Democratic Socialists of America’s Red Star caucus embraces terrorists, says ‘we do not condemn Hamas, and neither should you’

The DSA’s Red Star Caucus posted an article on its website Friday calling for “defeating the Israeli state,” advocating for the organization to take a firm stance of backing Hamas. The Marxist-Leninist caucus wrote, “As socialists, the entirety of our politics are based upon the struggle of the international working class against the capitalists, and the liberation of oppressed peoples everywhere. In the abstract, that much is easy to agree on."

The group then justified the Oct. 7 massacre, writing, "Many people support the idea of resistance, and even support real resistance once it is safely in the past and the propaganda has withered away. But in the moment, when the actual resistance is disrupting the status quo, people are dying, and the propaganda machine is in full gear, some people falter, and leave support for the resistance to the historians.”

On Oct. 8, the group began organizing protests across the US after the attacks that killed over 1,200 people and injured many more. The organization’s Palestinian Solidarity Working Group even released a "tool kit," with the resources to coordinate pro-Hamas rallies coast to coast.

The article criticized the media for referring to the “Palestinian resistance” as “Hamas,” and preferred it to be described “as a popular front involving several militant organizations that coordinate through a Joint Operations Room.”

The group then glorified Hamas, al-Qassam, Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), and the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP) and claimed designated terror groups such as Hamas and PIJ are merely “Islamist groups” and that the PFLP and DFLP “are secular communist groups, but they fight together as a common popular front.”

“They all understand that allowing their disagreements to divide them would only serve Israel’s interests,” adding that “They work with each other and with external groups like Iran, Hezbollah, and Ansarallah under a principle they call 'unity of the fields', which entails a loose coordination where any of them can respond to attacks on the others, making escalation risky for Israel.”

The group claimed, “Palestinian communists’ choice to participate in this alliance is a good thing, and we’re grateful for the good judgment our socialist siblings in the PFLP and DFLP have shown by participating in it. If they had instead chosen not to participate because of ideological disagreements with the Islamist factions, it would have doomed the cause of socialism to irrelevance in Palestine. If socialists were absent from this existential fight for the future of Palestine, it would tell the Palestinian people that socialists are useless when it matters most, and that Islamism is the only way forward. The Palestinian communists are fighting alongside Hamas against Israel, and by doing so they’re building support and legitimacy for socialism in Palestine.”

The group claimed the destruction of the terrorists that raped, tortured, and murdered innocent civilians on Oct. 7 would be counterproductive to their cause. “To support a resistance without Hamas is to support something which does not exist. It is to support no resistance at all. And in turn, to spend our time on criticism of Hamas as an organization validates the widespread opinion that Hamas is an existential danger (too extreme for even the communists!) and lends credence to Israel's justification of its onslaught.”

The article criticized the media for creating “narratives painting escalation as the result of ‘outside agitators’” regarding the group’s efforts to occupy college campuses “in an attempt to divide the movement, suggesting that the people are being led away from some ‘good’ way to protest that the media would accept.”

Marxist and communist groups have been at the center of the antisemitic protests and occupations on college campuses and regularly have their logos on flyers. According to the group, “the students’ struggle is already merging with that of the Palestinian resistance, regardless of how we feel about it. The Palestinian resistance and their allies praise the students, and the students display the resistance’s flags and symbols at the encampments… What would the students gain from distancing themselves from the resistance by condemning Hamas? More clout with 'moderate' Americans, Israelis, and the capitalist media, perhaps, but this is of little value in the fight for a free Palestine or for socialism here, since none of those groups share those goals.”

They then called terrorists in Gaza their “comrades” and noted that Hamas and other Jihadi groups that want the end of Israel and America “have condemned calls to avoid supporting Palestinian resistance. Just as they say, there is no legitimate support for Palestine in the eyes of the capitalist media. No matter how much we compromise and try to sound 'reasonable', they’ll continue to move the goalposts to call us too extreme. The demand for us to condemn Hamas quickly becomes support Israel’s right to exist and then support Israel’s right to defend itself.”

The group then called the terrorist organizations its “allies” to create an “Axis of Resistance,” adding that “all forces fighting alongside Israel are our enemies. Most importantly, that includes its main supporter: the US empire.”

The article continued, “There is no way to oppose Hamas—or any other element of the popular front—without standing in stark opposition to the entire resistance movement.”