Beijing paid the bill. Jihadis wrote the script. Hollywood supplied the useful idiots

On Thursday, an Oscar winner, an Emmy winner, a New York City Council member, and a Democratic congressional nominee sat down on First Avenue. Around them marched communists bankrolled from Shanghai, Islamist-aligned activists, and protesters waving the flag of a terrorist organization. They called it a stand for peace. It was the Red-Green alliance on parade, and Washington should treat it as the influence operation it is.A federal grand jury in Manhattan is examining Neville Roy Singham’s money. Singham is a Shanghai-based tech mogul whose nonprofit network members of Congress accuse of advancing the interests of the Chinese Communist Party. On Thursday, that network’s street machine delivered Hollywood’s biggest names to the curb.Susan Sarandon, Hannah Einbinder, Caleb Hearon, and Chelsea Manning were led away in zip ties. Cynthia Nixon, Elliot Page, Julien Baker, and Lucy Dacus joined them in the street. These performative activists had political company. Democratic congressional nominee Darializa Avila Chevalier, New York City Council member Chi Osse, and activist Linda Sarsour were also arrested, and Brad Lander, another Democratic congressional nominee, joined the protest. New York’s own mayor set the stage. Zohran Mamdani, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, has spent months branding Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu a war criminal on television and social media. He even promised to have the New York Police Department arrest him under an International Criminal Court warrant, a power he never had and later admitted he lacked. It was theater for the manipulated masses, and on Thursday, the street performed the sequel.This was a coalition, not one group’s protest. The sit-in was run by Jewish Voice for Peace, an organization that is neither Jewish nor for peace, with co-sponsors including the DSA, the Palestinian Youth Movement, and New York’s Muslim American Society chapter. The larger march was led by the Palestinian Youth Movement and the People’s Forum, which has received $22 million from Singham. The Party for Socialism and Liberation arrived with wagons of professionally printed signs. Code Pink co-founder Medea Benjamin was on the street. Her fellow co-founder, Jodie Evans, is married to Singham.Protesters waved the flag of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, designated a terrorist organization by the U.S., the European Union, and Canada. They chanted “globalize the intifada,” a call to spread the jihadi terrorism that killed thousands of Jews, Christians, Druze, and foreign workers, along with Muslims branded collaborators or dissenters. They hung Netanyahu in effigy from a noose and called Jews “Zios,” a slur popularized by white supremacists. That is bigotry dressed up as activism.The picture is plain: Palestinianist, Islamist, communist, socialist, and progressive movements, Democratic officeholders and Hollywood celebrities, marching as one behind a terrorist flag.What binds them is Palestinianism, an ideology that turns the Palestinian cause into a political identity aimed at Israel’s elimination rather than Palestinian statehood or welfare. It gives Marxists a revolution, Islamists a jihad, and celebrities a costume.Analysts call this partnership the Red-Green alliance: the communist and socialist left (red) joined with Islamist movements (green), bound by shared enemies (America, Israel, and liberal democracy) rather than shared values. The Soviet bloc armed and trained the PFLP, whose flag flew on First Avenue. Today, Beijing hosts Hamas diplomatically and buys Iran’s oil, and Singham’s network is the alliance’s domestic arm.The hypocrisy is staggering. These celebrities claim to champion LGBT equality, women’s rights, and dissent. The regimes that their movement shields crush all three. Under Hamas, gay men are imprisoned, raped, and killed. Tehran hangs gay men and jails women for showing their hair. Beijing jails dissidents and has detained an estimated 1 million or more Uyghurs. Havana imprisons protesters for decades. None of these victims got a sit-in.History shows how this alliance ends. In 1979, Iran’s communists and leftists marched with Khomeini’s Islamists to topple the Shah. The Islamic Republic then banned its party and, in 1988, executed thousands of leftist political prisoners. The Islamists always turn on the reds, and the gay people, women, and dissidents in the coalition go first. The Western leftists marching with Islamists today are useful idiots.Then there is the charge of genocide. It is chosen because it triggers, summoning the Holocaust to indict the Jewish state. It is also false. Gaza’s population doubled in the quarter-century before Oct. 7, 2023, and U.S. government figures show it kept growing after the war began. On the eve of the war, nearly half of Gazans were under the age of 19. Even Palestinian statistics, which Israel’s Foreign Ministry calls manipulated, count more than 2.1 million people in Gaza today, and by the Palestinian Authority’s own casualty figures, most of the dead are men of fighting age. That is the profile of a war against an army, not the extermination of a people. A genocide does not leave behind a growing, overwhelmingly young population. Israel is fighting a war Hamas started, against terrorists whose leaders have vowed to repeat Oct. 7 again and again. The genocide charge is propaganda, and Beijing, Tehran, and Hamas all profit from the information warfare it fuels.THE WORLD’S WORST HUMAN RIGHTS VIOLATORS JUST GATHERED IN NYC TO LECTURE ISRAELWashington has the tools. The Justice Department should finish its Foreign Agents Registration Act review of the Singham network, which Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-IA) has pressed. The IRS should act on Ways and Means Chairman Jason Smith’s (R-MO) call to revoke the People’s Forum’s tax-exempt status. The Treasury Department should weigh the asset freeze lawmakers have requested. And Democratic leaders should be asked, on the record, whether they stand with officeholders arrested alongside a network under federal investigation.Hollywood supplied the faces. Beijing’s money built the stage. Jihadis wrote the script. It is long past time Washington stopped treating the show as spontaneous.Yuval David is an Emmy Award-winning journalist, news commentator, filmmaker, and actor, and an internationally recognized political advocate and adviser combating antisemitism, extremism, and disinformation while advancing democratic values, human rights, and the U.S.-Israel relationship.