Anti-Israel protests begin on first day of class at Cornell

August 31, 2024 • 12:00 pm

I’m back in Cape Town, and preparing Kruger Post #1. In the meantime, have another read about college miscreants:

See below. I told you so, but this isn’t rocket science. Anybody with two neurons to rub together could have guessed the protest engine would rev up when classes begin again, for, especially at elite schools, students are more interested in enforcing what they consider Social Justice on others than engaging in learning.

The article below (click to read), written by Judy Lucas four days ago, was published in The Ithaca Voice, the local paper. Click headline to read:

An excerpt:

The spring semester at Cornell University ended with protests, as students erected an encampment on the Arts Quad to oppose the university’s ties to institutions supporting the Israeli state. The war in Gaza raged on through the summer, with reports of thousands of more lives lost. Cornell’s fall semester started much like its last one ended.

A crowd of about 150 student protestors at Cornell University marched into a campus dining hall Monday, the first day of classes, where speakers renewed the call for the university to divest from any institutions supplying weapons and support to the Israeli military in the war against Hamas, among a set of other demands first released earlier this year.

Have a look at the list of demands, especially the “land return” demand (#1) and the usual “and-of-course-we’re-not-to-be-punished” demand (#8).

Twenty minutes into the rally, seven university police officers entered the atrium of Klarman Hall and stood guard near the protestors. At the instruction of lead organizers, students joined arms to form a chain in order to resist interactions with police.

And the kicker: no IDs proferred when asked, and no punishment (bolding is mine, and it’s all bolded because it shows the cowardice of the Cornell administration).

Officers asked protesters to hand over their student identification cards to refer them to the university’s conduct office for potential disciplinary action. None of the protestors followed orders but no arrests were made. 

Have a tweet; this one has three videos and it’s just like the bawling we heard so often last year.

The unions, by and large all anti-Israel (are there any pro-Israel unions?), were part of the demonstration:

The Coalition for Mutual Liberation (CML), which represents the university’s activist organizations and the group responsible for organizing and maintaining the pro-Palestinian encampment on Cornell’s Arts Quad in April, planned Monday’s demonstration.

They were joined by representatives of the United Auto Workers Local 2300, the union representing about 1,200 university employees, including custodians, cooks and food service workers, who are currently on strike demanding an increase in wages and improved working conditions.

As usual, there’s illegal vandalism:

The morning of the demonstration, graffiti reading “Israel bombs, Cornell pays” and “Blood is on your hands” was found, spray-painted in red, on the front facade of Day Hall, the university’s administrative building. The front door was also shattered.

Cornell’s Vice President for University Relations Joel Malina released a statement on behalf of the university Aug. 26. Malina wrote the administration was “appalled by the graffiti spray painted.”

“Acts of violence, extended occupation of buildings, or property damage (including graffiti) will not be tolerated and will prompt an immediate response from public safety,” Malina wrote. “Cornell Police are conducting a thorough investigation, and those responsible will be subject to suspension and criminal charges.”

Joel Malina is Cornell’s Vice President for University Relations, and if you think that anybody will be suspended or subject to criminal charges, I have some land in Florida to sell you.

Finally, the interim Provost and President sent out an email with dire warnings about what would happen to students who engaged in encampments:

Students involved in encampments would first receive a warning of their violation of the university’s policy. On a second violation, the student would receive a “non-academic temporary suspension.” After a third violation, a student would receive “temporary academic suspension.”

I guess to get a “permanent academic suspension,” you have to shoot someone.

This is only the very beginning. When asked for a comment, the University said bupkes. 

Cornell University has not released a statement or comment regarding the specific demonstration Monday evening during which university police officers were involved.

In response to an email from The Ithaca Voice requesting a statement regarding the protest, a media representative for the university said “We don’t have anything specific regarding yesterday afternoon’s protest.”

Have another tweet with two videos:

There are more invertebrates in Cornell’s administration than there are in one square meter of the bottom of Cape Town’s Harbour. But there’s one consolation. While Cornell’s administration is demonstrating its spinelessness, I seriously doubt that it will give in to any of the student demands.

h/t: Debi

21 thoughts on “Anti-Israel protests begin on first day of class at Cornell”

  1. Columbia admits to systemic Jew-hatred:

    “The following quote is not from the book “Woke Antisemitism,” but from a report by Columbia University Task Force on Antisemitism:

    “Group identity is the way most of us think of and organize ourselves, but identities are complex: people can belong to multiple groups, and relations between groups change constantly. In an institution as diverse and as complex as Columbia, it is neither empirically accurate nor desirable to divide identity groups into two master categories, marginalized and privileged, and to restrict the University’s multicultural embrace to members of the former category. In this typology, Jews are considered privileged, no matter what circumstances they come from or what their experiences have been. This kind of thinking, often supported by DEI offices, makes it difficult to acknowledge our students’ experience of antisemitism, even when it’s happening on our own campus.”

    https://president.columbia.edu/content/report

    https://x.com/DavidLBernstein/status/1829678919659773988

    1. “Group identity is the way most of us think of and organize ourselves”
      If that is so, it’s a sad state of affairs.

      1. You can’t get from an is to an ought, true. It’s easy to get from an is to an oughtn’t. The hard part is getting from an oughtn’t to an isn’t.

  2. A question I have is whether students involved in these things come an go. That is, do they attend class and then return to the protests. If that is so, then a way to push back on this is to prevent students from leaving a protest. They then get into academic trouble, and that is that.

  3. It’s not like these elite universities are hurting for admissions, why don’t they expel these agitators?

  4. Pathetic so far. This tells me that Cornell did not use the summer to prepare for the onslaught. Hoping that the problem goes away is not a strategy.

  5. These protests are sure looking like what Paul Johnson describes in 1920’s Germany in his book “The History of the Jews”. Holocaust chapter. I came upon this book on my own, but recently saw a video with Einat Wilf and Bari Weiss who both seem to recommend it. There is no excuse for wearing masks at any demonstration…particularly outdoors. These chickenshits simply do not have the courage of their claims to stand up as individuals and be recognized. It is generally accepted procedure in companies and even many k-12 schools that members of the community have and prominently display an ID badge. Why is this not a uni requirement? It is simply a security issue given the frequency of and vulnerability to mass shootings in recent years.

    1. Have you seen where various jurisdictions are trying to ban the wearing of masks due to the anonymity it affords criminals in light of all theft problems? They are, of course, getting lots of push back from the usual places… it’s being called a “dog whistle”. Particular stores have the ban posted outside their establishments. I wish I could figure out how to post links here. It’s been proposed in various parts of the country — even California.

      1. Debi: i use a Safari browser and Mac products and have always been able to post a link by using a simple copy and past of Word edit. If I post more than one link, the comment posting is delayed for Jerry to moderate it. If I really, really need to post more than one link, my work around would be to do multiple comments, and I may have done that for two links one time, but it is something that is frowned upon it seems and I like to respect Da Roolz both in fact and in spirit! So i try to pick my favorite single link and post it.

        1. I’m a tech moron. I’m on a cellphone (have no computer) and I used to be able to split my screen which I think would enable me to get to comments and then do the cut and paste thing. I’ve screwed something up in settings, though, that’s preventing my split screen from working. I’m on an Android and I use Brave and sometimes duckduckgo. I’m on a Google boycott currently. As I said, I’m a tech moron. I need to get together with my computer wiz friend and attend to my settings. Thanks. I will make an effort. There’s really no excuse.

          1. Though my first computer programming class (yes it was programming, not coding in the old days) was in 1966, learning FORTRAN, PL1, and either cobol or algol…i cannot recall which because in any case I never used either. Over the years, as an engineer I self taught and used probably two dozen additional languages including assembler and machine code. That said, when I have an IT issue these days, I immediately consult our youngest daughter who is 52 or a twenty something grandchild. I admire your ability to make do with your phone! I could not do it.

          2. I use only my iPhone. I can paste links by using multiple windows. I leave WEIT in one window then return to the window with the link. Copy the link, return to WEIT and paste.

            I can have many windows open at once.

      2. In Long Island, NY.
        This is a good thing. You know, masks in public WERE banned except for Halloween and narrowly prescribed reasons prior-covid.

        Now they’re camouflage for terrorists and criminals. Like keffiyehs – which the PLO adopted from Yemen in the 60s for that very reason. They are not “Palestinian” in origin (and they’re all made in China anyway).
        D.A.
        NYC
        https://themoderatevoice.com/author/david-anderson/

  6. Uggh.
    I’m convinced tictok is responsible for this antisemitic, pro terrorism mania in the kids, in “the girls not doing well”.

    On the other side there’s a pro-Israel thingie in Manhattan on Sep. 8th.
    See you there if you live in NYC. Look for me in my Israeli flag t-shirt!
    https://x.com/PamelaParesky/status/1829593410581217477

    D.A.
    NYC
    column:
    https://themoderatevoice.com/author/david-anderson/
    (There are many David Andersons out there, most are crazy, make sure you’re with the genuine, dog loving, Australian-American obnoxious attorney David. All other David Andersons are… not so good) 🙂

  7. How long are these administrators willing to put up with these disruptions and vandalisms? It’s not that hard I would think to issue punishments that would be effective. Are they willing to have chaos on their campuses all school year?

    1. Iran is certainly funding Hamas. They would be quite capable of funding the protests.

      I saw some reporting on protest funding earlier this year: mentioned Soros, Rockefeller and others.

  9. I keep thinking of another country, founded a year after Israel in 1949, that probably every one of these universities include in their portfolios, in some fashion, whose human rights violations, oppression of minorities, and suppression of dissent, categorically dwarfs everything even the most rabid anti-Zionist accuses the Jewish state of… But it’s been crickets… Why, oh why, could that be? It’s the double standard that makes it antisemitism.

  10. Perhaps Cornell is trying to give the noble, breathtakingly entitled spoiled brat protesters every undeserved (un-) reasonably generous opportunity to cease and desist of their own volition (short of administrators kissing the protesters’ gluteals on the front steps of the administration building), perhaps also giving them trigger warnings and offering them safe spaces with coloring books and pacifiers to suck on before lowering the boom.

  11. It’s interesting how far right-wing hate groups are publicized as a threat due to their Jew hatred but these far-left protests seem to be tacitly encouraged.

    I’d love to do a social experiment of paying about 50 college-age actors to play the part of neo-nazis who join up with these protesters and who start yelling the same anti-Jew slogans but while waving nazi flags. When they get challenged, they say “but we’re on the same side you are!”. I’d have them not spout any other rhetoric, but just parrot whatever the pro-Hamas students say. I wonder if it would change minds.

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