Patrick McWilliams is protesting outside the Democratic National Convention urging the U.S. to stop funding Israel. “We’re making sure that we are out there, wherever the people are, to peacefully demonstrate against genocide and demand that the Democrats do what’s right,” says McWilliams, a volunteer coordinator with ANSWER Coalition-Chicago, an anti-war mobilization organization helping organize the DNC protests.
For a moment, I can almost envision the two of us jointly calling out Israel’s disastrous, far-right government — one that recovers the bodies of dead hostages rather than securing their release, all while pummeling Gaza into rubble . Then I ask McWilliams what ANSWER Coalition thinks about Hamas’ actions on Oct. 7. He says the group doesn’t have a position. But that isn’t true.
Recent videos posted by ANSWER-Chicago on Instagram show signs with the group’s name saying “Resistance Is Justified When People Are Occupied!” amid chants of “Intifada Revolution.”
I have no doubt that many people are there in good faith. The problem is that some of the loudest voices outside the DNC — and key groups involved in anti-Israel protests since Oct. 7, like ANSWER Coalition — are spreading misinformation and conspiracies. They are defending and denying egregious human rights abuses around the world. It makes it hard to take their claims against Israel seriously, and impossible for people like me — who believe in self-determination for both Palestinians and Israelis — to join in a broad, pro-peace coalition.
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I didn’t know much about ANSWER Coalition or the Party for Socialism and Liberation until the morning of Oct. 7. As I frantically messaged my family and friends in Israel, I saw former classmates and close friends post Instagram graphics justifying Hamas’ depravity . Some of these former friends were organizing with the PSL, which occasionally protests jointly with ANSWER.
ANSWER Coalition, along with the PSL and other groups, helped organize the March on the DNC 2024 , whose top demand this week is to stand with Palestine and end U.S. aid to Israel, though its domestic platform includes more money for schools, abortion access, and LGBTQIA+ rights. The protest, so far, does not appear to have attracted the tens of thousands expected, but speakers say that more than 250 groups showed up.
While their domestic policies are often aligned with mainstream Democratic values, the PSL and ANSWER Coalition on the international front repeatedly share false claims and defend foreign dictators. The PSL has claimed Russia had legitimate reasons to invade Ukraine, Cuban political repression is a myth , China has done nothing to the Uyghurs and Hamas did not carry out sexual violence against Israelis. In the past, ANSWER Coalition has supported North Korea’s Kim Jong-il and Serbia’s Slobodan Milosevic.
Most recently, these “anti-imperial” left groups have defended Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro, whom U.S. officials have said stole the country’s recent election. At one protest this week about Venezuela in Atlanta, an activist wearing a red PSL shirt said the U.S. would call anyone who “wants to use the wealth of their resources in order to improve the lives of the people” a dictator. Activists at a parallel PSL protest in San Francisco held ANSWER Coalition signs saying, “Stop the U.S. Coup Against Venezuela’s Democracy.”
Never mind, of course, that a quarter of Venezuela’s population has fled the country in recent years because of Maduro’s cronyism and violence . Never mind that Russia fabricated a pretext to invade Ukraine, that Uyghur “re-education” camps are well-documented and that Hamas’ sexual violence is indisputable .
Current membership numbers are not readily available, and neither ANSWER nor PSL immediately responded to inquiries via social media, email and phone. But in 2022, the PSL claimed to have “an organized presence in over 100 cities and towns,” and ANSWER Coalition currently lists chapters in at least 14 major cities. Publicly available financial information suggests that the latter’s fiscal sponsor , the Progress Unity Fund, has collected around $6 million in contributions since 2001.
The PSL and ANSWER aren’t the only players in the pro-Palestine movement. But from Oct. 7 to the present, they’ve helped organize many notable anti-Israel protests. Within a week of Oct. 7, ANSWER sponsored at least 14 protests, and by the end of the month, PSL had sponsored at least 43 protests, including in Boise, Idaho, Salt Lake City, Utah and Anchorage, Alaska. Both groups remain active, organizing marches on Washington D.C. and directing protests outside campuses like Columbia University’s.
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There is nothing wrong about harshly criticizing the Israeli right or advocating for peace, justice and self-determination for Palestinians — I’ve done so myself in the past. But these groups’ credibility on these issues is tainted by their cheerleading of atrocities. Unfortunately, leftist support of human rights abuses is a decades-old phenomenon, going back at least as far as the Soviet Union’s 1956 invasion of Hungary, which was supported at the time by leftists known as “ tankies , ” a reference to their approval of USSR tanks rolling into Budapest to crush the Hungarian Revolution.
For tankies and groups like the PSL and ANSWER Coalition, American and Western imperialism is the original sin responsible for all subsequent evils. This view ignores non-Western imperialism, like Russia’s in Ukraine or Iran’s in Syria, Iraq and Lebanon. It can also dehumanize the people on whose behalf the anti-imperial left claims to speak.
Shortly after reading an article I wrote about Oct. 7, one of my former friends who organizes with the PSL sent me a text that said: “After generations of oppression, we cannot reasonably assume people will be perfectly controlled when they rise up.”
This text confuses Hamas — a fascist, radical Islamic group terrorizing Palestinians — for the people of Palestine. And it frames Palestinians as unable to “be perfectly controlled,” in other words, as incapable of taming their impulses or exerting moral agency. Sound familiar? It’s what colonizers have long said about the peoples they conquered.
Some of the key protest groups outside the DNC this week are enmeshed in conspiracies, drawing more attention to themselves than the real suffering of Palestinians. Sadly, the hypocrisy of claiming to fight for justice while supporting well-documented dictators and atrocities undermines what might have been a shared goal to find peace and oust leaders like Netanyahu. This apologism of well-documented atrocities is a paper shredder to the anti-imperial left’s credibility, both as moral error and a strategic mistake.
This should also be a lesson to people who claim to support Israel: Just as anti-imperial protesters torpedo their credibility when they misrepresent reality, so too do pro-Israel voices when they misrepresent or deny Palestinian suffering.
I agree with the protesters in Chicago about many things: Yes to abortion access. Yes to LGBTQ+ equality. No to Donald Trump. No to Benjamin Netanyahu.
But to stand with these leftist authoritarians to fight against the right would feel like marching with white supremacists in support of climate action. No thank you.
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