WELL, YES: Bob McManus: Anti-Israel protests have a higher purpose — a complete teardown of the West. “Please don’t mistake Wednesday’s Rockefeller Center Christmas tree demonstration for just another unimaginative lashing-out by dyspeptic attention-mongering misfits. It was much more than that. . . . It was an enthusiastic endorsement of rape, torture, mutilation and kidnapping — a brutal forecast of what the Palestinian war cry ‘from the river to the sea’ really means: extermination in detail. The audacity is staggering. What happened in Midtown Wednesday night, and during the Macy’s parade Thanksgiving day and at transportation hubs, river crossings and public parks citywide for weeks now, are not protests per se. They are efforts to seduce New York into standing behind the man on the pillar — if not endorsing the October 7 slaughter explicitly, then by acquiescing in it.”