Yesterday I mentioned a letter I wrote to the Chicago Maroon, the University’s student newspaper, emphasizing that while the Students for Justice in Palestine has a right to express their hateful rhetoric on campus (it’s free speech), they must also abide by campus regulations about the nature of demonstration. The prohibitions, which SJP has violated, include these mentioned in my letter:
At the end of last year, the organization and its umbrella group, UChicago United for Palestine (the latter not a recognized student organization), have repeatedly violated the University’s Protest and Demonstrations Policy, including by engaging in demonstrations during prohibited hours without permits, deplatforming a group of peacefully assembled Jewish students, sitting-in in campus buildings, disrupting classes using loud megaphones, and blocking access to buildings. While these actions have led to some arrests, the legal charges have been dropped. This still leaves the possibility of institutional punishment, but whether the University will pursue the charges, or what the punishments will be—if any—are never disclosed to the University community. Unless punishments for such violations become public (names need not be given), there is no deterrent to illegally disrupting University activities. Punishments for other prohibited behaviors, like sexual harassment and assault, are publicized in a yearly report, so why not trespassing?
The connection between UChicago United for Palestine (UCUP) and SJP isn’t completely clear to me, but UCUP was described by the South Side Weekly as “a coalition of campus groups that includes CareNotCops, UChicago Students for Justice in Palestine, and the National Lawyers Guild at the university.” SJP describes itself on the university website, as a branch of a national organization:
Subject: Students for Justice in Palestine
Description: Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) is a diverse group of students, faculty, staff, and community members at colleges & universities throughout the US. SJP UChicago is a chapter dedicated to raising awareness of the plight of the Palestinian people on the UChicago campus, as well as throughout the United States, and advocating democratic principles to promote justice, human rights, liberation, and self-determination for the Palestinian people.
Thus UCUP includes SJP, and both organizations comprise University students. Thus both groups must conform to the University’s Protest and Demonstrations Policy. They have violated this Policy repeatedly, and just vowed that they will continue to do so.
On December 9, 26 UCUP students and 2 faculty members were arrested, after being warned, for conducting an illegal sit-in in Rosenwald Hall. For some reason, the charges were dropped against all the demonstrators. There still remains the possibility of University discipline, but whether these students actually will be subject to the disciplinary procedure is a mystery I can’t get clarified, despite having made inquiries. And this is despite our own President’s statement about disruptive demonstrations and protests that include this:
We have policies and processes for guiding community norms, reporting instances that require investigation, and disciplinary action when needed. Our Dean of Students in the University will share more about those policies and processes with students later today.
Apparently, the University community is not allowed to be informed of whether discipline is imposed upon students who violate the Protest and Demonstrations Policy. If it isn’t, then there is absolutely no bar for students to continue violating university regulations, disrupting University activities, blocking university buildings, shouting down other protestors, and so on.
It’s the University’s responsibility, I believe, to let us know if disciplinary action is indeed taken against protestors who violate University regulations, and then let us know the outcome (names need not be given), just as they do with other violations, including sexual harassment and assault. After all, the students on December 9 were charged with “criminal trespass”.
Now UCUP and the “National SJP” have exulted on their instagram page that not only were the charges dropped, but they will continue to engage in illegal activities. Here’s what’s from the Instagram post below.
Note in particular the statements, “WE REJECT THIS. we know that it is imperative to disrupt business as usual.” This is an arrant threat that these groups will continue their illegal activities that disrupt campus, and it’s just one more reason to consider barring SJP (and UCUP, if it’s barr-able) from campus. Instead of saying they’ll abide by the protest regulations, these groups brag brag that they will continue violating them
Our administration appears to ignore that these illegal activities are publicized, that they disrupt the education we’re supposed to be proffering to students, and they constitute a reason why parents, particularly Jewish ones, might not want to send their kids here. SJP and UCUP are tearing the campus apart with illegal protests, and I call on our administration, while adhering to our Principles of Free Expression, to enforce the University’s Protest and Demonstration Policy.
Here’s the Instagram post issued by UCUP and SJP, which includes a request for donations to cover the “court fees” levied on the demonstrators.
Thank you for this important update. Unfortunately, it seems that the administration, as with the judge, is a paper tiger. There will be no accountability and these students and their friends will continue to disrupt the daily functioning of the university. Civil disobedience and making good trouble assumes skin in the game and accepting penalties for disruptive actions. It, historically, is not simply performative. You kids get off my lawn!
Love the reference to John Lewis!
https://youtu.be/z_oEkOdIXdo?si=enwqGbXQnqJqP3yj
Thanks for sending us there, Stephen. Such a great man and so nice to hear his voice today. I needed that.
🙏
“It, [civil disobedience] historically, is not simply performative.”
Consider any religion. It has a place of worship, tax-exempt (of course), a holy book, ancient scriptures, mystical rites or performances (e.g. communion), mythology, etc.
Now imagine a religion with none of that for whatever reasons – especially (my point) the place of worship. What can it do? Well, the entire world can be its place of worship. The very air anyone is surrounded by. Their religious rites and performance can be anywhere.
Such is the sacred praxis of Marxism. The protest (exoteric, worldly to us) is a mystical ritual (esoteric, mystical to them). Making and transforming the world (in their heads) by Hermetic alchemy.
I don’t have any Marx readily available but I’m pretty sure he writes about praxis as sacred work. I’ll have to find that too.
It’s a gnostic-Hermetic cult. I imagine many layers of overlapping cults, decentralized and “fluid” (where have we heard that before) – as, e.g. Christian heresies were long ago.
It is weird how student activist language has remained stylistically the same since I was young back during the revolution. Different subject matter but otherwise that statement might have appeared on the pages of the Kaleidoscope, the Bugle American, or any underground university community newspaper in 1970.
The notion of “what’s under the hood” comes to mind – the hood being the language – hence my distinction between exoteric and esoteric (above).
Not sure that idea is clear… a difference in kind v. that of degree, concealed by language, is what I mean – to suggest the protest is no different from that of the lovable hippies from the 60s.
My recollection from reading Newsweek as a highschool student back then was that the demonstrations of the 1960s were not populated by lovable hippies. True, the music and musicians we remember from the era promoted dope, dropping out, and stoned sweet guiltless sex (well, guiltless for guys anyway, since the girls supposedly no longer had a good excuse to say No. In reality: Ha! We wished!) But the demonstrations participated in by a tiny fraction of a college demographic a few years older than I was had a harder, grimmer edge. I’m thinking the Weather Men, the Weather Underground, the Black Panthers, the YIPpies, the Students for a Democratic [if irony-challenged] Society and assorted communists who posed a real threat to the social order in France and West Germany.
Many of them were indeed “longhairs” who wore ratty sweaters and Che Guevara berets but lovable bums they were definitely not. Ambitious, yes. Same as now.
Being old enough to have been there at the time (UW-Madison, ’68-’72) I can attest that there were far more than a “tiny fraction” of the college demographic involved in the demonstrations, at least at the major universities at which the upheavals occurred. Certainly the harder edge of the movement (Weather Underground types) were a smaller fraction but the difference between lovable hippies and politically active tear-gas-dodging students was fuzzy at best. The draft brought many, many thousands of consumed the literature of the times… the underground newspapers that thrived at the time.
The un-nuanced political analysis that UCUP illustrates reflects, IMO, the rebellious thinking of youthful brains. From my elderly perspective it is a bit comical, though-be-it socially hazardous.
Sounds to me like the SJP is no more than supporters of Hamastinian terrorism and should be branded as such.
I always think I can make a short comment, but no. So I’ll try a sort-of short comment:
The students have been trained in activism from kindergarten in the U.S. at least – deeply in the ideological dimension to use emotion as the epistemic gold standard – i.e. gnostic wizardry – which is the impetus in the Hermetic alchemy articulated by Paulo Freire (It might be in Pedagogy of the Oppressed, not sure) e.g:
“To speak a true word is to transform the world.”
… peaceful protest and free speech is perhaps an Achilles Heel for ideological subversion.
I also note a demoralization at play, with both the commitments of the protesters (the moral equivalent of 2+2=5), and also the waiver of responsibility for the interference with objectives of the university.
Demoralization is the first stage of ideological subversion
(Paraphrase of Yuri Bezmenov alias Thomas Schuman – who I now gather is an “op”. Make of it what you will.)
Done!
“Charges Dropped! But students still need help!”Cue the slow, sad music behind a plaintive voice) : “For as little as nineteen dollars a month you too can help these poor innocent voices be heard…
Keep the pressure on the University to enforce its own rules. I also think that students (or faculty and staff members) who observe SJP disruptions should call the police, not university officials. University officials want problems to go away; they are less interested in problems being solved.
Thank you for the update.
Neither the University police nor the Chicago police will act in trespass cases unless the University administration gives them the go-ahead. That hasn’t often happened, though it did when they arrested the 26 students and 2 faculty. But the charges were dropped.
As a foreigner I remain confused about American process after someone is arrested. One often hears on TV cop shows that the victim or some other person deemed to have been affected “declined to press charges.” What does that mean? That the police won’t lay a charge without the victim’s permission? What if there are two or more victims? Does one have veto power? Or is this just a made-up plot device for the screenplay?
In Canada, after the police arrest someone at the scene of a disturbance, either they release the person without an immediate charge —they can always arrest him later — or they lay a charge and hold the person for a bail hearing before a magistrate. In the latter, the Crown is obligated to proceed with the case if it thinks it can get a conviction and if it’s in the public interest. Sometimes it decides not to proceed if, say, no witnesses including the victim can be cajoled to testify or if prosecution would set back the reconciliation project. But there is no circumstance where the victim—in this case the university—would be able to direct the police not to charge or the Crown to “drop” the charges.
So I ask on whose instigation were the charges against the trespassers “dropped”? If the university had a say in this, why did it not want to “press” charges?
So possibly imo three answers, none of them are particularly complimentary, trigger warning!
1) those responsible for university management and discipline are complicit with and support the Antisemitic student groups and so by default Hamas.
2) those responsible for university management and discipline are spineless cowards and are frightened to do the job that they are paid to perform.
3) those responsible for university management and discipline simply do not give a damn and just take the money and do f***k all!
Feel free to add or criticise.
I don’t know if the university had a say in this, but the prosecuting attorney had to do the dropping. My inquiries about whether the university had a hand in dropping the charges didn’t meet with any answers.
Not good, especially with the inquiry originating from a senior well known (famous) and respected Emeritus Professor.
Thanks. Trespass is tricky. I think I get the picture.
Victims can’t really direct the prosecution to drop a case; that’s up to the prosecutor, acting for the government (federal, state, or local.)
But if victims don’t want to participate in the case, prosecutors may decide the case isn’t worth pursuing.
The phrase “victim dropped the charges” is simply wrong. It’s something you hear on TV, not in real life.
Expel them. Breaking rules has to have consequences.
GBJames in #2 notes the similarity of today’s student pop-Left lingo to that of ~1970. It goes even further back, GB. UCUP apparently includes the National Lawyers Guild, which was formed in 1937, in the heady days of the Left “popular front”. After some schisms due to the 1939-41 romance between the USSR and the Third Reich, the NLG emerged in my parents’ time as a stereotyped Stalinist front. In Britain, the anti-Israel demos are coached by the Stop the War Coalition gang, a coalition indeed of old-timey Communists and Trotskyists of the SWP—what a thrill to see Stalin and Trotsky together again, like Jekyll and Hyde. In short, the anti-Israel focus of the current pop-Left summons up zombies from the old Old Left of the mid-20th century. It is a treat, in a way, from the perspective of social paleontology.
UChicago should be very careful here. If other groups do the same behaviour as SJP and they are compelled to prosecute they will find a Harvard situation on their front door. Hypocrisy front and centre.
The solution is fairly simple. Just have some women accuse the SJP members of sexual assault, and they’ll be expelled after a short, perfunctory Title IX hearing.
You’ve forgotten MacPherson’s Rule.
I’m less worried about the dynamics or illegalities in the protests than you (all).
I’m more horrified by their popularity. That such large numbers/mobs can take BIG positions in obviously evil ideologies as the current Pal movement is amazing.
Previous iterations of “Free Palestine” tried to play hide the ball, pretended to be civilized. No more.
These fools HAVE to know what they’re pushing for. How could they not? Bubble tick tok? I don’t buy that.
Also, I’m deeply curious as to why the crowds, particularly on campuses, skew so heavily female. Unis are majority female I know, but not THAT much.
Ever wonder what was motivating the murderous mobs in Germany and the USSR, Cambodia/Kampuchea? See it today downtown in many modern cities. Except I’m not sure whether the evil movements of the past really knew what they were getting into and in Kampuchea – being mainly illiterate – they probably didn’t know. Over the decades I’ve read a LOT about the Khmer Rouge and Cambodian history, as well as North Korea, communist Ethiopia and Soviet history.
Now… with the world’s knowledge in our hip pockets… there’s no excuse.
These people are morally bankrupt and intellectually retarded.
D.A.
NYC / Florida temporarily
me & puppers: https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2020/06/10/photos-of-readers-93/
(posted here earlier, one of my many articles on this)
https://themoderatevoice.com/there-are-no-two-sides-in-gaza/
I recall reading about a similar incident where a college didn’t press ahead. Someone suspected it was because the Palestinian students would lose their student visas and be required to return to Palestine if they were found guilty of breaking the law. Could this be the reason here?
Possibly. 30 years ago I was an exchange student here in the USA at Georgetown. I didn’t do ANYTHING remotely shady (against my usual mien) BECAUSE I didn’t want to get deported for anything!
Deport them.
HA. Deport them to GAZA! Or Yemen, to the welcoming AK’s of their Houthi buddies. I’m sure they’ll have fun.
D.A., J.D.
NYC
https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2020/06/10/photos-of-readers-93/
Charges were also dropped against BLM rioters, despite the damage. A subway store was burnt out next to my building, btw, in upper class Chelsea, Manhattan. There was anarchy. I was in a small war in the Middle East (not as a participant) once but the BLM riots scared the shit out of me way more. Even under bombs there wasn’t anarchy!
And… along with the charges.. my jaw dropped when the city PAID the arrested rioters some millions of dollars.
As a former (defense) attorney for the poor, this strikes me as utterly outrageous.
Shouldn’t happen. I’m no conservative but I’m well aware of the dynamics of crime and punishment and the psychology thereof.
If you don’t enforce laws they will be ignored.
So it is open season in a worse way than the flashy mass shoplifting we see. For “racial justice”.
This cost us, the Dems, at suburban elections lately in NY. Law and order and moreso its perception (our murder rate in NYC is actually less than MANY even smaller cities, many red cities) will give Trump his win.
D.A.
NYC
https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2020/06/10/photos-of-readers-93/
“We will continue to put pressure on UChicago to meet our demands”
Forgive me if I missed it but what exactly are their demands?
I should add that the Instagram is not showing on my device (in case the answer to my question is there)