If you are shouting genocidal slogans at preschoolers, you’re probably not the good guy. If you’re a middle schooler shouting genocidal slogans at preschoolers, you are surrounded by adults none of whom is the good guy.

Just before the weekend, according to the Jewish News of Northern California, about a hundred middle-schoolers in Berkeley walked out of class and marched to a University of California, Berkeley, pro-Hamas tent encampment. Along the way, the students stopped outside a JCC, inside which a Jewish preschool was in session. They chanted, among other slogans, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.”

It’s possible they weren’t trying to menace the preschoolers but the fact that it was clearly a Jewish institution casts some doubt on the plausibility of that excuse. The most likely explanation generally holds: People who knew exactly what they were doing had chosen to behave poorly, toward 4-year-olds in particular and toward society in general. These future Nobel laureates also paused to hit a woman with a cardboard sign and throw water on her because she made a rude gesture at them. They succeeded in hitting the lady but failed to free Palestine.

The only purpose of this activity is to radicalize people—to increase the supply of racism and rage and indoctrinate young teenagers into normalizing violence. For a sense of where such indoctrination tends to lead, we can look across the pond to Manchester, England, where two men (and an accused accomplice) appeared in court on terrorism-related charges. Reports the BBC:

The court heard Walid Saadaoui and Amar Hussein had intended to target “the Jewish community in the North West of England and members of both law enforcement and military”.

The hearing was told the pair were accused of plotting an attack designed to cause “multiple fatalities using automatic weapons”.

Prosecutor Rebecca Waller said the alleged plan had been inspired by the Islamic State group.

It was what’s known as an “ISIS in place” attack. The reason such attacks are so dangerous is because the perpetrators aren’t card-carrying members of ISIS or another terrorist group, so there is no paper trail at the end of which sits a central terror planner whose arrest or elimination can stop multiple future attacks. These are just angry people who wanted to kill Jews and so mimicked Hamas, the totalitarian death cult that is the toast of the enlightened West at the moment.

The progressive masses that march regularly for Israel’s destruction believe the United Kingdom is deserving of precisely the same fate for precisely the same reasons. In fact, they hold the UK uniquely responsible for Israel’s creation and thus see the two states as part of the same holy war. Back in Berkeley as elsewhere in the U.S., the tentifada is organized and run by those who also admire the pluck of the “decolonization begins at home” psychopaths.

The Martin Luther King Jr. Middle School (you can’t make this up) isn’t the first in the Bay Area to see trickle-down radicalization, the Jewish News points out: Schools in San Francisco and Oakland and other schools in Berkeley have walked out too. A couple of those walkouts took place just after Hamas’s attacks and well before Israel’s incursion into Gaza, which can only be understood as celebratory of the massacre.

Back in Britain, the police reassure the public that they “do not believe that there is a wider risk to the public connected to this case,” which is no doubt true. But there is a wider risk to the public that has been exposed by this case, and others like it.

For months, dishonest people have argued that the “river to the sea” chant, a variation on a line in the Hamas charter, isn’t necessarily indicative of a desire to carry out a genocide. But even offering the benefit of the doubt, is there a benign reason to gather outside a Jewish preschool and chant “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” at the 4-year-olds inside? There is not. And that is crucial to this discussion: The actions of these demonstrators are indefensible from any angle.

There’s another chant that has been quite popular at the demonstrations and marches in the U.S. as well as those in Britain (and elsewhere): “Globalize the intifada.” Since the intifada refers to a campaign of mass terrorism against Jewish civilians, to globalize it would be to expand the battlefield without changing the goal. Some people try to deny this, but even they do not believe their denial, because it is ridiculous. They are not cheering on individual vision quests or yoga retreats. They are not shouting “have yourself a very merry intifada in the privacy of your own home surrounded by loves ones!”

Walid Saadaoui and Amar Hussein were in court today because they attempted to globalize the intifada. They heard the calls of the protesters, as others no doubt will. And they didn’t misunderstand.