Israel Blamed for October 7; Pro-Israel Activist Blamed for Being Assaulted

Dexter Van Zile

On September 12, Caleb Gannon, 31, attacked a U.S. Army veteran in Newton, Massachusetts.
Gannon was wounded by a gunshot as the veteran defended himself. The attack, and what has followed, reflect a worrying trend of tolerance for acts of violence by supporters of Hamas and their allies. A Focus on Western Islamism (FWI) investigation reveals the key facts and their worrying implications.

Activist Attacks Veteran

On the evening of the attack, Gannon made his way to a busy intersection just over half a mile away from his parents’ house in Newton, Massachusetts. Once there, he saw several activists who had gathered on the sidewalk to call for the release of Israeli hostages held by Hamas in Gaza. Gannon, a Dungeons and Dragons aficionado who has a penchant for playing guitar, drums, and bass and posting video of his performances on Instagram, made obscene and juvenile gestures at the protesters, accusing them of supporting “genocide.”

After working himself into a frenzy, Gannon ran across the street through heavy traffic, punched a 47-year-old Iraqi war veteran in the face, and then tackled him to the ground, smashing his victim’s head on the sidewalk. Gannon then put his arm around his victim’s neck in an apparent effort to choke him unconscious.

If the attack, which was caught on video, were allowed to proceed much further, its target, a well-known pro-Israel activist by the name of Scott Hayes, could very well have suffered the same fate as Paul Kessler, a 69-year-old man who died in November 2023 after he was hit in the head by a megaphone wielded by an anti-Israel protester at a rally in Thousand Oaks, California.

Fortunately, the assault came to an abrupt end when Hayes allegedly used his pistol, which he was licensed to carry, to shoot Gannon in the belly. After Gannon stopped fighting and took off his shirt, the pro-Israel protesters Gannon previously accused of supporting “genocide” tended to his wounds and called police, who took him to Beth-Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, where he was put into a medically induced coma and intubated to stabilize his condition.

The police arrested the bruised and bloodied Hayes, charging him with assault and battery with a dangerous weapon and violating the civil rights of his attacker and kept him overnight in a jail cell in police headquarters. The initial charges leveled at Hayes by the Newton Police Department astonished and dismayed people in Boston’s pro-Israel community, who have witnessed increasing levels of violence and hostility toward Jews and their allies in American society since the October 7 massacre.

“Once [Hayes] was on the ground, lethal force was justified,” said Mathew Garland, a Massachusetts-based security consultant and instructor. “Thirty seconds after someone starts choking you, you lose consciousness,” added Garland, who refrained from giving further identifying details for fear of retribution from pro-Hamas agitators. The size of the attacker is irrelevant in such instances, Garland said. “You don’t know what he’s carrying in his pocket. He could take out a knife and stab you in the chest.”

Within hours of the shooting, Hayes’s friends and supporters start a GoFundMe page to raise money for his legal fees. Before midnight on Thursday, September 12, 2024, the day of the shooting, it had garnered more than $100,000 and within a few days, more than $250,000. Standing on the steps of Newton District Court the following afternoon after the arraignment, (during which Hayes was charged with only one count of assault and battery with a dangerous weapon), his lawyer, Glenn Mackinlay from McCarter and English, a top-ranked law firm in Boston, declared the shooting a “textbook case of self-defense.” As of this writing, no charges have been filed against Gannon.

“The charges against Hayes fly in the face of every single one of the 13 unrefuted witness statements taken by police officers at the scene,” says Massachusetts attorney Karen Hurvitz. “Each witness reported that after yelling at the demonstrators, Gannon ran across the street and attacked Hayes, jumping at him, punching him in the face and knocking him over. Even after Gannon was shot, he was still wrestling with Hayes. When the officers arrived and then arrested Hayes, multiple people protested, confirming that Hayes was innocent and had been attacked. Hayes had visible facial injuries.”

Hurvitz was shocked to see that in their report to the Middlesex District Attorney Newton police charged Hayes with a violation of Gannon’s constitutional rights.

“There is no constitutional right to physically attack someone you disagree with,” she said.

Gannon’s Assault part of a Trend

The controversy surrounding the charges against Hayes threatened to obscure an important reality: pro-Hamas propagandists who had been demonizing Israel—and the United States—on social media since October 7 had clearly hit paydirt with Gannon, inciting him into mimicking Hamas by attacking an armed man on the streets of Newton, a city of approximately 90,000 residents, 20 percent of whom are Jews. With Gannon’s attack, the contagion of anti-Jewish violence that manifested itself on college campuses during the last academic school year has gone out into the public square, warns Hayes’s second attorney, Yael Magen.

“If you look at the video … it’s as if people actually feel that it’s okay to assault a person that supports the Jewish people,” she said after the arraignment.

The police report indicates that Gannon’s father told police that his son likely suffered from autism, was “hyper-focused on Hamas,” and saw the conflict between Israel and the jihadist organization “in ‘black and white.’” The content of Gannon’s social media accounts make it tough to assess which country he hated more, Israel or the United States.

On his now-deleted X account, Gannon, a Jew, called his family “ghouls” for not hating Israel as much as much as he did and reposted a comment that Zionists should feel unsafe. He also declared on X that “The United States government is a roque terrorist organization that does not represent its population. It must end. All police precincts, military bases, and government offices must be liquidated immediately, and all resources from them redirected back into their communities.” He also retweeted a post falsely declaring that Israel killed 200,000 people in Gaza since October 7 and another post stating that “it’s ok to be an enemy of the state when your state is run by fascists.”

On Instagram, he posted a video of himself performing a song declaring his contempt for the United States and also posted a link to a number of Gofundme pages for families living in Gaza. “Hi, can you help me from Gaza,” one commenter asked him on Instagram.

Ominously enough, Gannon’s self-destructive and potentially homicidal act was preceded on the previous day by the self-immolation of another anti-Israel activist, Matt Nelson, in front of the Israeli consulate in Boston, and several months before that, by Aaron Bushnell’s self-immolation in front of the Israeli embassy in Washington. Gannon’s assault on an armed adversary came nine months after the suicide by fire of another unnamed protester in front of the Israeli consulate in Atlanta in December 2023. Sickeningly enough, the Muslim Justice League, well known for running interference for Muslim terrorists, organized a now-postponed vigil in downtown Boston to celebrate both Gannon and Nelson’s self-destructive acts with the goal of demonstrating “solidarity with all those risking their lives to resist and for all of our martyrs.” This vigil, coupled with the Iranian regime’s lionization of Aaron Bushnell’s act of self-murder, send a message to lost souls that they too can become heroes through acts of self-destruction and violence, just like the hijackers on 9/11.

In addition to highlighting the manner in which Islamists and their allies on the left have fomented and taken advantage of what appears to be a mental health crisis on the part of young people in the United States, Gannon’s self-destructive attack on Hayes is emblematic of the increase in hostility toward Jews and their allies in American society that has been evident in the U.S. in the months since October 7.

“It’s getting worse and the worst part is that the authorities don’t do anything about it, and these people are getting more brazen,” said Eli Davidyan, a Massachusetts-based activist who attended a pro-Israel rally held in Newton on Sunday, September 15, 2024, three days after the assault. “People feel it’s open season on the Jews.”

CAIR Suggests Hayes Is Aggressor

Predictably enough, the Massachusetts chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), an Islamist organization that has played a central role in importing Hamas-style Jew-hatred from the Middle East into American society since its founding in the early 1990s, spun Gannon’s attack and the consequences it engendered into a story about violence against “pro-Palestinian” activists in a statement issued on September 13, 2024, the day after the attack.

“We are deeply concerned by this tragic situation. Our thoughts and prayers are with the injured individual and the entire community,” said Tahirah Amatul-Wadud, executive director of the Massachusetts chapter of CAIR in a statement that clearly ignored the injuries Hayes endured as a result of Gannon’s attack. Hayes’s booking photo shows that his face was badly blooded and bruised as a result of the attack and a scabbed elbow, which was clearly visible as he stood in the defendant’s cage in court the following day.

After passing over Hayes’s injuries in silence, Amatal-Wadud suggested that Hayes was the aggressor, declaring that “too often, we witness pro-Israel protesters harassing and threatening peaceful pro-Palestinian demonstrators without proper police intervention.” The Patriot Ledger furthered this narrative by publishing an article that relayed complaints about Hayes’s alleged aggressiveness toward anti-Israel protesters who, in one instance, stopped their public demonstrations, “fearing violent provocations from counter-protesters, including Hayes.”

A news outlet in Lexington also portrayed Hayes as the aggressor in a piece quoting members of a group that calls itself Lexington for Palestine, who complained of confrontations they had with Hayes during the weekly anti-Israel protests they held at the corner of Pleasant Street and Massachusetts Avenue in that town.

The Lexington Observer, the publication that smeared Hayes, clearly hadn’t talked to pro-Israel protesters who had been harassed by Gannon’s ideological fellow travelers in Lexington. Karen Hurvitz, a petite woman, was standing on a lawn on the other side of the street from the main protest when two pro-Hamas activists crossed the road, stood on the sidewalk in front of her and a friend, and backed into both of them. Hurvitz and her friend circled back around the two protesters to be able to display their signs to passersby.

“They backed into us again,” Hurvitz said. The upshot, Hurvitz said is that the pro-Hamas folks are “very aggressive and physically assaultive.”

Protector of Jews, Zionists

Ali Salimi, an activist associated with the anti-Iranian regime group Boston to Iran, says that Hayes worked to keep the peace during tense situations at rallies, oftentimes turning his back to the anti-Israel protesters as he called on the pro-Israel demonstrators to settle down during heated moments at protests.

“All I’ve seen through this time is that he just tries to make sure people are protected,” Salimi said. This reporter witnessed for himself Hayes’s efforts to keep the peace during a time of high tension. It happened on July 5, 2024, when pro-Khamenei activist Kian Kianfar taunted and bullied Iranian dissidents at Iranian balloting taking place in Woburn, Massachusetts.

“We’re keeping a distance from him,” Hayes said. “We’re staying back.”

But I’m a reporter. I want to ask him some questions.

“Ask him from over here,” Hayes said, gesturing for the reporter to move a few feet away before his fellow activists encouraged him to let the interview proceed.

Given the protection Hayes afforded to pro-Israel activists, many of them Jews, and Iranian human rights activists, who have suffered harassment and bullying at the hands of pro-Hamas agitators since October 7, it comes as no surprise that his supporters were able to gather the $5,000 bond required to get him out of jail less than an hour after the conditions of his bail were announced by Newton District Court on Friday, September 13, 2024.

Virtually every one of the 60 or so people who waited in the courtroom for hours to witness Hayes’s 3:00 p.m. arraignment readily handed over whatever cash they had on hand to secure his release. And when the money in their pockets, wallets and purses, was insufficient, a few people bolted to the ATM to get the remaining funds needed to post his $5,000 bond.

Gannon, for his part, has kept a low profile since he attacked Hayes and suffered the consequences. No one answered the door at his house in Newton when a reporter from FWI rang the doorbell in hopes of learning of his condition three days after the attack. And while Middlesex District Attorney Marian Ryan is reportedly going to file assault and battery charges against Gannon, it hadn’t happened a week after he tackled and punched Hayes just a few minutes before sundown on Thursday, September 13, 2024.

“We haven’t received anything yet,” said the man who answered the phone at the clerk’s office for the Newton District Court seven days after the assault.

Dexter Van Zile, the Middle East Forum’s Violin Family Research Fellow, serves as managing editor of Focus on Western Islamism.