Pro-Palestinian protesters expose rift on left by crashing Pride Month parades

If there was a takeaway from this year’s Pride Month celebrations, it’s that they’re having trouble coexisting with the pro-Palestinian movement.

Anti-Israel protesters disrupted more than a half-dozen major Pride parades, culminating Sunday with procession-blocking demonstrations in New York City, Chicago, St. Louis and Toronto.

At the NYC Pride Parade, 10 people were taken into custody after protesters threw red paint on the street and on a truck pulling a Human Rights Campaign float, according to local news reports.

In Toronto, the parade was canceled altogether about an hour after pro-Gaza activists brought the procession to a standstill.

“Today we made the decision to cancel the remainder of the Pride Parade out of our commitment to ensuring public safety,” Pride Toronto said Sunday on X. “While we deeply respect and uphold everyone’s right to peacefully protest, our foremost priority is the well-being of all participants and spectators.”

In San Francisco, activists led by groups such as Queers Undermining Israeli Terrorism boycotted Sunday the annual SF Pride Parade with a “No Pride in Genocide” counter-march.

Parades in Philadelphia, Boston and Denver were interrupted in previous weeks by pro-Palestinian protesters, who blocked procession routes and in some cases tangled with the LGBTQ marchers.

Denver PrideFest CEO Rex Fuller rebuked the unauthorized anti-Israel demonstration at the June 23 parade, saying that organizers received “several reports of antisemitic language used by protesters.”

“These incidents included statements such as ’Jews and Zionists do not belong at PrideFest’ and worse, along with harassment of Jewish community members at their booth,” said Mr. Fuller, CEO of The Center on Colfax, which organizes PrideFest.

“To be clear: this is unacceptable,” he said in a Friday statement. “The Center does not endorse or condone the hateful language used by people in the protest group. Just as we would condemn homophobic or transphobic incidents, we condemn hate speech in any form, including antisemitism.”

A Pride Parade in NYC was blocked by pro Palestine protesters.

The alphabet gang and “Queers for Palestine” are so confused right now 🤣 pic.twitter.com/YYG9cy8C9F

— Sara Rose 🇺🇸🌹 (@saras76) June 30, 2024

The skirmishes came as evidence of a rift within the left-wing intersectionality framework, the oppressed-versus-oppressor matrix that unites a plethora of seemingly unrelated leftist causes, including LGBTQ rights and the Palestinian movement, based on alleged victim status.

Demonstrators sought to draw connections between the two movements. In San Francisco, activists chanted “Intifada! Intifada! Stonewall was an intifada,” conflating the 1969 Stonewall gay-rights riots with the Palestinian uprisings against the Israeli government.

“We understand that all of our struggles are interconnected and that there is no queer liberation without Palestinian liberation,” said the Party for Socialism and Liberation Bay Area, which supported the Pride parade boycott, in a Sunday post on Instagram.

Jody Sokolower, an author and co-coordinator of the Teach Palestine Project, said at the San Francisco counter-march that “the oppression of us as queer people is not separate from what happens to Palestinians.”

“Israel in particular has tried to build support for their colonial conquest by saying, ’Oh, we’re the safest place for gay people,’” she told KNTV-TV in San Francisco. “It’s called pinkwashing.”

Few would argue that Israel is less LGBTQ-friendly than Gaza, which is controlled by Hamas, the Islamic terrorist group that massacred 1,200 Israeli civilians and others in an Oct. 7 attack, prompting Israel to declare war.

Israel topped the list of Middle Eastern nations in the latest Equaldex World Equality Index, which ranks nations based on LGBTQ legal rights and freedoms, with a ranking of 59th out of 196 countries and a score of 59. “Palestine” was ranked 147th with a score of 22.

Outspoken, a publication of the Log Cabin Republicans, a gay-rights GOP group, asked in a June 11 headline: “When did gay activists become useful idiots for homophobic terror groups like Hamas?”

“This summer is set to be a mass of pride parades doubling as pro-Palestine rallies, full of useful idiots who want to undermine our freedoms in the name of an ideology that hates them,” said Outspoken author Peter Lloyd. “They say pride comes before a fall. I’d say it’s already fallen.”

He cited a 2023 Gallup poll that showed that Americans who think homosexuality is morally acceptable declined from the previous year by 7%.

“The obvious explanation for this is that the movement is no longer about equality, but drag queens indoctrinating children with pro-Hamas BS,” Mr. Lloyd said. “Nobody wants that, gay or straight.”

In Chicago, activists blocked the parade for nine minutes, one minute for every month of the Israeli-Hamas War, and hung banners with messages such as “No Pride in Apartheid” and “You Can’t Pink Wash Blood Off Your Hands,” as shown on the U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights page on Facebook.

SF Pride landed in a kerfuffle last month after organizers said that there would be “no Israeli float,” and that pro-Palestinian groups were welcome to participate in the parade. The group had previously called for a ceasefire and the release of hostages.

The organization clarified its statement days later by emphasizing that “all are welcome at Pride.”

“Just to be crystal clear: absolutely all LGBTQ+ people and allies are welcome at San Francisco Pride, and that includes Israelis and Jewish people just as it does Palestinians and Muslims,” said SF Pride in a June 6 statement.