Maeve Higgins: The crowd called the police to drag me off the stage

A US taxpayer, Maeve Higgins reveals how she and fellow New Yorkers have been trying to get their politicians’ attention to protest against American support for the Israeli military in Gaza

Members of NY-10 neighbors at the office of Dan Goldman.

Perhaps you heard about the footage this week of five-year-old Sally Abu Laila moments after Israeli soldiers shot her in the head. The child’s mother, Sabreen, told CNN that her daughter was in her arms as she and her four other children were crossing a checkpoint in Gaza. It seems unbelievable, doesn’t it? Yet, Unicef reports that Israeli forces, funded by billions of dollars from the US, are killing or injuring one Palestinian child every 10 minutes in Gaza. What they did to Sally has become devastatingly routine.

Still, that particular child’s shooting struck me with a personal sense of outrage. In early March, I spoke up at a church near where I live in Brooklyn. There was a community meeting there featuring New York senator Kirsten Gillibrand, and just before it was scheduled to start I took the podium to call her out for her complicity in the ongoing genocide. I told the people gathered there that American doctors were reporting from Gaza that Israeli soldiers were shooting small children in the head. The crowd jeered at me, and called the police to drag me off the stage and escort me out of the building.