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GIORDANO: The Left Invents A Martyr By A Tree

By Alice Giordano

An elaborate street shrine, the type you see that marks a spot where a child was brutally murdered, has taken shape around a tree in Somerville, Massachusetts.

There are piles of flowers, cards, handwritten notes, ribbons, even a cross spray painted in blaze red on the imposing tree itself.

For three days straight, major network television stations camped outside this makeshift marabout even showing up one day at 5 O’clock in the morning.

Passing motorists steadily beep in solidarity to pay homage to this grassroots presbytery, adorned in what appears to be inspirations from the current Lenten season, a sacred time for many Christian faiths across the world.

One handwritten message on a purple piece of construction paper carefully wrapped in plastic reads “And Still We Rise,” a version of a well-known Easter epitaph. Purple, of course, is the traditional liturgical color for Lent.

It makes it all the more ironic that this street martyry is all for Hamas sympathizer Rumeysa Ozturk.

The 30-year-old Turkish nationalist and her impending deportation has been daily global news since she was picked up by ICE agents, or “snatched” as her sympathizers like to embellish, from the very location of her Massachusetts dargah.

As if she was Joan of Arc burned at the stake, Ozturk — here in the U.S. under the privileges of a foreign student visa — has been turned into a modern day martyr — here on American soils.

It doesn’t seem to matter that Ozturk is a celebrator of a group that gang raped teenage girls, brutally slaughtered them, and beheaded babies.

Instead, now she is an American-made shaheed, an exalted figure in Islamic culture.

Her overnight canonization spotlights a disturbing hypocrisy, near lunacy,  by the propaganda media and a fan-tribe with questionable sanity — at least it should be construed that way. Because if not — then — what is?

As her sympathizers scribbled Christian messages to an Islamic fundamentalist, they expressed outrage that Ozturk was arrested, not during the Easter season, but  rather during Ramadan, a Muslim observance.

Even Tufts University, the very college she excoriated for not siding with her pro-Palestinian protests, have joined in her deification, demanding she be released at once, even petitioning a federal judge to do so.

Less than two years earlier, the brutal assault of a young female Tufts student just nine blocks from Ozturk’s street shrine barely mustered up even a sliver of such outrage.

The student was attacked by a man ordered released by a local liberal judge on an ankle bracelet on a previous assault conviction.

Nature Moncoeur, the assailant, had cut off his bracelet, carried out the assault, and then fled the state, not to be seen again in the local headlines.

No mediafare showed up to invent a saint like they have with Ozturk.

The same discrepant apathy from the community has been no different.

The very same citizenry, the same ones who insistently promote the killing of babies in the name of reproductive rights, are the same who have consecrated a tree with Christian messages for a cultural Muslim.

Adding even greater aberration, Easter encompasses Passover, which commemorates the liberation of Israelites, the very same people Ozturk detests.

This public sidewalk altar is even all the more ironic since for years, Massachusetts liberals have fought especially hard against any kind of public displays marking Christian holidays, even leading to the landmark U.S. Supreme Court case Shurtleff vs. Boston — a failed attempt to keep a Christian flag of a public flagpole where Pride and Communist China flags had been unquestionably unfurled.

One of Ozturk’s sympathizers complained in a post on X: “There is a specific cruelty with ICE choosing to arrest” Ozturk while on her way to an “Iftar meal breaking their Ramadan fast.”

In proverbial antithetical fashion, this group — so incensed that Ozturk was taken during Ramadan — never once professed any furor that  Israelis were “snatched” not to mention slaughtered by Hamas militants during Sukkot, a sacred week-long Jewish observance that starts on Oct. 6 —  the evening before the horrifying Oct. 7 attack.

There were neither no Christian messages or bouquets for Americans held at gunpoint with their hands cuffed behind their backs in their own homes simply for attending the Jan. 6 Capitol protests.

Unlike a retired Texas couple, Ozturk didn’t have assault weapons pointed in her face, flash bangs thrown at her, or a trained laser fixed on her forehead, the day she was taken into federal custody.

There wasn’t a scintilla of fury, not even a whisper from this same group, when Mark and Jalise Middleton, devout Catholics, were arrested on Easter Monday or sent to prison during Christmas.

No tirthas or spray-painted crosses have neither appeared for the child, who the nation learned just days before Easter Sunday — suffered unspeakable sex crimes at the hands of Gilberto Avila-Jara, yet another illegal immigrant  allowed to walk free when yet another Massachusetts left judge ignored an ICE detainer and freed him.

Instead, gut wrenching for Ozturk’s devotees is that she was gently led away by female ICE agents who offered her water and comfort.

Of course, the ultimate hypocrisy in all of this madness is like most colleges around the U.S., Tufts University and its surrounding neighborhoods are likely built on stolen land from native Americans —  meaning foreigners like Ozturk are protesting the fallacy that Israel stole land from Palestinians — on stolen land while they gather on yet more stolen land to preach to Americans about it.

The myopia is so rabid that undoubtedly, if the next newsworthy event involving Ozturk occurs around the 4th of July, it will be festooned by anti-American Americans in red, white and blue in time for our patriotic Independence Day.

If only “Make America Great Again” could “Make America Make Sense Again….”

Alice Giordano is an investigative reporter for Newsmax Magazine, a contributor to The Federalist, and a former political correspondent for The Epoch Times, Associated Press, and The Boston Globe. Her commentaries can be heard daily on Newsweek’s Topic of the Day.