A dark and dangerous undercurrent in U.S. society

Adam Shapiro is a harmless pacifist who believes he serves a purpose in life by being a human shield.
I met him on a recent visit to Ramallah where he and other members of the International Solidarity Movement, including a number of Coloradans, were protesting the presence of Israeli tanks outside Yasser Arafat's headquarters.
The protests were always peaceful but the Israelis always responded with teargas and rubber bullets.
The “internationals,” as they call themselves, oppose violence of any kind. They do not condone Palestinian suicide bombings, just as they do not condone Israeli military assaults on Palestinian communities. They distribute food, volunteer as medics and stretcher bearers and believe their presence, as foreigners, helps protect the Palestinians from Israel's superior firepower.
When I met Shapiro he wasn't getting much publicity. Most of that was reserved for his fiery fiancee, Huwaida Arraf, a Palestinian-American born in Michigan, and Neta Golan, a 30-year-old Jew born of Canadian parents in Israel. The two women, co-founders of ISM, were hogging so many headlines that Shapiro wryly referred to himself as “the unnamed guy with Huwaida.”
All that changed when Israeli troops punched into Arafat's compound on March 29. Shapiro, trapped inside while trying to evacuate the wounded, spent a night there and was invited to have breakfast with Arafat the next morning. He then described his experience in numerous TV and newspaper interviews.
That enraged militant Jews in his hometown of New York, who denounced Shapiro as the “Jewish Taliban” and “Sheepshead Bay's John Walker Lindh.” His parents, both public school teachers, had to move out of their Brooklyn home because of death threats and his brother, a lawyer, is now being called a “fake Jew.”
The New York Post did not help with a column headlined: “Our Latest Traitor Must Live With His Vile Choice.”
To its credit, the Anti-Defamation League leaped to the family's defense. Calling the threats “sinister and serious,” Abraham Foxman, national director of the Jewish group, said it was “reprehensible to target anybody based on what they believe or what they stand for, whether or not we believe in their actions.”
But what happened to the Shapiros illustrates a dark and dangerous undercurrent in American society.