(RealClearWire)—“Death to America!” We are used to that chant. Maybe too used to it.
If you are old enough, you heard it in 1979 during the Iranian hostage crisis when supporters of Ayatollah Khomeini invaded the U.S. Embassy in Tehran.
Since then, it has been a recurring theme of Islamic fundamentalism, along with “Death to Israel.” Khomeini even went so far as to declare the United States “The Great Satan” in order to goad Muslims into a religious fervor aimed at destroying America.
Since then, we have heard “Death to America” shouted thousands of times around the globe. When the World Trade Center was destroyed in a terror attack in 2001 and thousands of innocent lives were taken there and at the Pentagon and on an empty field in Shanksville, Pa., the jarring chant was heard from the West Bank, from Gaza, from Somalia, and across the Muslim world.
But now it is closer to home. In fact, the chant of “Death to America” is being heard on American soil, and it is being written off by some naive commentators as First Amendment-protected speech. No big deal. We were told by a Supreme Court justice once that the Constitution is not a suicide pact, but if so, then how can we tolerate the anti-American rhetoric of thousands of newcomers as “free speech” when their goal is plainly the destruction of America?
To be specific, “Death to America” was heard earlier this month at a Dearborn, Mich., rally held on al-Quds Day, an anti-Israel holiday invented by Khomeini years ago. At the pro-Palestinian rally, speaker Tarek Bazzi attacked Joe Biden for his support of Israel in the Gaza War but added, “It’s not Genocide Joe that has to go, it is the entire system that has to go. Any system that would allow such atrocities and devilry to happen and would support it – such a system does not deserve to exist on God’s earth.”
Dearborn is the largest Muslim population center in the United States, so it is no surprise that anti-Israel rhetoric is heard there, but what we saw in the days following suggests that we are not just under attack with hateful words but also with actions that can only be described as seditious.
On April 15, pro-Palestinian protesters shut down the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco. That same day, in Oregon, traffic was shut down in one direction on Interstate 5 by protesters wielding Palestinian flags. Roads were also shut down in Seattle and Chicago to block air travelers from accessing terminals at the airports in those cities. This was a coordinated effort, and it promises to be the first of many, “with the aim of causing the most economic impact” in the U.S. and elsewhere in order to persuade nations to abandon Israel.
Welcome to the global intifada, yet another disastrous result of the Biden administration’s porous border and feckless foreign policy.
Intifada refers specifically to two separate uprisings of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank over the past four decades, but more broadly, it pertains to the continued resistance of the Palestinians to the existence of Israel. When they shout “Death to Israel,” they mean it. It should be a top priority of Congress now to determine whether they mean it when they shout “Death to America.”
The rise of pro-Palestinian hatred in the United States should not be a surprising development to anyone. Even before President Biden opened the southern border to millions of unvetted “newcomers,” as the global elites like to call the invaders, there has been a reckless U.S. policy going back two decades to resettle Muslim refugees from Iraq, Libya, Somalia, and Afghanistan in the U.S. heartland. And because immigration policy no longer treats assimilation as a worthwhile goal, many of those refugees are loyal to their homeland and their religion much more than to the nation that offered them safety and security.
I suppose that is an inevitable result of the globalist agenda of border dissolution and the merging of disparate populations for the purpose of sharing wealth and assuaging billionaires’ guilt.
But it is only inevitable if the rest of us tolerate it.
In the meantime, the Palestinians have learned the lesson of how to play the victim card. With the support of the left-wing media, they have worked tirelessly to convince the world that the bloodthirsty killers of Hamas are actually heroic freedom fighters. This is not by accident. Since the Hamas invasion of Israel on Oct. 7, Palestinian advocates have been calling on their supporters to “globalize the intifada,” a phrase that “calls for people from around the globe to participate in rising up against Israel.”
According to the American Jewish Committee, “Calls to ‘globalize the intifada’ contribute to the sense that people around the world need to take action against supporters of Israel around the world. Many protests have been peaceful, still some have taken violent action against Jews and their institutions. There are numerous examples of the usage of the phrase such as at a demonstration in Times Square, in front of the Consulate General of Israel in Manhattan, in central London, at Harvard University, and even on Eastern Parkway in Brooklyn, not far from Crown Heights, a neighborhood with a very large Hasidic Jewish population that is the home of the Chabad-Lubavitch movement.”
Just last week, pro-Palestinian students held a disruptive protest at Columbia University on the very day when the university’s president, Minouche Shafik, was being grilled by members of a U.S. House committee about the rise of antisemitism on campus. Shafik testified that “One of the issues that we are actively debating now is to actually clarify where language crosses the line from protected speech to discriminatory or harassing speech.”
As Islamic protests escalate over the next few months, that is a debate that should be quickly concluded, not just at Columbia but across America. If protesters disrupt civil society and threaten violence or insurrection, there should be no doubt about the resolve of a free society to fight back. The Department of Justice does not exist solely to prosecute Trump supporters. Attorney General Merrick Garland had better act quickly to suppress the very real insurrection about to blow across the country, or else he and his president will reap the whirlwind.
This article was originally published by RealClearPolitics and made available via RealClearWire.
Bypass Big Tech Censors
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.