Just watch this space and I’ll provide updates as I get them. Here’s a report from the Chicago Maroon, which also has an update page.
April 29, 2024, 12:40 p.m.:
As a speaker from UChicago Jews for a Free Palestine spoke at the rally, a director and rabbi of Chabad attempted to walk through the encampment area before protestors stopped him. UCPD told protestors that they cannot block the path, and the rabbi proceeded to walk in front of the rally’s speaker. He stood behind the speakers as they spoke.
– Eva McCord, Co-Editor-in-Chief, Anu Vashist, Managing Editor, Katherine Weaver, Deputy News Editor
I’ll walk through the encampment in a while.
I’m looking at updates on the Maroon site, as you recommended. This caught my attention: “The rally has concluded with approximately 300 demonstrators in attendance. The final speaker closed the rally by advising those in attendance to “not talk to cops or Zionists.””
Can you imagine anybody giving this advice if they really believed themselves to be “on the right side of history,” as they always claim to be? How do you expect to persuade anybody to your point of view if you refuse to talk to anybody who disagrees with you?
Did Martin Luther King or any of the other civil rights leaders refuse to talk to people who didn’t already share their opinions? Did people championing legalizing gay marriage refuse to talk to people who weren’t already convinced?
This strikes me as evidence that their goal is self-serving and performative, not to actually change anything.
Hey, did they give a land acknowledgement to the effect that they are protesting on stolen Indian land? If not, I can have no respect for the entire endeavor!
[Now turning sarcasm mode off.]
Or the yiddish-speaking Indians in Blazing Saddles…Luzzem gay!
Or that they are protesting on stolen UofC land?
That’s actually a good thought. At least in Canada, there is always the possibility that when anyone occupies private property and diminishes the property rights of the landowner, as is happening at McGill since the weekend, the ubiquitous First Nations activists always probing our society for weakness will take over the protest and run the original settler protesters off the land, taking the land acknowledgers at their word and exploiting a vacuum in law enforcement. You don’t mess with the Haudenosaunee Land Defenders (as the Mohawk Warrior Society is now styled in translation.)
If Chicago has any actual Native Americans in the neighbourhood, the campers might get some unwelcome visitors, especially if the land really is “stolen.”
I noticed this from a CBC story on McGill:
“In a statement published Monday, the university’s media relations office said the situation with protesters on campus had “shifted significantly.”
“We have become aware that many of them, if not the majority, are not members of the McGill community,” the statements reads.”
https://www.cbc.ca/amp/1.7187787
Never any shortage of thugs in Québec keen to raise a little Hell, especially against Anglos and Jews. This Revolutionary Communist Party has been at pro-Hamas rallies in Toronto, too.
Americans if you have kids finishing up at McGill, tell them to get their butts home now. Let’s hope that’s why the protest occupation is no longer mostly McGill people: they’ve already skedaddled.
The university is a social construct. It works only if a community of scholars can come together to teach, learn, and do research in a climate where they agree to forswear intimidation (or cancellation.) Not only does intimidation make scholarship impossible, but the university simply has not the resources, or the access to the lawful monopoly on the use of violence, to keep order and secure its premises (physical and intellectual) from those who would corrupt it for revolutionary ends.
The Vietnam war and ban-the-bomb protestors broke the social covenant in the 1960s when it imposed security demands on the university that it had not the power to bulwark against, since it relied on individual restraint. Forever after that, scholarship has been able to happen only when the mob, who may not necessarily even be students, permits it to.
There was an incident at the UCLA protests last week involving a Native American holding a sign supporting Israel – https://www.jpost.com/diaspora/antisemitism/article-798915
Thanks – utterly disgraceful and hypocritical behaviour by the self-proclaimed “indigenous liberation movement”. You really couldn’t make it up!
“I’ll walk through the encampment in a while.”
Be safe. Most of the students are useful idiots, but some of the outsiders have been willing to physically confront people on other campuses.
Babylon Bee: Clever College Students Figure Out It’s Not Racist To Call For The Murder Of All Jews If You Just Call Them ‘Zionists’