Photo credit: Anna Selman
By Anna Selman
Contributing Writer
It was raining on October 7. The world was already exhaling — the news on the radio said a ceasefire was near, that the hostages might soon come home. But as the drizzle fell over Cincinnati, another story was unfolding.
Mo Shaw was driving when he saw it: a banner stretched across the Wasson Way overpass, flanked by painted paragliders. It read “Long Live the Resistance.”
For anyone else, it might have looked like just another political slogan. For Mo, it was a dagger. He knew what those paragliders meant. He had seen them before — not on a bridge in Ohio, but in the skies above southern Israel, when they carried men who raped, tortured, and murdered Jews.
Shaw’s a Cincinnati horseman — a farrier, a former rodeo cowboy, a Walnut Hills graduate, a father of three. One of his children, Tori, is a former lone soldier in Israel. She once lived on Kibbutz Re’im, beside the Nova festival grounds. When Shaw looked up at those paraglider silhouettes, he didn’t see politics. He saw the men who could have killed his daughter.
Across Cincinnati that morning, banners appeared like a coordinated confession. “Stop Israel’s Genocide.” “Viva la Resistance Palestine.” “Liberation Now.” Seven of them in all, strung from overpasses before dawn. The city stayed silent as they passed under them during their morning commute.
So the Jews did what Jews always do when no one else will. They called. They scrubbed away graffiti. They climbed ladders. One man brought wire cutters. Another brought solvent. They acted not out of courage but reflex — an ancestral muscle memory of cleaning up what others won’t touch.
By 5 p.m., the banners still hung. The rain hadn’t stopped. So Mo climbed a ladder with a saw in his hand and did what no one else would. Two people in keffiyehs ran off as he approached. He didn’t chase them. He climbed.
“I didn’t do it because I’m brave,” Shaw said. “I did it because no one else would.”
He thought of his grandmother in Iran, who used to tell him how Jews weren’t allowed outside when it rained. “We would dirty the water,” she said. So she stayed indoors until the sky cleared.
Her grandson didn’t.
He climbed into the rain of a major American city and cut down a banner glorifying the murder of his people. The same hatred that kept his grandmother inside had crossed oceans and generations, disguised as moral protest. And still, the only thing that washed it away was one Jew in the rain.
Later that day, a video appeared online — a slick montage of banners, smoke, and fountains dyed red — portrayed as Cincinnati’s “acts of resistance.” Among the tagged collaborators was a woman who calls herself the press officer for the Gaza Freedom Flotilla, an organization long associated with Hamas.
The video wasn’t made for Cincinnati. It was made for the world — proof that even in the American Midwest, terror has fans.
The next day, Shaw stood before the City Council and described what he’d seen. “You stood in my synagogue two years ago, Mayor Pureval, and you promised this city would stand with us,” he said. “You haven’t.” After the meeting, staff for Councilmembers Walsh and Jefferies followed up. Walsh’s office later confirmed they were contacting the Department of Public Services to learn why the banner remained up for more than eight hours, despite violating state law.
Now that the war has ended and hostages are returning home, many Cincinnatians hope tensions will ease. Shaw is less focused on slogans than on what comes next. He says he’d like the city to set clear procedures for removing banners and graffiti on public property and to apply them consistently. He’s also proposing a public forum featuring Middle Eastern Jewish voices — from Iran, Iraq, Syria, and elsewhere — to explain histories that he feels are often missing from local conversations.
His own family left Iran, but their stories rarely surface in the wider Jewish narrative. “People here don’t really know what it was like for Jews in Iran, Iraq or Syria,” Shaw said. “They should hear those stories.”
For now, he promises to continue doing what he can: filing reports, showing up to meetings — and if it comes to it again, going out in the rain.
