The young women of the West are not okay. They are bawling and screeching. They are locking arms and ripping papers. The best—or at least the most credentialed—minds of their generation are proudly displaying various ways of being destroyed by madness. They’ve been trending this way for a while, but the Jewish state broke them.

First, they took to the streets tearing down pictures of Israelis taken hostage by terrorists and civilians of Gaza. Overnight, poster removal became a global trend, spreading from one Western city to another. Most of the vandals caught in the act of methodically destroying the flyers were visibly distraught young women. One particularly rabid gal was filmed slicing the picture with a knife. Some culprits have been identified on social media—they tend to be somewhat educated and come from prominent families. Many appear to have some sort of Muslim background, but not necessarily—plenty of hipsters and students among them. For these women, defacing posters is often a group activity. If you confront them, they will assault you.

The curious mental illness manifests itself in ways other than poster removal. One pro-Palestinian activist was filmed sitting on the floor of Waterloo Station in London, surrounded by fellow activists, most of them women, chanting “Ceasefire now!” The influencer Oli of London thought she looked possessed, screaming and shaking uncontrollably. Another London woman, holding a protest sign, her eyes popping, called a Jewish man “Nazi psychopath” and screamed, “Get out of here! Shame on you!”

The ritualistic side to this behavior could be observed at New York’s Jewish-owned eatery Hummus Kitchen. Mayra Teke of Paterson, New Jersey, threw soup at an employee and ripped an American and Israeli flag. A yet-unknown copycat fanatic went into the same restaurant a few days later, ripped off the same flag and also assaulted an employee.

Their rhetoric is as dripping in cliches as it is divorced from reality. To prevent an amendment condemning Hamas at a city council meeting in Oakland, California, the majority female tinfoil brigade railed against Israel. Christina Gutierrez, a program analyst with the City of Oakland who takes home a pretty $151,000 a year, dubbed the whole thing a bizarre Jewish conspiracy: “there has not been beheadings of babies and rapes. Israel murdered its own people on October 7.” A Berkeley Gender and Women’s Studies lecturer Brooke Lober expanded on this theme: “The notion that this was a massacre of Jews is a fabricated narrative. Many of those killed on October 7, including children, were killed by the IDF. An amendment condemning Hamas is bold propaganda.”

Kholoud Nasser, a short-haired middle-aged woman who does “drama therapy” for a living and claims to be “non-judgmental,” stated: “As an Arab, asking with this context to condemn Hamas is very anti-Arab racist.” More charges of racism followed from a masked young woman: “Calling Hamas a terrorist organization is ridiculous, racist and plays into genocidal propaganda that is flooding our media.” Another masked young woman explained that Hamas is “the armed wing of the unified Palestinian resistance.”

As skilled as they are at parroting post-colonial jargon, what fervent young women don’t know about the conflict can flood every UNWRA-run school in Gaza and leave enough material for every one of its hospitals. Newscaster Kosha Dilz interviewed a cute blond at a pro-Palestinian rally who was confident that all Israelis have dual citizenship, and so could easily return to their other homes, but didn’t know that most Israeli Jews are not of European descent. Not surprisingly, only 47 percent of college students who embraced the slogan “from the river to the sea” could name the river and the sea. The pro-Palestinian movement strives on cult-like devotion, not knowledge.

Which is why it’s dominated by young women. The fairer sex, unfortunately, is widely overrepresented among the cult followers. Once Hamas broke the ceasefire on October 7, women began showing up at Congress with their hands painted red. Women blocked railways in Canada. Women shrieked into megaphones at Fox News headquarters. Women tried overly emotional arguments on a middle-aged security guard.

During the Tate-La Bianca trials, Charlie Manson’s followers attempted to disrupt the legal procedures by erratic behavior. In a display of female camaraderie, they shaved their heads, drew X’s on their foreheads, walked hand in hand into the courtroom and sat on the sidewalk. Before his arrest, the cult leader used them as honey traps for men. They might have killed a heavily pregnant woman in cold blood, but boy were they tender with each other.

The pro-Palestinian cult exhibits similar intragroup dynamics. They back the most genocidal anti-zionist cults, but their sisterhood is on display. A fist-clinching woman in a modest head covering can calm down a rabid Canadian student screaming “kike!” with a kiss on a cheek. Likewise, representing Gaza in the halls of the U.S. Congress, Rashida Tlaib broke into sobs and had to be comforted by her colleague, Representative Ilhan Omar.

Criminality of the sisterhood of Palestinian solidarity is not limited to assault, trespassing, and stalking. Sophie Marika Ross, Cala Mairead Walsh, and Bridget Irene Shergalis were arrested for setting a fire at Israeli company Elbit Systems in New Hampshire. The three were found to have a map of Jewish institutions in Boston, including pre-schools.

Francesca Block and Julie Burchill report on the phenomenon of radical Western girls “reverting” to Islam in the aftermath of the Simchat Torah massacre as an ultimate act of rebellion against our civilization. Burchill goes on to describe it as a “strange psychological kink.” I suspect the young westerners are attracted both to the power and criminality of Palestinian men and the assertiveness of Middle Eastern women willing to do their bidding in foreign lands.

Not all the zealous chicks are Middle Eastern or interested in Islam. It’s possible that the girls are simply lonely and undersexed, with young men preferring other modes of entertainment than catering to borderline narcissists. Or maybe the women themselves have unrealistic expectations of romance. For whatever reason, there is a lot of pent-up frustration that finds expression in political action for a cause they understand poorly.

Young women today grow up with dreams of leadership. We’ve socialized them this way. Kara Jesella argues in Quillette that the ideal feminist persona evolved from the midcentury ideal of female self-actualization to “the queer Palestinian terrorist.” Our culture no longer tells girls to be all that they can be—in fact, we are afraid to tell them that they are girls. They have been taught that to perform outrageous political stunts is the highest spiritual value—and they are acting accordingly.

There is a hole in the American female psyche. The theater of the political absurd has supplanted meaning, reason, and human relationships. Young women yearn for the violent and the mysterious. As with their sisters who ran away from home ten years ago to become “ISIS brides,” these women have embraced a radical vision of political, emotional, and spiritual revolution. Let’s hope they figure out the dead end journey they are on before they go past the point of safe return.