Sunday in LA-Pro Hamas Rally

Today at the Federal Building in Westwood, the pro-Hamas supporters had what is now becoming a weekly feature of LA life. It was an anti-Israel rally. Thanks to the Zionist Organization of America (LA Chapter) and others, the pro-Israel forces turned out more folks than the forces of evil.

While there were a couple of hundred pro-Hamas supporters, several hundred pro-Israel people showed up to show that LA stands for Israel. In what was supposed to be the pro-Palestinians' event, it was the Israel supporters who carried the day. The pro-Palestinians for their part were angry as buzzards and were reduced to their tired old chants and two sentence nursery rhymes, plus their march down Wilshire Blvd to stand and chant in front of the Israeli consulate. Furthermore, the motorists were solidly on Israel's side, honking, waving Israeli flags, and showing lots of love to the good guys.

The police of LAPD and LASD did a much better job of crowd control keeping the two sides apart than the previous two weeks. For the most part we were on the north side of Wilshire while the other side was on the south side. Somehow at one point, our side was occupying three corners of the intersection of Wilshire and Veteran. At one point a mob of about 20 pro-Palestinians tried to cross to our side to cause trouble and twice that number of pro-Israel demonstrators met them halfway in the crosswalk and forced them to stop before Sheriff's deputies moved in.

In the beginning, I mingled with the pro-Palestinian side just to get some video. I then went to my car and pulled out some posters I had made up yesterday. Here they are.

I wanted to see if the pro-Palestinian folks would find anything objectionable about those images, so I set up on their side and began holding the posters one after another. Sure enough, some of the protesters came over and took issue. One said there was nothing anti-Semitic about what they were doing and that they were Semitic as well. One young guy asked me to go back to the other side of Wilshire, which I refused to do. Another lady went and complained to a sheriff's deputy that I should not be there. He told her I had a right to be there. Then a couple of older Arab guys came over. One began talking about Jews controlling the world, the banks and that they were oppressing Palestinians, etc. At one point, when he was talking about what the Jews were doing in Gaza, I said, "You mean the Israelis, don't you?". He said, "No, I mean the Jews." He told me that everybody is anti-Semitic because of what they are doing, then became reduced to saying "F-You" a few times as he stalked off.  I must say that there was one young man who came over and engaged me in a civil discussion before I moved on. By that time, the word was getting around among the crowd not to engage me. Of course, nobody wanted to talk about what ISIS is doing to Christians.

The unfortunate part was that I had nobody with me to film it all and was trying to do it with my cell phone as I was having to deal with these characters. You guessed it. The recording failed. Anyway, I did get a lot of crowd coverage with my video camera.

While the march to the Israeli consulate took place, our side was prevented from following. At that point, it was time for food and a couple of cool ones. By the time I got back, most of the Israeli supporters had gone home and at five o'clock it ended. Well, not quite. As both sides were leaving the area, much shouting and cursing was going on across Veteran Avenue. At one point, a young Arab-American girl completely lost it and had to be restrained two or three times. I got that on video.  It was not a good day for the pro-Hamas people. At various times in the videos you can see the green flag of Hamas, which I often point out in the narrative.

I am downloading videos as I write and will follow-up with a posting full of videos.