Caleb Gannon stands in the foyer of Newton District Court moments after a judge allows him to go free on personal recognizance. He has just pled not guilty to a charge of assault and battery against a pro-Israel activist he attacked a few blocks away in mid-September 2024. Gannon thanks the dozen or so well-wishers who sat in the courtroom while the prosecutor for Middlesex County failed in his attempt to force Gannon to post a $5,000 bond to stay out of jail while awaiting trial. Consequently, Gannon, 32, will spend the sixth night of Chanukah, December 30, 2024, at home with his parents.
Convincing the judge to require Gannon to post bail was a long shot. His defense attorney argued forcefully that his client had no criminal record, lived less than a mile away from the courthouse, was well known in Newton, and simply didn’t pose a flight risk. Judging from his demeanor, it’s clear Gannon isn’t going anywhere. Since tackling a man police said Gannon knew was armed and smashing his head on the sidewalk, in an attack that was caught on video and posted and reposted numerous times on X, Gannon had been shot in the belly, spent 38 days in the hospital, three of them in a medically induced coma. According to one of his supporters, who spoke to the press outside the courthouse after the arraignment, he suffered damage to many of his internal organs, forcing him to wear a colostomy bag as a result.
Gannon is no victim, but he is a captive of anti-American, anti-Israel, and anti-Western ideology.
Sporting a somber wool jacket, dark pants, and black fabric sneakers, Gannon leans on a cane with a polished wooden handle, stooping in the courtroom like a patient standing in front of the nursing station at a long-term care facility waiting for his medicine. Clearly whatever fantasy Gannon had of being the next Jason Bourne has come to a bitter end. Regarding the respiratory mask Gannon wore to protect his obviously frail body from infection, viewers could almost be forgiven if they forgot that, just a few weeks before, a bruised and bloodied Scott Hayes, the man Gannon attacked, was forced to stand in a cage to face charges for what lawyers have declared was a “textbook case of self-defense.” Mawkish pity for Gannon, a cage for the man he attacked. It’s a metaphor for October 7 after which huge swaths of activists have forgotten—or worse, legitimized—Hamas’s attack and demonized Israel for defending itself.
Still, I was surprised at the relatively low turnout at Gannon’s arraignment. He had become sort of a cause célèbre among his supporters on the far left after his well-documented confrontation in Newton on September 12, 2024. The Muslim Justice League (MJL), a Massachusetts non-profit that serves as a lynchpin for the red-green axis in the greater Boston area, held a vigil for Gannon at which more than 200 protesters lauded him for his willingness to martyr himself for the pro-Hamas movement that swept through the United States, on college campuses especially, in the aftermath of the October 7 massacre. “How can we not relate to the urge to throw our bodies on the line for Palestine?” one speaker said at the vigil. Maybe someone asked the MJL folks to stay away from the courthouse. A bunch of explicitly pro-Hamas activists standing on the courthouse steps wouldn’t help Gannon’s case.
The twenty or so folks who did show up all wear stickers reading “No Guns in Newton/No Problems in Palestine.” A white-haired man and a tearful black-haired woman, presumably Gannon’s mother and father, stand protectively nearby. Gannon puts his right arm over his mother’s shoulder, thankful for her presence. He has lost a lot of weight since the confrontation he initiated and exhibits none of the bravado he displayed while running across the street to tackle Hayes.
Hayes and his supporters look at me warily as I approach to hand him my business card and prepare to ask him a question. Trembling with anxiety, he tells me he has “no real comment” but that another now-absent reporter had asked if he was Jewish.
“Yes, I am Jewish,” he says, answering a question I hadn’t asked.
I utter my question: “Do you believe that Israel is committing a genocide against the Palestinians in Gaza?” One of his supporters, a well-dressed young man in his thirties with dark hair says, “That’s not relevant to the case.” I keep my mouth shut, refraining from telling him that Gannon called his opponents “genocide supporters” before charging Hayes in September. Gannon doesn’t answer the question.
“I have no real comment,” Gannon says, still shaking. “I appreciate your work.”
I walk away, having concluded that it would be impolite, cruel almost, to ask the shaking Gannon if he would have attacked Hayes if Hamas hadn’t incited him and his fellow leftists in the United States to take to the streets by murdering 1,200 of his fellow Jews on October 7. Gannon is no victim, but he is a captive of anti-American, anti-Israel, and anti-Western ideology that drove him to attack a fellow U.S. citizen in the name of “liberation.” Ironically enough, the man he attacked was part of a group calling on Hamas to release Gannon’s fellow Jews it took hostage.
The fact is, if Hamas hadn’t murdered 1,200 Jews, Gannon would likely be spending Chanukah posting anti-Israel and anti-American propaganda on Instagram from the safety of his bedroom in his parents’ house located just down the street. But, catastrophically enough for Gannon, who has described the United States as a fascist country worthy of destruction, he apparently has embraced an ideology that author Adam Kirsch calls “settler colonialism.”
The way Kirsch describes it in On Settler Colonialism: Ideology, Violence, and Justice (W. W. Norton & Company, 2024) is based on the belief that the United States, Israel, and other western democracies are worthy of destruction—not reform—because of the violence associated with their founding. It’s hard to deny Kirsch’s premise. These days, violence against Israelis is legitimized with chants “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” while violence against Americans like Hayes is legitimized with land acknowledgements that portray them as genocidal interlopers on a mythical place called “Turtle Island”—a moniker Kirsch reports is used as “a kind of shorthand for the idea of American illegitimacy.”
This ideology has prompted leftists in the West such as Gannon, who presumably seek to defeat White Male Supremacism, to align themselves with Hamas’s vicious display of Muslim Male supremacism on October 7 and to regard Israelis and Americans as legitimate targets of violence. This ideology had disastrous results for Gannon, and his target, Hayes, just as it did for Israelis and the inhabitants in Gaza in the aftermath of the massacre. In both instances, the targets of the violence justified by the ideology of “settler colonialism” refused to lay down and die but, instead, insisted on the right to defend themselves. People are funny like that.
Outside the courthouse, Gannon’s supporters are quick to tell the reporter from the local NBC affiliate that they are Jewish, as if their Jewishness gives some magical credibility to their counterfactual condemnations of Israel and Scott Hayes for defending themselves against Hamas and Gannon respectively. In the narrative they offer, Gannon made a “mistake” in attacking Hayes who responded with disproportionate force to being attacked, just as Israel did the same thing in the aftermath of October 7.
The protesters who came to Gannon’s defense are a case in point. In the narrative they tell, Israel is guilty of “genocide,” but the sins of Hamas aren’t worth mentioning.
They tell this story to the TV reporter, an earnest young man who seems intent on steering the discussion toward ending the divisiveness and controversy in Newton. This young man wanted everyone to get along. In a subsequent interview, I tell him that if he wants societal peace in the U.S., he better hope for an Israeli victory over its adversaries in the Middle East because, as long as the war against Israel continues in the region, spectacles such as October 7 will destabilize American civil society.
The protesters who came to Gannon’s defense are a case in point. In the narrative they tell, Israel is guilty of “genocide,” but the sins of Hamas aren’t worth mentioning. Gannon’s defenders tell us that Hayes, 47, a U.S. Army veteran, was a big mean bully who had no reason to be frightened for his life—even as Gannon had him in a chokehold. They suggested that since Hayes said mean things to folks during confrontations at anti-Israel rallies, he had no right to defend himself.
“He’s a dangerous, vile, intimidating, threatening kind of man and he does not deserve to be allowed to carry a weapon when he will obviously use it, and boasts about having one,” said Jill Charney, a friend of the Gannon family and member of the anti-Israel group Jewish Voice for Peace, outside the courthouse.
Given what we’ve seen in the video of what actually happened on September 12, 2024, we can only be thankful it was Hayes, and not Gannon, who had the gun that fateful day last fall. And, given what happened on October 7, we can thank our lucky stars, and G-d in heaven, that Israel maintains superior firepower over its enemies.
