She lived a few miles from where I am writing this: Irondequoit, New York. A (reasonably) quiet suburb of Rochester, the kind of place with lawns and school pickup lines and absolutely nothing that looks like a terror cell.

Federal prosecutors say Catherine Beth Washburn ran one anyway.

On Tuesday, the FBI arrested the 37-year-old and charged her with attempting to provide material support to Palestine Islamic Jihad, a U.S.-designated foreign terrorist organization. According to the criminal complaint, she sent roughly $30,000 in cryptocurrency, in about eighty separate transfers, to a man in Gaza who told her he was fighting for PIJ. Investigators recovered messages in which she is accused of telling him she wished every day were October 7th. That she would fight alongside “the resistance” if she lived in Gaza. That the killing of an occupation soldier gave her a rush of something like joy. Prosecutors say she was photographed holding two hand grenades in front of a Hamas flag.

The Justice Department identifies her as a leader of the Direct Action Movement for Palestinian Liberation, DAMPL. A group that surfaced online in early 2023, spent a few months manifesting their resistance by tagging buildings and threatening a professor, then allegedly graduated to laundering money toward people who kill.

I want to talk about that word, resistance, because Washburn used it, and DAMPL uses it, and it is not theirs to use.

There is a real philosophy of resistance. It has a long, unbroken lineage: Cato standing against Caesar’s ambitions, abolitionists refusing to recognize the legitimacy of the auction block, workers walking off the line, a bus boycott that bankrupted a system of humiliation one fare at a time. Its tools are public, deliberate, and aimed at power rather than at people. Protest. Organized economic pressure. Civil disobedience that accepts its own consequences in open court, in daylight, under your own name. The willingness to lose something, your comfort, your safety, your freedom, in defense of a principle, without ever taking someone else’s life to make the point.

You can support the resistance and still abhor the violence

DAMPL’s founding premise is that this entire tradition is a trap. Its members call each other “Action Comrades” and hold that peaceful protest is not merely insufficient but actively counterproductive, that marching and petitioning only launder the appearance of consent for continued oppression, and that only sabotage, property destruction, and eventually violence constitute anything real. It is a seductive argument to a certain kind of impatient mind, because it flatters itself as the only honest position in the room. Everyone else is compromised. Only the arsonist really means it.

It is also wrong.

The claim smuggles in an assumption it never defends: that the moral force of an idea transfers automatically to whatever method its adherents choose to pursue it. It does not. “Free Palestine” is a political position, arguable on its merits, held by millions of people who have never spray-painted a door or wired a dollar toward a bomb. “Bring forth disruption by hindering the entrances” to government buildings, DAMPL’s own stated tactic, is not a position. It’s a threat. The gap between the two is not a matter of degree. It’s a different category of act, and pretending otherwise is how a defensible grievance gets laundered into cover for people who simply want to hurt somebody and needed a flag to stand behind while they did it.

Draw the line, of course. Marching, organized boycotts, refusing your money and your labor to institutions you find complicit, running for office, showing up at the school board meeting nobody else wanted to attend, defending a neighbor’s right to speak even when you think they’re wrong: this is citizenship exercising itself. It is protected, it is necessary, and a society that punishes it for being inconvenient to power is a society already halfway to tyranny.

Defacing a war memorial, planting incendiary devices in a public park, threatening a scientist by name until she says her colleagues fear being murdered for going to work, wiring cash to a man who says he has killed for it: this is not further along the same road. It’s a different road, and it leads somewhere else entirely. It leads to a federal courtroom, as it should, because it is not activism. It is a crime, and in Washburn’s case, allegedly a crime committed in service of an organization whose entire founding act was the mass murder of civilians.

The people running DAMPL understand this distinction perfectly well. That’s precisely why they keep borrowing the language of the peaceful tradition they’ve rejected, “liberation,” “resistance,” “direct action,” while doing something that tradition would recognize as its opposite. William Lloyd Garrison never planted a bomb. Martin Luther King, Jr never funded an attack on civilians. Mandela’s underground did turn to sabotage against an unelected regime that had closed every legal door, and history has argued about that choice ever since, hard and honestly on the merits.

Nobody needs to argue about wiring $30,000 to a man boasting about killing civilians. That case decided itself the moment the first transfer cleared.

None of this requires you to have a settled opinion about Gaza, or Israel, or the war, or who bears what share of blame for any of it. You can think the Israeli government’s conduct is indefensible. You can think Hamas and PIJ are monstrous. You can hold both at once, as plenty of serious people do. What you cannot do, if you want the word resistance to keep meaning anything, is let it be stretched to cover whoever commits violence while invoking a cause you find sympathetic. The cause doesn’t get to launder the method.

Washburn is presumed innocent unless proven otherwise in a court of law, and that presumption is not a mere formality, it is one of the actual differences between the country DAMPL claims to be fighting and the one its members would build in its place. But the underlying question she’s forced into daylight isn’t really about her. It’s about whether we still know how to tell the difference between an idea and a bomb.

We do. We just have to insist on it, out loud, especially when the people blurring the line claim to be standing on our side.

Addendum

Shortly after publishing this, two people in NYC found their way to the top of the Empire State Building and unfurled a flag that said:

When ​the power of love beats the love of power the ‌world ⁠knows peace.

Good on you both—we need more spectacles like this.