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Yes, that is my point. That is the best "evidence" that we have, and as you note, it is worthless.
Eh, I agree with /u/gattsuru. "Flood Brooklyn" is an odd turn of phrase unless you're trying to evoke "Operation al-Aqsa Flood"
Yes, obviously. That is not the point. The point is that that sort of anecdotal data has almost no value. Among other things, a pro- Hamas event held a month ago would have gotten no news coverage. And even actual data that includes only the post-attack incidents obviously cannot tell us anything about how attitudes have changed since before the attack. It is no different from someone claiming that, because there were x incidents of anti-black racism in 2022, that therefore nothing has changed since 1960. It is literally impossible to make a claim when half the data is missing.
And that doesn't even include the issue I mentioned of controlling for the effect of Israeli air raids.
Hamas, specifically, I'd have to go back a year ago for something explicit, though the famous Tufts one is kinda telling on itself when the protestors start to insult the Palestinian peace advocate. More broadly, I can show anti-Israeli/pro-Palestine protests in March, anti-anti-anti-Semites in April, commencement speakers in May, so on.
Sometimes this got to equivalent extremes: SJP affiliates promoting literal spree-shooters was a January-this-year-thing.
That's also... notably not what I asked. Maybe there genuinely was a pro-Hamas protest named referencing a thousand-plus fatality attack on civilians, shortly after a separate pro-Hamas protest by the same group has some protestors turn violent in September I and the rest of the internet missed. I can't prove a negative, after all.
But it's a data point that hints and waggles its eyebrows, and I don't think it's the only one.
Your link to the "Flood Brooklyn for Gaza" seems to reinforce my point about the methodological challenges that OP's claim ignores. Gaza is not Hamas. A rally calling for support for Gaza at a time when a hundreds or more civilians in Gaza are dying each day cannot be assumed to be pro-Hamas, and even if it is, the causal relationship between the attack and the level of support for that protest is obviously confounded by the effect of Israel's response.
And if, as you note, there were all those pre-attack events you link, where is the evidence for OP's assumption that the attack led to an increase in support?
Edit: And, btw, I don't give a damn about the "right to return" or adjacent ideas like nationalism, or self-determination, or anti-imperialism, because none of those things have any intrinsic value for actual, individual human beings, which is all that matters. They are claims about the "rights" of groups, and hence they are illegitimate claims, as far as I am concerned.
I'm sorry, is it "obviously" true or not that "Flood" is a clear reference to the Hamas-run terrorist attack?
As far as I can tell, all of the examples I linked were in the sort of category Certain People would shrug off as a couple nutty kids on a college campus, sometimes with obnoxiously tolerant administration from the college campus. The last post-attack protest brought an estimated 5k people and turned violent, and... well, I'll comment back here tomorrow when we have estimated headcounts (and hopefully just that), but I'm skeptical that it's going to be a Couple Nutty Kids off a college campus.
My objection isn't your position on Israel/Palestine directly; I don't have a very clear idea of what the moral or pragmatic solutions are, or if there even are any.
My objection is that you've responded to an (admittedly under-evidenced!) claim by demanding not just some evidence, but by trying to establish insurmountable and impossible standards of proof. What if, hypothetically, I found a pro-Hamas protest on October 5th with only four people being reported in the news? That doesn't prove that bigger protests had to be reported! What if, less hypothetically, I could point to some of the more aggressively Hamas-friendly protests being planned before the Israeli forces had even finished retaking their own settlements, and had not started any bombing strikes yet? I can't prove that they'd have had similar attendance without the IDF's bombing campaign, limited as it was at the time, and of course even if some of the protests had actual in-person gatherings before that bombing campaign took off, anyone paying attention knew it would be coming down the road sooner or later.
Is there any possible evidence that would even lower your confidence in your position? If not, that's... not actually a strong point in favor for it.
As for the rest, you don't seem to understand my objection. As I said:
There might well be evidence of #1 and #2 that will come to the fore at some point. There might be survey data that has been collected by some researcher or another, or it might eventually be found in one of the many datasets of contentious poiitics that are out there, though they don't generally capture low level events such as might have occurred pre-attack. But as of right now, the evidence that there has been "increased support for Hamas in the West", as OP claims, let alone that any such increase was caused by "the brutality of the terrorism," as opposed to the Israeli response, is so lacking that it is silly to hypothesize about the mechanism behind that causal relationship, for the simple reason that we have no reason to believe that that causal relationship exists.
Note also that for every anecdote of yours, I can counter with someone who was formerly fine with the DSA's support for Hamas leaving the organization. I can spin that as a drop in support for Hamas. That's why we need actual data, not cherry picked anecdotes.
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