pro-Marxist professors and organizers have had a direct hand in influencing college students and have been helping the pro-Palestinian encampments and demonstrations. Not long ago, the Wall Street Journal reported in an extensive article that “Left-wing groups and veteran demonstrators provided guidance and support before the rise of pro-Palestinian encampments.”
So, what can Alinsky tell us about what’s ahead?
First, he states his aim in “Rules” is to destroy the fabric of Western, capitalist American society through subversion, disorder and chaos.
As I noted in Part I of this series, the first disturbing piece of advice he gives activists is that in a revolutionary struggle, truth doesn’t matter. “To begin with, he (the revolutionary) does not have a fixed truth - truth to him is relative and changing.; everything to him is relative and changing.” (italics is in original).
Also dump ethics. "The rule of ethics of means and ends is that in war, the end justifies almost any means,” Alinsky wrote. “Ethical standards must be elastic to stretch with the times.” And as far as morality is concerned, “you do what you can with what you have and clothe it with moral garments.”
Today, we now examine his thoughts about revolutionary strategy. His summary is dark: “In the fight, almost anything goes.”
He stresses that the first obligation of the revolution is, “The opposition must be singled out as the target and ‘frozen.’”
Israel clearly is the protester’s first “frozen” target and pro-Israel Jews are the second.
But while Israel and Jews are the current target, Alinsky’s key call is for activists to produce deep polarization in American society itself. “All issues must be polarized if action is to follow,” he wrote. He admonished them to never seek a “middle ground.”
As noted above, Alinsky’s central thesis is that you must get the “enemy” to recognize and grant you power. “Power is not only what you have but what the enemy thinks you have.”
It’s clear a palpable fear of the “potential” power of the Muslim-American vote has begun to grip and divide the White House and Biden’s Presidential campaign. In statements and actions, his administration continues a step-by-step retreat in defending Israel. Other Democratic Party politicos are beginning to adopt anti-Israel postures including a cutoff of military aid to Israel.
Former Clinton political strategist James Carville has harshly admonished the Biden campaign to stop worrying about Gaza. “Talk about the cost of living,” he recently advised. “Don’t talk about F-king Gaza and student loans.”
Thus, we are witnessing Alinsky’s key piece of advice unfolding. The President and liberal university presidents are awarding enormous political power to the protesters. “It should be remembered that you can threaten the enemy and get away with it. You can insult and annoy him” counsels Alinsky.
Another related Alinsky principle in organizing: “Wherever possible go outside of the experience of the enemy. Here you want to cause confusion, fear and retreat.”
Clearly, the encampments and loud protests have surprised university leaders, city mayors and the White House. “The enemy properly goaded,” Alinsky says, “will be your major strength.” And don’t let up on your opponents. “Keep the pressure on, with different tactics and actions, and utilize all events of the period for your purpose.”
Do not let up. “The major premise for tactics is the development of operations that will maintain a constant pressure upon the opposition. It is this unceasing pressure that results in the reactions from the opposition that are essential for the success of the campaign.” His advice is to provoke reaction by your opponents: “the real action is the enemy’s reaction.”
Here is where we can see the future for the pro-Palestinian movement - reaction and counter reaction. This is the lifeblood of revolution: the polarization of society and the experience of constant crisis. Does this sound familiar?
However, Alinsky also recommends that tactics be changed over time. “Once the battle is joined and the tactic is employed, it is important that the conflict not be carried out over too long a time,” he writes. “After a period of time it becomes monotonous, repetitive, an emotional treadmill, and worse than anything else a bore.”
So..new tactics must be devised. The encampment on the National Mall is a possible next step. Will they riot if the National Park Service and the Biden administration seek to arrest and move them?
While the National Mall action is unfolding progressives and pro-Palestinian organizers elsewhere are busily targeting the Democratic National Convention in Chicago this August. Will this also devolve into riots?
According to AP, Chicago Police Chief Larry Snelling last week told reporters his police department, the second largest in the nation, are undergoing “specialized training to respond to civil unrest and the possibility of riots.” Snelling said they are expecting at least 50,000 demonstrators.
Whatever the pro-Palestinian camp plans, drama and adventure is likely to be part of it. Alinsky says this is good. “People hunger for drama and adventure, for a breath of life in a dreary, drab existence.” He says demonstrators are “desperate search for personal identity - to let other people know that at least you are alive.”
Alinsky concluded in his book that the ultimate revolution will be about the complete rejection of the American way of life. “Our rebels have contemptuously rejected the values and way of life of the middle class. They have stigmatized it as materialistic, decadent, bourgeois, degenerate, imperialistic, warmongering, brutalized and corrupt. They are right.”
Is this merely the ravings of a 1970’s radical? Hardly, as the New York Times recently reported, the current crop of college pro-Palestinian demonstrators tie the Palestinian “struggle” with other struggles. “In interviews, the language of many protesters was also distinctive. Students freely salted their explanations with academic terms like intersectionality, colonialism and imperialism, all to make their case that the plight of Palestinians is a result of global power structures that thrive on bias and oppression.”
The newspaper reported, “The student movement in support of Palestinians has been built over decades by linking to other issues. Students for Justice in Palestine, a loosely connected confederation that began to emerge in the early 1990s at the University of California, Berkeley, consciously invited other activists — environmentalists, opponents of American intervention in Latin America, critics of the Gulf War — broadening the group’s base.”
Columnist and brave civil rights activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali recently wrote a compelling article about the fact she has seen this movie before. Addressing the growing unrest since October 8, she warns, “What is at stake in our ability to see the threat plainly.”
Ali experienced the darkness of Marxist movements. She grew up in Somalia when it became a brutal, Soviet-led Marxist state. Her story is agonizing. When the Marxists took over, “statues of Mohamed Siad Barre, our dictator, sprung up across Mogadishu, flanked by a trio of dark seraphim: Marx, Lenin, and Engels. This particular communist experiment plunged Somalia into bloodshed, mass starvation, and a 20-year period of suffocating tyranny.”
She sees today’s agitators as cultural, modern day American Marxists: “This category includes old card-carrying communists, red-diaper baby socialists, antifa anarchists, and many of whom we now call woke. Though the Soviet Union collapsed decades ago, the Soviet worldview has found familiar proponents: young Americans and their professors. They are no longer advancing their cause merely through class struggle, but through the fusion of racial, class, and anticolonial struggles. Theirs is now a cultural communism; they lead subversion through the institutions with the ultimate aim of overthrowing the West.”
Her observations about our post-October 8 era contain deep observations that are there for those who wish to see it, that are in plain sight.
“When, on October 8, protests erupted across the Western world in support of Hamas—and not the democracy that had been overrun by terrorists—I saw the revolution. When I look at the recent spectacle at Columbia or Yale or UCLA or Harvard or Stanford—students tearing down American flags and raising Palestinian ones; or chanting in Arabic “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free”—it is hard not to see the fruit of this long process. I hear the same when, week after week, the streets of London, Amsterdam, Brussels, and Hamburg ring with cries of “intifada” or open demands for a caliphate or Sharia law in the heart of Europe.”
Saul Alinsky is smiling from his grave.