Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
As I predicted, since the encamped pro-Palestinian protestors didn’t get their way during the Encampment (no demands were met, and the tents were removed and thrown into dumpsters), they would return this weekend, which is Alumni Weekend: alums come back to relive their old days, and there are all kinds of events for them. Sure enough, the protestors returned yesterday, illegally occupying a University building, marching, and engaging in various acts of vandalism. They say they are not members of University of Chicago United for Palestine (UCUP) or Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), both organizations of students, but are a “group of young alumni.”
This is going to look bad for the University. As normal, the University is allowing legal demonstrations of free speech, but they are not arresting protestors who trespass or engage in vandalism. This lack of punishment is a recurring theme of the pro-Palestinian protests at our school, and is going to come back and bite the University on the tuchas. As I’ve said repeatedly, if there’s no punishment for legal violations or abrogation of University rules, this stuff will continue
Here’s the Chicago Maroon‘s report of the protestors’ occupation of the Institute of Politics (IOP) building, along with the paper’s real-time reports from yesterday. I’ve thrown in a few tweets and a photograph taken by a colleague.
From the Marroon: click to read:
Pro-Palestine protesters have occupied the Institute of Politics building on South Woodlawn Avenue. After a rally on the Midway, pro-Palestine protesters marched north and turned into the Institute of Politics building.
Protesters brought chairs into the building, locked doors, and spray painted security cameras as they entered the building.
They were followed by a line of marked and unmarked Chicago Police Department cars.
Chicago Police Officers and University of Chicago Police Officers were on site attempting to remove protesters from blocking the street.
A protester installed a tent in the backyard. Five UCPD officers arrived shortly after, taking away the tent materials. They were seen arguing with protesters in the backyard.
Protesters began chanting, “From the River to the Sea; Palestine will be free.”
An organizer with Student for Justice in Palestine (SJP) said that SJP was not involved in organizing the occupation of the IOP.
UCPD have entered the Institute of Politics, removing protesters from blocking the doors.
—Maroon Staff
May 17, 4:58 p.m.
More than a dozen protesters are exiting the IOP through the windows on the second floor.
Protesters were heard screaming in the backyard and alleyway.
UCPD officers appeared through the window after the last protester jumped out.
— Maroon Staff
May 17, 5:10 p.m.
Two UCPD officers with shields entered the Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society, which is adjacent to the IOP.
Officers are currently stationed on all sides of the IOP backyard.
Protesters are now setting up two tents in front of the building.
From the Maroon: Protesters set up tents in front of the IOP building. (Finn Hartnett)
May 17, 5:20 p.m.
An organizer with UChicago United for Palestine said that the occupation was organized by an unaffiliated group of alumni.
UCPD officers are no longer entering the IOP. Protesters are blocking off the side entrance to the IOP using chairs from Neubauer. Two CPD officers have exited Neubauer.
— Maroon Staff
May 17, 5:40 p.m.
In their Telegram channel “Disrupt U of Chicago,” organizers messaged “Bring your sleeping bag, we’re staying” at 5:11 p.m.
Six minutes later, organizers shared a statement in the channel called “Bring the Intifada Home” from “a crew of protesters holding down the Casbah of Basel Al-Araj, formerly known as the institute of politics at the university of chicago [sic].” Bassel al-Araj was a Palestinian activist, writer, and author. In 2016, he was arrested by the Palestinian Authority and charged with planning attacks against Israel. A unit of Israel’s police force killed al-Araj during a gunfight in 2017 as they attempted to enter his house.
“We’ve liberated the Institute of Politics – a breeding grounds for politicians, bureaucrats, non-profit functionaries alike to come to learn to say the right things while meting out violence and devastation on oppressed, colonized people,” the statement said.
“We target the university of chicago for both its current complicity in the genocide of Palestinians and its past: inventing neoliberal economics and enabling the Chicago Boys to be puppet masters of bloody, authoritarian rule from Pinochet’s regime in Chile and beyond, creating the first nuclear reactor, violently displacing and policing Black communities with the nation’s largest private police force of UCPD.”
A second part of the statement is titled “Statement of Principles from the Liberated Casbeh of Basel Al-Araj” and lists six points.
“We must escalate our actions against all governments, institutions and corporations who participate in, profit off of, and enable genocide,” the first point reads.
“We have nothing to gain by working with government, cops, or the administration. We do not negotiate. We do not share information about each others’ identities. We do not seek permission to act. We lean on each other – not the state in any of its forms- for radical care, safety, and support,” another point reads.
The statement does not mention points and demands that UCUP has often mentioned during past rallies, such as that the University acknowledge the bombing of Gazan universities or that it divest from companies with Israeli ties.
— Maroon Staff
The frat boys strike back again!:
May 17, 6:20 p.m.
After the Iron Key fraternity began playing U.S.-themed music, three protesters walked towards the fraternity house and began pulling flowers from the fraternity house’s front lawn. One of the protesters carried a brick from the flower bed away with them.
A significant UCPD and CPD presence remains in the area around the IOP building.
— Maroon Staff
May 17, 6:12 p.m.
The Iron Key fraternity, formerly known as Delta Upsilon, has begun loudly playing the American national anthem from their fraternity house. The protesters are responding by loudly chanting “D.U., fuck you.”
Protesters have pitched four tents in front of the IOP.
— Maroon Staff
May 17, 6:41 p.m.
A man who declined to identify himself alleged that a pro-Palestine protester walked onto the front lawn of the Rohr Chabad Center—located across the street from the ongoing encampment—while holding a brick.
“You walk on to [a place for] Jewish life and learning with a brick? It’s intimidating,” the man said.
The man claimed the protester “pushed a girl friend of mine” before another protester called him a “racist pussy Jew” after seeing him speaking to the police. The man is currently filing a police report with UCPD.
— Maroon Staff
More vandalism:
May 17, 7 p.m.
Two UCPD officers were briefly in foot pursuit of accused perpetrators who spray-painted “ACAB,” an acronym of the slogan “All cops are bastards,” onto the front of a UCPD segway. The officers then spoke with Iron Key brothers who witnessed the act.
UCPD officers are attempting to identify the individual responsible for the spray paint.
— Maroon Staff
(From the Maroon): Protesters spray painted the front of the UCPD vehicle. (Eli Wizevich)
A photo taken by a colleague:
Demonstrators have hung an effigy of University President Paul Alivisatos depicting blood on his hands from a tree with a noose.
Protesters are gathered in front of Neubauer chanting “No justice, no peace.” Roughly 12 CPD officers are in a line on the street in front of Neubauer.
— Maroon Staff
Effigy of President Alivisatos with bloody hands; photo and caption from The Maroon:
Protesters outside the IOP hung an effigy of University President Paul Alivisatos. (Finn Hartnett)
May 17, 8:10 p.m.
Protesters later began dismantling the barrier in the back alley themselves. Some protesters threw chairs and other furniture in the direction of UCPD officers.
Protesters are chanting, “Pigs go home” and “Who do you serve? Who do you protect?”
— Maroon Staff
May 17, 8:04 p.m.
UCPD officers have begun dismantling a barricade that protesters built in the back alley of the Institute of Politics.
— Maroon Staff
May 17, 9:04 p.m.
In a message in its Telegram channel, UCUP said that some demonstrators “are preparing to stay the night” at the IOP. “There are a number of people who are going to stay and continue to hold the space,” the message reads.
They reiterated that the “UCUP are not the organizers” of the IOP occupation and thus “can’t provide more information.”
According to the message, UCUP is still planning to hold the events originally planned for Alumni Weekend.
“We will see you tomorrow at the UCUP events that were sent out earlier today,” the message ended.
— Maroon Staff
Screenshot of a tweet from Shadi Bartsch, a professor of classics here and also the widow of ex-President Bob Zimmer, a President who never would have tolerated this sort of disruption. She’s very angry!
Note the demands, especially #2. I’ll explain #5 below.
As for point #5 above, one of my colleagues consulted Wiktionary and found this meaning:
Tweets don’t seem to be embedding today, so I’ll use screenshots when there isn’t a video. But in the video tweet below, a student is upset that they’ve painted red handprints around the alumni area. Click. on the link to go to tweets.
Apparently the threat of jail brought the protestors out of the building like rodents fleeing a sinking ship. This is how deterrence–real deterrence–works:
The IOP has been renamed the “Casbah of Basel Al=Araj!! Note that “Bring the Intifada home” is an explicit call for violence, as an “infitada” is a period of violent terrorism used as resistance. Also: “we do not negotiate” and “we must escalate”. Doesn’t look good for graduation on June 1!
Click to read it, or click on the statement below the tweet:
Click to enlarge if you can’t read it:
Well, there are two more days left in Alumni Weekend, and they will be disturbed by the protesters. Yes, some of the speech will be “free” and legal, but one wonders whether the protestors think they’re advancing their cause by being so aggressive this weekend. They surely won’t affect the war in Gaza, and they’re not going to bring alumni over to their side. They are performatively acting out their anger, and at the same time trying as hard as possible to avoid arrest for acts of civil disobedience.
As for their failure of the Un iversity arrest students or give them meaningful disciplinary sanctions when violating University rules, I think it’s shameful. Will any Jewish parent send their children here?
And of course there’s graduation in about two weeks.
41 thoughts on “Tentifada has returned to Chicago to disrupt Alumni Weekend”
Thank you for the update jerry. Totally agree with you…very sad. i feel for prof Bartsch and I too have felt for Bob zimmer’s clear legacy as his successor “flushes it down the toilet” while patting himself on the back for his self-described great successes. This is all very sad, but not too difficult to see a more strategically constructive path involving removing and punishing the miscreants. At least TRY to clearly delineate right from wrong for ceiling cat’s sake.
“Tentifada”
This^^.
Because the operation is entering the Normalization phase — normalization of language of “encampment” such that it is a normal expectation of daily life, anywhere outside a legitimate campground. I saw a guy who took a photo of himself with a bunny to emotionally normalize “encampment”. Same goes for “protest” v. what it actually is, e.g. extremism.
So any counter-subversion — like “Tentifada” — will maintain clarity.
Good luck to the university leadership in recognizing the traps and manipulative provocations.
I wasn’t sure what the Institute of Politics was. I thought maybe they meant Pick, the international studies building. I was going to say, Let them have the ugly thing. As these people deny they are students, I don’t see why the University should delay sending the cops in and arresting all of them.
I had to look up what the hell Turtle Island was. Apparently, it’s a term used by some Indians to mean Earth or North America. I had forgotten that it’s turtle all the way down.
Whew, glad to know I wasn’t the only one who had to look up “Turtle Island.” 🙂
The language in the Statement of Principles above made me flash back to the 60s counterculture movement. I did not personally participate, being too young, but experienced the backlash as I matured.
I can’t help but remember the scene from Field of Dreams, where Kevin Costner shows up at James Earl Jones’ apartment and Jones tries to get rid of him: “You’re from the 60s! Peace! Love! Dope! Now get the hell out of here!”
The language is indeed eerily similar to the 1960s, which was a decade before my time for personal experience. But, like Elliot, when I did arrive at university I experienced the retaliatory “cutbacks”, the “fighting” of which which obsessed the radical Left rump for the next 20 years. Of course they had no military draft by then to energize them.
It’s not surprising that the rhetoric should rhyme. It’s not just turtles but Marxism all the way down.
They are putting on a nice show for all the parents and alumni who will be coming for Alumni Weekend and graduation day (if it even happens)—and who are rightly deciding never to give money to the University again or to send any of their other children there.
Love your blog,
My son is graduating high school going to college this fall, we are Jewish and my children are Israeli from their dad we have been watching all this very closely. He is committed to Lafayette college in Pennsylvania. He got into Brandise.with a great fellowship but still to expensive And we are waiting to hear from George Town and Cornell . I belong to a group called mother’s against Antisemitism on college campuses. Many have declined their acceptance letters to the very loud schools, UCLA, Berkeley ,Stanford, Columbia , George Town, Harvard , my son who has started wearing his star of David every day to school and is very diplomatic. Wants to become a lawyer. Has stated that Jewish students must go to these schools must keep a Jewish presence as otherwise we have let these A holes win. And then Antisemitism will become worse as their will be no Jewish voice. As his mom I say no , I am terrified of who his roommate will be but I have to let him make his own journey Also as a mom please can somebody bake cookies for that frat house at u Chicago.
For Jewish students and parents right now the joy and excitement of going to college has been robbed from us. My daughter is at college, with an encampment and the students, Hillel and Chabad are fighting a bill to divest . Her words I wish I did not have my name , (Yael), I now know who is truly my friend. I feel isolated, ostracized, targeted, closeted . She will be the president of her Hillel next year.
Thank you
As a graduate of Cornell and the USMC I am sorry administrators are so reluctant to do the right thing. To me the right thing is immediate expulsion. That would take some of the fun, fun, fun put of the idiocy. Virtually all university vice presidents have proven to be PITA.
I’m sorry to hear that and hope this will settle down. I remember the protests of the 60s, started university in ‘69 in Canada. It was mostly American as it was about the Vietnam war. But Simon Fraser was pretty new and had a lot of American faculty. We had a Ho Chi Minh Way for a while.
But the protesters weren’t attacking other students. Big difference.
Your son wanting to defy the assholes at these schools is making the right decision, although it would make any mom worry. You should know that Jewish people are not alone in this fight. There are non-jews the world over who support you.
+1
+1
+1
“We cannot allow the state or its functionaries to have a monopoly on violence”.
Yikes.
Yeah that one’s huge. Arguably the foundational mechanism of our civilization — the thing that allows all other flourishing — is the collective decision by the people to give the state a monopoly on violence.
Challenging the state’s monopoly on violence is a call for insurrection, revolution, or civil war because you are claiming to set up an alternative state (with its own right to violence which might be capricious for all you know) that will usurp the existing state. This a really big deal.
On a related point, while I’m not familiar with the local politics and personalities, I’m not sure how much blame can be laid on the university leadership. All the President can do, through the Provost, is expel students, or arrest them and hand them over to the Chicago Police Dept. For outsiders, everything depends on the will and capacity of the criminal justice system off-campus to deal harshly with what, in the grand scheme of Cook County, are minor offences that would likely be abandoned early on to clear Court dockets. It’s hard to imagine the County going out of its way to whack these people just to protect UChicago when people arrested with illegal guns on the street aren’t charged with anything, and looting shoplifters aren’t even arrested.
I was barely into my teens during the Chicago Convention riots and the subsequent trials of Bobby Seale and the Chicago Seven on serious criminal charges. My young recollection was that public opinion in all the fashionable salons, including on university campuses still roiled by the draft, favoured the defendants and had been bitterly hostile to the police and to Judge Hoffman. (Some tunes never change.) With enduring sympathy for protesters, it’s hard to imagine any of those repercussions happening today no matter how the insurrectionists escalate short of shooting someone. The long memories of the “Man” we were all being urged to stick it to likely explain a lot of the laissez-faire.
I hadn’t heard of the “Iron Key” name for a frat. I tried looking it up, but only got that name as a branded system of onboard encryption for portable USB storage devices. Is there a broader cultural significance I’m missing?
The pro-Pal fixation on setting up tents reminds me of the Hitchens stories in “God is Not Great” about cargo cult religions and John Frum. In the latter, setting up docks and runways will lead to the arrival of ships and planes full of goods and the ushering in of the Era of the Companies. In the former, if one could only set up enough tents, Palestine would become free (river, sea, etc.).
Good jibe, Mike, but I think it’s just that tents give a besieging force staying power, until dysentery sets in, or until the troops start to complain about the monotony of the food, all carefully curated to respect 100 different food allergies…and NO BAGELS! And judging from the requests for donations of Plan B at several encampments, a modicum of privacy, too.
To me the high-end tents (those babies ain’t cheap at the outdoors stores) along with the fancy water bottles most of these kids carry on their backpacks just serve as an exclamation point on how pampered these students are. Looking at the twitter pics Jerry posted from U Chicago this morning I couldn’t help but wonder how these protesters would fare in the part of the city where all the shootings occur every weekend. They’d be crying for the “ACAB” law enforcement if they found themselves in those neighbors. Sadly ironic.
“Enpampered” please.
Ha! And I meant “neighborhoods”. Probably that was obvious.
Ha yes maybe so. My view at least takes for granted the sincerity of the encampers’ purpose. But omg Plan B!? Really? In that case I take it all back – clearly it’s all just a big meetup.
Also wrt TP’s comment @ 2 about normalization, as I typed “encampers” I got “encumbers” from my autocorrect. How long will it be before the software updates favour “encampers”?
Apparently the best example he could come up with for U. of Chicago helping aid genocide through its academic activities was a partnership in quantum computing with researchers at Weizmann. This is about as intelligent as suggesting that teaching Dostoevsky directly aids the Russian war effort in Ukraine.
Thanks for the link. An interesting forty-minute video presentation by Eric Cohen, President of the Tikvah Fund. First half of general interest; second is push for the Exodus Project. Access to transcript included.
From the Exodus Project video: “As go the Jews, so goes the West”. Maybe Jews and everyone who supports the values of the European Enlightenment on which Western Democracies are based should get behind the University of Texas at Austin which still needs a Physics department and a Medical School but seems well on the way to becoming a first rate University with an explicit mandate to eschew the Puritanical Fake Left and the tsunami of anti-semitism (more accurately, Jew hatred) that it includes.
Didn’t UT-Austin poach Nobel Prize Laureate in physics, Steven Weinberg from Harvard in the early 80’s?
In the good old days (which never really “good” except in selective memories) such a looney and obnoxious mob would have been thoroughly hosed down with a firehose and taken off to confinement. ID cards should be copied and any one who is a UC student should be expelled. Why is the administration so reluctant to fight ire with ire? Oh yeah, is anything happening in Ukraine? The Republicans have become Putin’s allies. No protests.
These protesters are very selective: no interest whatsoever in any other conflict.
Ronen Bergman and Mazzetti apparently have a long form piece in nyt magazine this week on Jewish settlers and extremists behaviours in the West Bank and the Netanyahu administration’s normalization of those behaviors over the years. I cannot vouch for these authors, but I sure would like to read a fair analysis of the situation of Palestinians in the West Bank…which is clearly occupied I believe.
Israel occupies the West Bank by Right of Conquest. She drove into it during the Six-Day War and it is a spoil of war. Since 1945, states are not supposed to expand their territory by annexing their neighbours and settling their civilian populations in occupied war spoils, so Israel says the West Bank is “disputed” (not “occupied”) territory. Israel conquered the territory from Jordan but I don’t think Jordan wants it back because it would get the Palestinians who live there in the bargain (like O. Henry’s short story, “The Ransom of the Red Chief.”). And of course the Israelis who have settled there don’t want to become Jordanians or ethnically cleansed (again).
My take on the settlements is that everyone but the settlers agrees they are wrong but they are probably the least wrong of the available solutions. Life has a way of working out things like that but it does require armed force and good diplomacy to keep the Pareto optimum stable. If the current arrangement is apartheid, then I need to go back and re-look at South Africa to see if I would still oppose theirs. If someone says to me in a huff, “But the Israelis are doing apartheid in the Occupied Territory!”, my response, instead of trying to explain why it’s not apartheid, maybe ought to be, “So? Your point?”
Thanks leslie. I fully agree. Good to have confirmation from someone who knows significantly more than I.
There are loads of reolutions against those settlements and many of those settlers have committed horrific crimes but that’s all a bit if a moot point after October 7th. Per usual, the so-called “leaders” of the Palestinian people screwed things up for the general Palestinian populace.
“She drove into it during the Six-Day War and it is a spoil of war. ”
Israel’s position is that the West Bank is sovereign to Israel because it is within its still-legal 1948 borders, which were granted to it by the League of Nations. Jordan occupied it illegally from 1948 – 1967.
There is not an institution in the world which recognizes the legitimate sovereignty by the victor of territory captured by a war of aggression. Except, of course for the UN, which upholds that policy everywhere but for Israel, which they deem an “Occupier”. You can not “occupy” your own territory.
The Mandate for Palestine is still valid International law. And it specifically calls for, and encourages, the settlement of Israel by Jews.
Thank you. I suggest that it is better for Israel to regard Judea and Samaria as disputed, rather than re-claimed. If the provinces were now (since 1967) being reclaimed by their rightful sovereign, there would be pressure for Israel to normalize the situation by getting rid of internal border controls applied to Palestinians and make them citizens of greater Israel, able to vote and travel at will anywhere they want. This would be a bad idea from Israel’s point of view for many familiar reasons. So maintaining the polite fiction of “disputed” territory is useful, as any good diplomatic effort should be, whether or not it is true. It keeps the troublemakers penned in. If they never had any rights to the land in the first place, their government (Jordan) having occupied it illegally in 1948, so much the better.
The war during which Israel (re-)occupied Judea and Samaria was not a war of aggression. It was a pre-emptive attack against imminent aggression by her neighbours and any spoils taken as a result of the collapse of the enemy military effort (i.e., Gaza, Golan Heights, the Sinai, and the West Bank) are legitimately occupied. The “re-” part isn’t necessary for the case, but nice to have. Says I.
Another side of the “disputed” position is to say, reasonably, that the Mandate encouraging settlement of Israel by Jews is still valid. However I don’t think Israel officially encourages settlement in the disputed territories, rather it says it is politically powerless to stop them. This would be a curious position to take if the official view was that Jews have every right to settle the entire Palestine Mandate. I support Israel’s efforts to settle Judea and Samaria. I just think what backs up this claim is the IDF, not international law because the arbiters of international law at the United Nations are hopelessly biased against Israel. It may be necessary for Israel to pretend to oppose the settlements while at the same time conniving at them until the facts on the ground show the world that Israeli settlements are there to stay. So there.
There is a certain amount of admirable chutzpah in Israel’s position on the settlements in the West Bank. To me it just shows that Israel’s government is dedicated to doing what is best for its citizens and those foreigners with Right of Return and to Hell with what the rest of the world thinks.
How wonderful! A few months ago the student idiots had a chance of actually changing opinions. I was stressed by this.
Now however we have learned what they’re all about, how deranged and evil their goals, their funders, their motives.
They are an object lesson in free speech: “THIS is what we’re about.”
So now we – and others watching – know and can dismiss them as irrelevant and morally bankrupt narcissists.
Excellent.
This turn-around pleases me very much.
My only disappointment is they probably won’t ever travel to any Islamic country to see how their dreams would work in reality. I’d love to watch Queers for Pal FLY! Fly free, off that building because the sacred texts you endorse demand it. Fly, fly fly away little Pal loving Queers. To Gaza. To Kabul. To Baghdad. They’ll love ya there!
The concert our host enjoyed in Amsterdam featured what I consider Shostakovich’s best work, the finest violin concerto of the 20th century. As for the U. Chicago protesters, their point #2 (Abolish the University) was clearly their best work. I can’t help wondering when the replay of 60s golden oldies will reach the 1969 “days of rage” level—random shop and car window smashing for sport.
If they want to abolish the university, why would they mind being expelled?
Take them at their stated words and prosecute accordingly. This is a long term, well-funded plot to have an armed insurrection against the government and its people, especially one particular group of people.
These people are insurrectionists.
Thank you for the update jerry. Totally agree with you…very sad. i feel for prof Bartsch and I too have felt for Bob zimmer’s clear legacy as his successor “flushes it down the toilet” while patting himself on the back for his self-described great successes. This is all very sad, but not too difficult to see a more strategically constructive path involving removing and punishing the miscreants. At least TRY to clearly delineate right from wrong for ceiling cat’s sake.
“Tentifada”
This^^.
Because the operation is entering the Normalization phase — normalization of language of “encampment” such that it is a normal expectation of daily life, anywhere outside a legitimate campground. I saw a guy who took a photo of himself with a bunny to emotionally normalize “encampment”. Same goes for “protest” v. what it actually is, e.g. extremism.
So any counter-subversion — like “Tentifada” — will maintain clarity.
Good luck to the university leadership in recognizing the traps and manipulative provocations.
I wasn’t sure what the Institute of Politics was. I thought maybe they meant Pick, the international studies building. I was going to say, Let them have the ugly thing. As these people deny they are students, I don’t see why the University should delay sending the cops in and arresting all of them.
I had to look up what the hell Turtle Island was. Apparently, it’s a term used by some Indians to mean Earth or North America. I had forgotten that it’s turtle all the way down.
On a related note, ANTIFA apparently trashed the office of the President of the University of California.
Whew, glad to know I wasn’t the only one who had to look up “Turtle Island.” 🙂
The language in the Statement of Principles above made me flash back to the 60s counterculture movement. I did not personally participate, being too young, but experienced the backlash as I matured.
I can’t help but remember the scene from Field of Dreams, where Kevin Costner shows up at James Earl Jones’ apartment and Jones tries to get rid of him: “You’re from the 60s! Peace! Love! Dope! Now get the hell out of here!”
The language is indeed eerily similar to the 1960s, which was a decade before my time for personal experience. But, like Elliot, when I did arrive at university I experienced the retaliatory “cutbacks”, the “fighting” of which which obsessed the radical Left rump for the next 20 years. Of course they had no military draft by then to energize them.
It’s not surprising that the rhetoric should rhyme. It’s not just turtles but Marxism all the way down.
They are putting on a nice show for all the parents and alumni who will be coming for Alumni Weekend and graduation day (if it even happens)—and who are rightly deciding never to give money to the University again or to send any of their other children there.
Love your blog,
My son is graduating high school going to college this fall, we are Jewish and my children are Israeli from their dad we have been watching all this very closely. He is committed to Lafayette college in Pennsylvania. He got into Brandise.with a great fellowship but still to expensive And we are waiting to hear from George Town and Cornell . I belong to a group called mother’s against Antisemitism on college campuses. Many have declined their acceptance letters to the very loud schools, UCLA, Berkeley ,Stanford, Columbia , George Town, Harvard , my son who has started wearing his star of David every day to school and is very diplomatic. Wants to become a lawyer. Has stated that Jewish students must go to these schools must keep a Jewish presence as otherwise we have let these A holes win. And then Antisemitism will become worse as their will be no Jewish voice. As his mom I say no , I am terrified of who his roommate will be but I have to let him make his own journey Also as a mom please can somebody bake cookies for that frat house at u Chicago.
For Jewish students and parents right now the joy and excitement of going to college has been robbed from us. My daughter is at college, with an encampment and the students, Hillel and Chabad are fighting a bill to divest . Her words I wish I did not have my name , (Yael), I now know who is truly my friend. I feel isolated, ostracized, targeted, closeted . She will be the president of her Hillel next year.
Thank you
As a graduate of Cornell and the USMC I am sorry administrators are so reluctant to do the right thing. To me the right thing is immediate expulsion. That would take some of the fun, fun, fun put of the idiocy. Virtually all university vice presidents have proven to be PITA.
I’m sorry to hear that and hope this will settle down. I remember the protests of the 60s, started university in ‘69 in Canada. It was mostly American as it was about the Vietnam war. But Simon Fraser was pretty new and had a lot of American faculty. We had a Ho Chi Minh Way for a while.
But the protesters weren’t attacking other students. Big difference.
Your son wanting to defy the assholes at these schools is making the right decision, although it would make any mom worry. You should know that Jewish people are not alone in this fight. There are non-jews the world over who support you.
+1
+1
+1
“We cannot allow the state or its functionaries to have a monopoly on violence”.
Yikes.
Yeah that one’s huge. Arguably the foundational mechanism of our civilization — the thing that allows all other flourishing — is the collective decision by the people to give the state a monopoly on violence.
Challenging the state’s monopoly on violence is a call for insurrection, revolution, or civil war because you are claiming to set up an alternative state (with its own right to violence which might be capricious for all you know) that will usurp the existing state. This a really big deal.
On a related point, while I’m not familiar with the local politics and personalities, I’m not sure how much blame can be laid on the university leadership. All the President can do, through the Provost, is expel students, or arrest them and hand them over to the Chicago Police Dept. For outsiders, everything depends on the will and capacity of the criminal justice system off-campus to deal harshly with what, in the grand scheme of Cook County, are minor offences that would likely be abandoned early on to clear Court dockets. It’s hard to imagine the County going out of its way to whack these people just to protect UChicago when people arrested with illegal guns on the street aren’t charged with anything, and looting shoplifters aren’t even arrested.
I was barely into my teens during the Chicago Convention riots and the subsequent trials of Bobby Seale and the Chicago Seven on serious criminal charges. My young recollection was that public opinion in all the fashionable salons, including on university campuses still roiled by the draft, favoured the defendants and had been bitterly hostile to the police and to Judge Hoffman. (Some tunes never change.) With enduring sympathy for protesters, it’s hard to imagine any of those repercussions happening today no matter how the insurrectionists escalate short of shooting someone. The long memories of the “Man” we were all being urged to stick it to likely explain a lot of the laissez-faire.
I hadn’t heard of the “Iron Key” name for a frat. I tried looking it up, but only got that name as a branded system of onboard encryption for portable USB storage devices. Is there a broader cultural significance I’m missing?
The pro-Pal fixation on setting up tents reminds me of the Hitchens stories in “God is Not Great” about cargo cult religions and John Frum. In the latter, setting up docks and runways will lead to the arrival of ships and planes full of goods and the ushering in of the Era of the Companies. In the former, if one could only set up enough tents, Palestine would become free (river, sea, etc.).
Good jibe, Mike, but I think it’s just that tents give a besieging force staying power, until dysentery sets in, or until the troops start to complain about the monotony of the food, all carefully curated to respect 100 different food allergies…and NO BAGELS! And judging from the requests for donations of Plan B at several encampments, a modicum of privacy, too.
To me the high-end tents (those babies ain’t cheap at the outdoors stores) along with the fancy water bottles most of these kids carry on their backpacks just serve as an exclamation point on how pampered these students are. Looking at the twitter pics Jerry posted from U Chicago this morning I couldn’t help but wonder how these protesters would fare in the part of the city where all the shootings occur every weekend. They’d be crying for the “ACAB” law enforcement if they found themselves in those neighbors. Sadly ironic.
“Enpampered” please.
Ha! And I meant “neighborhoods”. Probably that was obvious.
Ha yes maybe so. My view at least takes for granted the sincerity of the encampers’ purpose. But omg Plan B!? Really? In that case I take it all back – clearly it’s all just a big meetup.
Also wrt TP’s comment @ 2 about normalization, as I typed “encampers” I got “encumbers” from my autocorrect. How long will it be before the software updates favour “encampers”?
Regarding the Divinity faculty member you quote:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mBc7qQDGozo&t=815s
Apparently the best example he could come up with for U. of Chicago helping aid genocide through its academic activities was a partnership in quantum computing with researchers at Weizmann. This is about as intelligent as suggesting that teaching Dostoevsky directly aids the Russian war effort in Ukraine.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aWlJu7eDgnM&t=1094s The Exodus Project – ideas for Jewish Americans on how to respond to the current tsunami of mindless Jew-hatred in Universities and the wider society.
Thanks for the link. An interesting forty-minute video presentation by Eric Cohen, President of the Tikvah Fund. First half of general interest; second is push for the Exodus Project. Access to transcript included.
From the Exodus Project video: “As go the Jews, so goes the West”. Maybe Jews and everyone who supports the values of the European Enlightenment on which Western Democracies are based should get behind the University of Texas at Austin which still needs a Physics department and a Medical School but seems well on the way to becoming a first rate University with an explicit mandate to eschew the Puritanical Fake Left and the tsunami of anti-semitism (more accurately, Jew hatred) that it includes.
Didn’t UT-Austin poach Nobel Prize Laureate in physics, Steven Weinberg from Harvard in the early 80’s?
In the good old days (which never really “good” except in selective memories) such a looney and obnoxious mob would have been thoroughly hosed down with a firehose and taken off to confinement. ID cards should be copied and any one who is a UC student should be expelled. Why is the administration so reluctant to fight ire with ire? Oh yeah, is anything happening in Ukraine? The Republicans have become Putin’s allies. No protests.
These protesters are very selective: no interest whatsoever in any other conflict.
Ronen Bergman and Mazzetti apparently have a long form piece in nyt magazine this week on Jewish settlers and extremists behaviours in the West Bank and the Netanyahu administration’s normalization of those behaviors over the years. I cannot vouch for these authors, but I sure would like to read a fair analysis of the situation of Palestinians in the West Bank…which is clearly occupied I believe.
Israel occupies the West Bank by Right of Conquest. She drove into it during the Six-Day War and it is a spoil of war. Since 1945, states are not supposed to expand their territory by annexing their neighbours and settling their civilian populations in occupied war spoils, so Israel says the West Bank is “disputed” (not “occupied”) territory. Israel conquered the territory from Jordan but I don’t think Jordan wants it back because it would get the Palestinians who live there in the bargain (like O. Henry’s short story, “The Ransom of the Red Chief.”). And of course the Israelis who have settled there don’t want to become Jordanians or ethnically cleansed (again).
My take on the settlements is that everyone but the settlers agrees they are wrong but they are probably the least wrong of the available solutions. Life has a way of working out things like that but it does require armed force and good diplomacy to keep the Pareto optimum stable. If the current arrangement is apartheid, then I need to go back and re-look at South Africa to see if I would still oppose theirs. If someone says to me in a huff, “But the Israelis are doing apartheid in the Occupied Territory!”, my response, instead of trying to explain why it’s not apartheid, maybe ought to be, “So? Your point?”
Thanks leslie. I fully agree. Good to have confirmation from someone who knows significantly more than I.
There are loads of reolutions against those settlements and many of those settlers have committed horrific crimes but that’s all a bit if a moot point after October 7th. Per usual, the so-called “leaders” of the Palestinian people screwed things up for the general Palestinian populace.
“She drove into it during the Six-Day War and it is a spoil of war. ”
Israel’s position is that the West Bank is sovereign to Israel because it is within its still-legal 1948 borders, which were granted to it by the League of Nations. Jordan occupied it illegally from 1948 – 1967.
There is not an institution in the world which recognizes the legitimate sovereignty by the victor of territory captured by a war of aggression. Except, of course for the UN, which upholds that policy everywhere but for Israel, which they deem an “Occupier”. You can not “occupy” your own territory.
The Mandate for Palestine is still valid International law. And it specifically calls for, and encourages, the settlement of Israel by Jews.
Thank you. I suggest that it is better for Israel to regard Judea and Samaria as disputed, rather than re-claimed. If the provinces were now (since 1967) being reclaimed by their rightful sovereign, there would be pressure for Israel to normalize the situation by getting rid of internal border controls applied to Palestinians and make them citizens of greater Israel, able to vote and travel at will anywhere they want. This would be a bad idea from Israel’s point of view for many familiar reasons. So maintaining the polite fiction of “disputed” territory is useful, as any good diplomatic effort should be, whether or not it is true. It keeps the troublemakers penned in. If they never had any rights to the land in the first place, their government (Jordan) having occupied it illegally in 1948, so much the better.
The war during which Israel (re-)occupied Judea and Samaria was not a war of aggression. It was a pre-emptive attack against imminent aggression by her neighbours and any spoils taken as a result of the collapse of the enemy military effort (i.e., Gaza, Golan Heights, the Sinai, and the West Bank) are legitimately occupied. The “re-” part isn’t necessary for the case, but nice to have. Says I.
Another side of the “disputed” position is to say, reasonably, that the Mandate encouraging settlement of Israel by Jews is still valid. However I don’t think Israel officially encourages settlement in the disputed territories, rather it says it is politically powerless to stop them. This would be a curious position to take if the official view was that Jews have every right to settle the entire Palestine Mandate. I support Israel’s efforts to settle Judea and Samaria. I just think what backs up this claim is the IDF, not international law because the arbiters of international law at the United Nations are hopelessly biased against Israel. It may be necessary for Israel to pretend to oppose the settlements while at the same time conniving at them until the facts on the ground show the world that Israeli settlements are there to stay. So there.
There is a certain amount of admirable chutzpah in Israel’s position on the settlements in the West Bank. To me it just shows that Israel’s government is dedicated to doing what is best for its citizens and those foreigners with Right of Return and to Hell with what the rest of the world thinks.
How wonderful! A few months ago the student idiots had a chance of actually changing opinions. I was stressed by this.
Now however we have learned what they’re all about, how deranged and evil their goals, their funders, their motives.
They are an object lesson in free speech: “THIS is what we’re about.”
So now we – and others watching – know and can dismiss them as irrelevant and morally bankrupt narcissists.
Excellent.
This turn-around pleases me very much.
My only disappointment is they probably won’t ever travel to any Islamic country to see how their dreams would work in reality. I’d love to watch Queers for Pal FLY! Fly free, off that building because the sacred texts you endorse demand it. Fly, fly fly away little Pal loving Queers. To Gaza. To Kabul. To Baghdad. They’ll love ya there!
D.A.
NYC
https://democracychronicles.org/author/david-anderson/
The concert our host enjoyed in Amsterdam featured what I consider Shostakovich’s best work, the finest violin concerto of the 20th century. As for the U. Chicago protesters, their point #2 (Abolish the University) was clearly their best work. I can’t help wondering when the replay of 60s golden oldies will reach the 1969 “days of rage” level—random shop and car window smashing for sport.
If they want to abolish the university, why would they mind being expelled?
Take them at their stated words and prosecute accordingly. This is a long term, well-funded plot to have an armed insurrection against the government and its people, especially one particular group of people.
These people are insurrectionists.