First.
Look at what it says on the car door.
'Courtesy. Professionalism. Respect.'
It is the NYPD's motto, it is on all their cars - and right above it, on the roof, stands a young woman in cowboy shorts, a peculiar purple crop top and a glitter bra, spreading her legs with a Palestinian flag between her hands, while people on the pavement below hold their phones up towards her.
She is not shouting at anyone. She is posing. It is not a demonstration in any traditional sense, it is a scene from Cabaret where she has landed the lead and the police car is the prop, and she knows it, because she looks down at the cameras between every pose.
This is where I then try - without success - to imagine her in the place where the cause she stands there for is actually playing out.
Not in Gaza or Ramallah, that is too easy - there we know what happens to her the second she turns up like that - that business with the 74 lashes for singing a song from last night - but just in any Arab or Muslim city at all.
Same clothes. Same car. Same flag, same moves, same mouth. She would not make it up onto the roof. And if she did, she would not come down again on her own legs.
That is not a jab at her.
It is just what is true about the place she is standing there shouting for.
Everything she uses to support the cause - the body, the clothes, the right to stand on a police car without being beaten down, dragged away, abused and thrown into a cell for years - the audience filming instead of stepping in - are things the cause does not have. Things the cause has never had. And things the cause, if it won on its own terms, would take from her FIRST.
She can do this because she is standing in the West. And she uses it to shout for something nine thousand kilometres away that she would not be able to survive five minutes inside of.
Do these people have any actual Muslim friends? Do they have any Palestinian friends? Have they read anything, asked anyone, looked even once at the country and the culture they wave the flag for, with anything other than camera-awareness?
I do not think she is evil in any traditional sense.
I think she is empty.
I think she is missing something to give herself to, and that this was what happened to come along.
And I think it comes from a particular place.
When the Western world removed its own deep understanding of God, it left Man in a void - and that void does not stay empty, because it is driven by a need in Man.
So a door opened, and in through it came an endless line of substitute religions, each with its own flag, its own liturgy and its own promise of belonging. This is just one of them. It is not special, it is just the one hijacking the young, left-wing, fragile mind right now, because that mind has a need for belonging that nobody has taught it to take seriously anymore.
So there she stands on the car roof with a foreign flag, thinking she has found something.
The conflict is not her cause.
It is her costume.
You can only dance on the police car in the country where the police let you.
That is her luck.
But it probably will not last.
