Survivors of the Hamas terrorist attack have spoken out against the “ignorant” pro-Palestinian protests breaking out in US cities and college campuses, and fear they could be the start of something worse.
“I opened a newspaper and on the second page I saw a sign in a store that said ‘no Jews allowed,’” Maya Parizer, 27, told The Post.
Parizer recently arrived in the United States after escaping the Nova Music Festival massacre, where Hamas terrorists massacred more than 200 innocent revelers on October 7.
“For me, this takes me back to the days of the Holocaust, where it all started with small things but then the hate crimes became bigger,” he said.
Parizer was partying with friends at the festival in Re’im, Israel, not far from the Gaza border, when Iranian-backed terrorists attacked.
He hid in a small room for 23 hours with three other families while terrorists invaded the event, killing or capturing anyone they could.
Protesters gather as part of the “Flood Wall Street for Gaza” demonstration in front of the New York Stock Exchange on October 26. AFP via Getty Images
She said that even though she is now on American soil, she still doesn’t feel safe.
Before a meeting with US senators at the Capitol this week, Parizer was forced to enter the building through an underground tunnel as pro-Palestinian protesters blocked his entrance.
Follow The Post’s live blog for the latest on Hamas’ attack on Israel.
He said he feared protesters would become violent, which went against his perception that the United States is “the safest place possible.”
“I want to stop being afraid like I have been since October 7. It keeps getting worse because I’m not in the war zone anymore, but I feel like I am somehow,” he said.
“I’m afraid that on any corner someone will identify me, maybe from the interview, maybe from hearing my accent, maybe just by assuming. “We are in 2023, people should just wake up.”
People search through the rubble of buildings destroyed by Israeli airstrikes in Khan Yunis, southern Gaza Strip. The bombing began shortly after Hamas launched a terrorist attack against Israel on October 7. AFP via Getty Images
Shortly after Israel began its retaliatory airstrikes against Hamas, pro-Palestinian protesters took to the streets across the country.
While many have been peaceful, others have seen hate-filled protesters burn American and Israeli flags, or worse.
At a pro-Palestinian rally in Midtown the day after the Hamas attack on Israel that killed 1,400 Jews, one attendee was seen brandishing an image of a swastika on his phone.
Several high school girls from the Brooklyn Urban Assembly Young Women’s Mathematics and Science Institute also brandished disturbing signs at a rally in Washington Square Park on Wednesday that read, “Please keep the world clean” over an illustration showing the Blue Star of David in a trash can. .
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Mark Avsker, the Soviet-born grandson of Holocaust survivors, said some of the demonstrations in the United States he has seen or read about “give a very superficial view of the situation.”
“I don’t expect most people to delve into some conflict or situation on the other side of the world. It is totally okay for people to be ignorant in that situation,” he admitted, before adding: “It is not okay to be ignorant and then express extreme and very strong opinions about the situation that you know nothing about.
“And not only that but also violently insisting that their opinions be enforced,” he added. “That is completely unacceptable.”
The campuses of some of America’s top colleges and universities have been the scene of some of the most vitriolic anti-Semitic rhetoric, deployed under the guise of showing support for the Palestinians.
On October 11, a 24-year-old Israeli student at Columbia University was beaten with a stick outside the university’s main library, leading to hate crime assault charges against 19-year-old Maxwell Friedman.
Protests on campus resumed the next day, when thousands of people representing both sides flooded its main square.
The day after Hamas’ cowardly attack on Israel, 34 groups of Harvard University students signed a letter saying that Israel was “fully responsible” for the terrorist attack.
A slogan designated as anti-Semitic by the Anti-Defamation League, which Hamas attack survivor Adele Raemer calls “a genocidal rallying cry,” is projected in a lower Manhattan courthouse during a pro-Palestine rally on October 26. AFP via Getty Images
Harvard saw large pro-Palestinian demonstrations on campus, including chanting “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” which the Anti-Defamation League calls an “anti-Semitic slogan.”
Adele Raemer, a survivor of the Hamas attack, agrees, but went a step further.
“When they say that Palestine will be free from the river to the sea, we have to understand that it is a genocidal war cry,” said the 68-year-old American-Israeli, who spent 14 hours locked in the armored cell of her home in the Kibbutz. Nirim. her safe room, while she and her family listened to Hamas fighters burn the city to the ground and kidnap their neighbors.
“And I take them at their word.”
Avsker also shared a harrowing account that echoed the events of the Holocaust told to him by his sister-in-law, who took refuge with her three young children while bloodthirsty terrorists raided their neighborhood.
“The images [she] He told me how they were hiding in the shelter, listening to the soldiers shoot and hearing their voices and waiting in horror for the moment when the door would open and they would be shot on the spot. Those are images that he did not expect to hear now because he remembered many of them.”
Avsker said that although the Holocaust occurred 80 years ago during “a different era” and a “different place,” it is still a living story for everyone in Israel.
He expressed fears about what will happen when tomorrow’s young leaders, currently fed a steady diet of inaccurate information about Israel at top colleges and universities across the country, graduate into the real world.
“Children grow up, but the concern is that if those children, when they grow up, don’t acquire some common sense, they will become leaders and replace the current leaders who still have some common sense. That will be worrying,” he told The Post.
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Source: vtt.edu.vn