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The scenes in Brooklyn this week of anti-Israel agitators flooding into a Jewish residential neighborhood to decry the Jewish state need to be a wake-up call to all of us, and we must plainly say, “Don’t make trouble where our families live.”
The images of terrified Orthodox Jews on their porches watching as their treelined streets were taken over by radical progressives, several of whom were arrested for acts of violence, requires a firm response from the government which must protect our residential areas from mayhem.
While the constitution protects protest, even in residential areas, such as outside the home of a Supreme Court justice, there are measures the government can take to prevent violence and intimidation in such areas.
Here is how Ilya Shapiro, director of Constitutional Studies at the Manhattan Institute put it:
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“The Constitution protects the right to protest, but as with speech protections more broadly, there can be time, place, and manner restrictions,” he told me. “Someone can properly be charged for disturbing the peace for using a megaphone at 2am to express his views about political leaders. More pointedly, a state or municipality can define ‘disturbing the peace’ in a way that protects residential areas as it does for schools, houses of worship, and other sensitive areas.”
So, for example, local, state and federal governments can and should provide far stiffer penalties for protest-related crimes committed in a residential area, where the clear goal is not speech, but intimidation.
Agitation in residential areas has a long and fraught history in our culture, from medieval anti-Jewish pogroms to the ransacking of Catholic neighborhoods in Elizabethan London, to the KKK of the Jim Crow south, and the Crown Heights riots of the 1990s. It rarely ends well.
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I’m not sure that there is even one historical example of protest in residential enclaves bringing about positive, peaceful change, but examples of chaos and violence abound, written in blood.
Both Renee Good and Alex Pretti would be alive today had they been protesting in a traditional manner in a public square instead of physically impeding federal agents in residential neighborhoods.
Since the dawn of civilization, towns and cities have been built with large public spaces that grant egress and exits, that allow a safe place for throngs of thousands to celebrate or protest. But that is not what residential areas are for.
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What purpose could there be in marching past the homes of innocent Jews to protest the Jewish homeland, other than pure intimidation?
These are the same deranged leftists who think there should be no buffer zones for their protests outside of synagogues. But why? Why do they need to be in arms’ reach of their Jewish targets, if not to intimidate or assault them?
This is why federal legislation to enhance penalties for protest-related crimes in residential areas is essential, and we know that such measures work because, ever since Don Lemon and his band of idiots invaded a Minnesota church and were arrested, no other churches have been overrun.
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Likewise, as soon as the Trump administration made clear in 2020 that destroying federal statues would get you 10 years in jail, the statues magically stopped falling.
In a sane world, protest organizers themselves, or their leaders like New York City Mayor Zohran ‘Madman’ Mamdani, would insist that demonstrations never occur in residential areas, that people’s homes be respected. But don’t hold your breath.
For whatever maniacal reason, these leftists think it is not only their right, but their responsibility to inflict chaos and fear on Jews until everyone comes around to their pro-Hamas politics of terror, a cabal of cowards frightening children.
As idiotic and reprehensible as the behavior is, we cannot stop progressive loonies from setting up camp outside the house of a conservative judge or a member of the Trump administration. Sometimes, in fact with some regularity, freedom of speech becomes freedom to be a moron.
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But we can make clear that, if in so doing, you break the law, it’s not just a ticket and a summons but real jail time for terrorizing people on the streets where they and their children live.
Brooklyn is known as the city of homes and churches and we are very lucky that so far, the targeting of those homes and places of worship by lefty protesters has not left anyone dead. But before that luck runs out, Congress should act, and protect our residences and our families from political violence.
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