Mick Hartley

Daniel Ben-Ami at Spiked – The chilling rise of the Hamas red triangle:

Earlier this week, inverted red triangles were daubed on the New York home of Anne Pasternak, the director of the Brooklyn Museum. Alongside the ominous symbols was a banner that stated: ‘Anne Pasternak / Brooklyn Museum / White Supremacist Zionist.’ Underneath, in a smaller red font, were the words, ‘funds genocide’. The homes of other Brooklyn Museum board members were also daubed with red triangles.

This act of gross anti-Semitic intimidation – Pasternak herself is Jewish – appears to be a follow-up to last month’s large anti-Israel demonstration outside the Brooklyn Museum. Protesters demanded that the museum condemn the killing of Palestinians in Gaza, disclose its financial ties to Israel and start divesting from the Jewish State.

When used by Hamas, the red triangle essentially denotes that someone is being targeted for execution. It first started using this symbol last November in propaganda videos produced in Gaza. In these, the red triangle was marked on Israeli soldiers or armoured vehicles about to be attacked. Since Hamas started promoting the symbol, it quickly began appearing throughout the Arab world, on everything from children’s comic strips to social-media memes. In the latter, it often appears over images of Israeli soldiers or the Star of David.

Now this repulsive glorification of violence against Israeli targets has been adopted by anti-Israel protesters in the West. As the Anti-Defamation League, a Jewish civil-rights group, has noted, students at the New School, Emerson College and New York University ‘have all advertised their [Gaza solidarity] encampments using inverted red-triangle imagery’.

The echoes of the Thirties are clear, and deliberate.