SCOTT WALTER: Extremism Is On The Rise And The Left Desperately Wants You To Ignore It

Are you frustrated with college presidents who do nothing when radicals bring violence to their campuses and justify it with claims to care for Palestinians, when the radicals’ deepest desires look more like wishing death to Israel and death to America?

I am.

Congress is doing better than that. After the National Park Service granted protest permits this summer to radicals who used them to burn American flags and damage federal property at Washington’s Union Station, members of the House Natural Resources Committee, which holds jurisdiction over the Park Service, began fighting back immediately.

That very day, as U.S. flags were hauled down, burnt and replaced with Palestinian flags, several committee members raced to the scene with American flags, so they could be raised once again. And last week the committee held a hearing to hold the Park Service accountable.

They kindly invited me to testify about the extremist groups involved. I opened by insisting that free speech is precious. It is both the mark of a free country and also the means of American self-government. But speech is not violence, and violence is not speech, even though we often hear radicals make those claims.

The extremists, many of whom have ties to groups that support uprisings in the Middle East and America, exalt violence, teach techniques of violence, and justify violence. They attack the very possibility of free government, which requires that citizens and government officials be able to speak and debate freely as they try to achieve their desired policies through rational argument, rather than by using violence to coerce those who disagree with them.

But the kind of radicals the Natural Resources Committee is investigating despise free governments and democracies like America and Israel. Instead, they love tyrannies that rule by violence, like Mao’s Communist China, the mullahs’ Iranian theocracy, and Lenin’s Soviet Union. Mao explained this ideology’s essence: “Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.”

Without violence, how are these extremists to achieve the dreams they graffitied onto Columbus Circle monuments: “US Empire will burn” and “Israel will fall.” Or take another of their graffiti slogans, “Hamas is comin’,” which means these radicals want Americans to suffer the bloody violence Hamas perpetrates on Israelis.

I testified to the same committee in April that America faces a convergence of extremist groups. Take, for instance, radical environmentalists like Interior Secretary Deb Haaland’s friends and family at Pueblo Action Alliance, a group that joined in a protest at the Interior Department that resulted in dozens of arrests and sent a policeman to the hospital.  These environmental activists also support radical Palestinian activists, who turn around and support other radical groups ostensibly dedicated to climate activism, anti-police activism and more.

In radicals’ minds, all particular causes are part of a single cause: the revolt of the oppressed against the oppressor. As a 1960s American radical put it, “The issue is never the issue. The issue is always the revolution.”

Similarly, the protestors this July chanted, “There is only one solution, intifada revolution.” But to endorse intifada is to endorse violence. Israel’s last intifada did not result in any effort to persuade others through rational speech and peaceful protest. It resulted in thousands of dead Palestinians and Israelis.

Of the 250+ endorsers of the July riot in D.C., my colleague Ryan Mauro identified 90 extremist groups that publicly support Hamas’ terrorism or identify as Marxist, communist, or anarchist revolutionaries.

Mauro observed that ANSWER, the leader of July’s protest, “signed a declaration of the Commit­tee of Anti-Imperialists in Solidarity with Iran that backs Iran’s direct attack on Israel and explicitly chooses the side of the Iran-led ‘Axis of Resistance’ consisting of the government of Syria, Iran-backed Palestinian terrorist groups including Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah, the Yemen-based Houthis and Iran-backed militias in Iraq who are trying to kill U.S. troops.”

I emphasized to the Natural Resources Committee that not every critic of American or Israeli policy has succumbed to this nihilistic lust for violence and tyranny, and I insisted that peaceful protests and vigorous debates over foreign policy are entirely legitimate in our free country. But the National Park Service and congressional committees with the responsibility of overseeing protests in the nation’s capital should continue investigating what went badly wrong in July and determine how to prevent similar outrages in the future.

Scott Walter is president of the Capital Research Center.

The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.