Anyone who happened to amble by the downtown Manhattan courthouse in early December, just after a jury acquitted Daniel Penny—the former Marine who put Jordan Neely, a deranged and threatening fellow subway passenger, in a chokehold that led to his death—would have noticed something peculiar.
It wasn’t that the sidewalk was filled with protesters, or that they were chanting slogans that ignored the facts of the situation, presenting Neely—a mentally ill man with 42 previous convictions, including for violent assaults on the subway—as an innocent lynched by a malicious white vigilante for no reason other than his being black. It was, instead, that many of the protesters were wearing keffiyehs, the traditional Arab headwear popular with the pro-Palestine crowd, as well as pins or t-shirts featuring the Palestinian flag.
