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.
We have a couple of days of readers’ wildlife photos left, but I’m holding off until the encampment here ends so I can document it (more photos and videos later today).
Yesterday the protestors removed a lot of small Jewish flags that had been strung up by the Jewish students a few days ago, and also tore down some of the big (and expensive) banners that the Jewish students had put up over the weekend. The installation of all the flags and banners were, of course, approved by the University. Here are (or were) two of the large ones. Note that they are peaceful, referring only to the hostages and giving a QR code to read about Hamas.
The Chicago Maroon reports this vandalism of Jewish signage, as well as someone calling the Jewish students trying to replace the banners “rats”, and shows a photo of the torn-down small Jewish flags. Bolding in the main text is mine:
April 29, 10:32 p.m.:
Maroons for Israel set up their Israeli flags again. Someone with a dog watching them said, “The dog smells some rats.” This incident was caught on video and confirmed by the Maroon.
Noting that the Israeli flags were going up again, encampment organizers made an announcement telling protestors not to engage with “Zionists” or “counter-protestors,” stressing that confrontations were a threat to the entire encampment.
— Eva McCord and Kayla Rubenstein, Co-Editors-in-Chief, Emma Janssen, Deputy News Editor
April 29, 9:50 p.m.:
The string of Israeli flags hung earlier in the day were taken down. The flags, along with the poster on a nearby lamppost, were approved by the University.
This marks 12 hours of the encampment.
— Eva McCord and Kayla Rubenstein, Co-Editors-Chief and Zachary Leiter, Deputy Managing Editor
The calling of the Jewish students “rats” is part of the anti-Semitism fomented by the demonstration. And since the Maroon has video of this, it can be confirmed.
How much longer will the administration tolerate this kind of divisive behavior. Tearing down banners and calling Jewish students “rats” (something not unknown during the Third Reich) is not bringing the campus together, but fracturing it. Does the administration care? How long will they let this charade persist, a performative demonstration that both the President and Dean admit is against university regulations. Are we becoming Harvard, treating different groups differently, even when they violate University rules?
The Maroon’s photo:
Caption from the Maroon: Israeli flags hung earlier in the day were taken down and found on the ground. (photo by Nathaniel Rodwell-Simon)
Here’s the official statement of our President:
The last three paragraphs implicitly threaten the demonstrators because the encampment is “a way of using force of a kind.” But it does not affirm that the encampment will be dismantled, nor give a time limit for how long it will be allowed to stand. It’s clear that the encampment is already disrupting scholarship, not only by alienating the Jewish students by vandalizing their signs, but by obstructing the quad, and, especially, by allow signs to stand that block the main sidewalks accessing the quads from north and south, like this one.
My prediction, which I hope will not come true, is that the administration will continue to tolerate the encampment despite the threats of reprisal for violating University regulations. It won’t look good if they bring in the cops to remove protestors: I was once told by an administrator that the thing that would make the University look bad was “laying hands on students.” But without forcible removal of protestors and dismantling the encampment, it will stay. Since many of the protestors, I think, are not part of the University community, they won’t feel threatened by warnings about suspension.
Of course the Jewish students were extremely upset that their banners, which cost a lot of money to make, were ripped down by the protestors (notice that the vandalism is all by one side), and the protest itself (look at the map of Israel above) smacks of Israel hatred. The tearing down of the signs, however, smacks of Jew hatred, as the signs are not about Israel, but about the hostages and Hamas.
To provide some solace for the distressed Jewish students, Rabbi Yossi of Chabad and Rabbi Anna of Hillel stood for hours yesterday in the center of the quad, just outside the encampment, acting as a magnet for about 25-30 of the students. The students did not shout and they did not chant; they just stood in a group that was at once upset and defiant. I admire Yossi and Anna for going to the demonstration to show the Jewish students that someone cared.
Here’s the emailed letter we got from the Dean of Students:
Dean Rasmussen’s letter is stronger, affirming that the encampment is violating University policy, and implying that the signs blocking the sidewalks are, too. She notes that the camping protestors have been put “on notice”, but I don’t know how. The Deans on Call are empowered to ask for student IDs, which must be shown upon demand, but they have not done this. This is a nonviolent way of identifying which protestors are students, and getting their names should they be punished. Note that the email does not give any specific time limit for the encampment, nor a firm assurance that violators of University policy will be disciplined.
Although there are high-minded words about free speech in both letters—and, indeed, protests against what’s happening in Gaza are free speech—the encampment is not about free speech. In fact, the protestors prohibit any interaction with university officials, the press, or “Zionists”. It is about whether protestors can violate university policies for the time, place, and manner of such speech, and do so with impunity. The encampment is there to test the mettle and resolve of the University of Chicago to defend freedom of speech by preventing its disruption, and to ensure that the University is not impeded from carrying out its mission. So far, the University is failing the test.
So far, the University’s “threats” seem toothless, and are fracturing the campus, allowing Jewish students to have their banners vandalized and to be characterized as “rats”. I hope with all my heart that my University recognizes that an important part of free speech is allowing it to be exercised without disrupting the academic mission of the University. So far, the University have recognized that only in words, not in deeds.
And, of course, tearing down the banners of Jewish students is an explicit violation of free speech. Will those who did it be identified and punished? I wouldn’t count on it.
As my Polish friend Malgorzata said (she lost most of her relatives in the Holocaust), “I don’t understand how this can happen in America.”
I’ll be back later with photos and video of the encampment. So far the protestors seem to be there for the long haul, as they’re well equipped with food, tents (including a medical tent) and other supplies.
Finally, as all the readers know here, I’m an atheist, and reject the tenets of Judaism as I reject the tenets of all faiths. But that doesn’t extend to a group of students who are being attacked and terrorized by the campers, and their pro-Israel signs and flags ripped apart and thrown on the ground. The head of one Jewish organization in Chicago posted this mantra on her Facebook page, which also appeared on Twitter:
And, yes, I’m getting Jewisher (culturally, not religiously) and I call on the administration to not only prevent vandalism of the Jewish students’ own free expression, but to dismantle the illegal encampment before it tears the University apart. SJP and UCUP can march and holler as much as it wants, but it cannot be allowed to violate University rules.
Oh, and President Alivisatos, you know that although the administration would rather do anything than call the police to dismantle the encampment you recognize as illegal, Title VI lawsuits against the University will surely follow, as the night the day.
I’ve collected several articles on the troubles at Columbia and other American campuses; two of these I found in Tom Gross’s newsletter. If you click on the headlines, you can access them all for free, as I’ve used archived links. I also give a brief excerpt from each article below the headline.
In my view, this is a far more troublesome time for colleges than the period of civil rights and anti-Vietnam-war protests of 1968 and after, for the protestors are not only bigoted and calling for the extermination of Israel, but seem opposed to all Western values—almost as if they would be delighted to live under Hamas. They’re certainly extolling Hama and Iran, both purveyors of terrorism.
And, if I don’t miss my guess, this trouble will spread off campus, for campus is where what is ideologically “cool” begins. (As Andrew Sullivan said, “We’re all on campus now.”) Arresting or expelling the protestors won’t solve the problem, for arrested protestors are energized protestors.
The solution? I don’t know, but I put the blame on universities themselves, which, by buying into and selling DEI to campuses throughout America, have promoted the divisive idea that Jews are settler-colonialists who don’t deserve a state.
I’m not afraid that concentration camps will come to America, but these protests have exposed not only the ugly underbelly of anti-Semitism among many Americans, but also the hatred of Western values of young people, probably instilled in them by colleges themselves or adopted as the au courant ideology. As you’ll see in the second article, the protests are of course applauded by foreign terrorists and extremists Muslims, for the college students camped out across America are playing precisely by the Islamist rulebook.
The points that in common among these articles are that the student protests of today are not similar to the civil-rights and antiwar protests of the Sixties, as the ones going on now are pervaded by bigotry, hatred, and a wish to destroy a people. Further, several articles argue that preventing the disruption of society and academia in this way, or refusing to even call out the hatred, will ultimately redound to a weakening of American—and therefore Enlightenment—values. This is not going to end soon.
First, in the NYT, John McWhorter is appalled by the demonstrations, but lays them at the door not of antisemitism but of DEI:
Excerpts:
I thought about what would have happened if protesters were instead chanting anti-Black slogans, or even something like “D.E.I. has got to die,” to the same “Sound Off” tune that “From the river to the sea” has been adapted to. They would have lasted roughly five minutes before masses of students shouted them down and drove them off the campus. Chants like that would have been condemned as a grave rupture of civilized exchange, heralded as threatening resegregation and branded as a form of violence. I’d wager that most of the student protesters against the Gaza War would view them that way, in fact. Why do so many people think that weekslong campus protests against not just the war in Gaza but Israel’s very existence are nevertheless permissible?
Although I know many Jewish people will disagree with me, I don’t think that Jew-hatred is as much the reason for this sentiment as opposition to Zionism and the war on Gaza. I know some of the protesters, including a couple who were taken to jail last week, and I find it very hard to imagine that they are antisemitic. Yes, there can be a fine line between questioning Israel’s right to exist and questioning Jewish people’s right to exist. And yes, some of the rhetoric amid the protests crosses it.
Conversations I have had with people heatedly opposed to the war in Gaza, signage and writings on social media and elsewhere, and anti-Israel and generally hard-leftist comments that I have heard for decades on campuses place these confrontations within a larger battle against power structures — here in the form of what they call colonialism and genocide — and against whiteness. The idea is that Jewish students and faculty should be able to tolerate all of this because they are white.
. . .On Monday night, Columbia announced that classes would be hybrid until the end of the semester, in the interest of student safety. I presume that the protesters will continue throughout the two main days of graduation, besmirching one of the most special days of thousands of graduates’ lives in the name of calling down the “imperialist” war abroad.
Today’s protesters don’t hate Israel’s government any more than yesterday’s hated South Africa’s. But they have pursued their goals with a markedly different tenor — in part because of the single-mindedness of antiracist academic culture and in part because of the influence of iPhones and social media, which inherently encourage a more heightened degree of performance. It is part of the warp and woof of today’s protests that they are being recorded from many angles for the world to see. One speaks up.
But these changes in moral history and technology can hardly be expected to comfort Jewish students in the here and now. What began as intelligent protest has become, in its uncompromising fury and its ceaselessness, a form of abuse.
This Wall Street Journal column is important, for it’s by Steven Stalinsky, the executive director of the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), an organization that translates articles, speeches, and sermons from Arabic into Hebrew, English, and other languages. MEMRI thus has its finger on the pulse of Middle Eastern Muslim society. Stalinsky notes that those who promote terror in the Middle East are also promoting these college protests (I suggest that they’re funding them, too), and certainly approve of them, for the protests will move worldwide Islamism forward. Globalize the intifada!
Excerpts:
What is most discouraging is the lack of attention to what the protesters are demanding, which goes far beyond a cease-fire in the Israel-Hamas war.
Take the March 28 re-election fundraiser for President Biden in New York featuring Barack Obama and Bill Clinton, which was disrupted by shouting in the auditorium. That made headlines, yet the protesters’ chants, including “Down with the USA” and the “Al-Qassam are on their way,” a reference to Hamas’s miliary wing, received no coverage. Neither did their physical threats to attendees outside, a common tactic. Also ignored are the flags and posters of designated terrorist organizations—Hamas, Hezbollah, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine—displayed at protests in the U.S., Canada and the U.K.
Major terror organizations have expressed support for these protests and disruptive actions, which have long been a key part of Hamas’s plan to win hearts and minds in the West. As early as a decade ago, during the July-August 2014 Israel-Gaza war, Hamas’s Interior Ministry issued guidelines to social-media activists on framing events for a Western audience.
. . . Every senior Hamas leader has also acknowledged the importance of the protests and said that influencing U.S. and Western policy is part of the organization’s strategy for destroying Israel. Khaled Mashal, the Hamas leader abroad, on Oct. 10 urged supporters to protest “in cities everywhere.” On Oct. 31, he said that the organization’s friends “on the global left” were responding to its appeal. On March 27, he called for millions to take to the streets in protest, saying there had been an unprecedented shift in global public opinion.
. . . Six months after the attack on Israel, Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis and others aren’t merely cheering those protesting in the streets. They are working with and grooming activists in the U.S. and the West, through meetings, online interviews and podcasts.
. . . On March 25, the Columbia University Apartheid Divest student group hosted an event called “Resistance 101” on campus. It featured leaders of the PFLP-affiliated Samidoun, Within Our Lifetime and other extremist organizations. At the event, former PFLP official Khaled Barakat referred to his “friends and brothers in Hamas, Islamic Jihad [and] the PFLP in Gaza,” saying that particularly after Oct. 7, “when they see students organizing outside Palestine, they really feel that they are being backed as a resistance and they’re being supported.” On March 30 on Hezbollah’s Al-Manar TV, Mr. Barakat said “the vast majority” of young Americans and Canadians now “support armed resistance” because of “the introduction of colonialism, racism, and slavery studies into history curricula.”
. . . The collaboration between senior terrorists and their growing list of friends in the U.S. and the West has real-world consequences. These groups are designated terrorist for a reason. They don’t plan marches and rallies—they carry out terrorist attacks. And when the U.S. and Western activists, including college students, see that their marches and protests aren’t achieving their goals, they may consider their next steps—which will be influenced by the company they have been keeping.
From Bret Stephens in the NYT, who begins his story with the visit of two Jewish Yale undergraduates, one visibly Hasidic, to the center of campus protests, where they were “yelled at, harassed, and pushed”. Like McWhorter and others. Stephens notes that Jews are treated much worse in these demonstrations than other minorities would be, for DEI considers Jews as “white adjacent”. Stephens not only sees administrators’ lack of action as a form of “bigotry,” but also argues that history will show the demonstrators ineffectual and wrong. And donors will speak with their wallets:
Excerpts:
Yale and other universities have been sites of almost continual demonstrations since Hamas massacred and kidnapped Israelis on Oct. 7. That’s just fine, insofar as students have a right to express their views about the war in Gaza — whatever one thinks about those views. It’s fine, too, to be willing to defy campus rules they believe are unjust — provided they are willing to accept the price of their civil disobedience, including arrest, jail time or suspension.
But as the experiences of scores of other Jewish students on American campuses testify, we are well past the fine stage.
At the University of California, Berkeley, students were spat on and grabbed by the neck by anti-Israel demonstrators. When a small group of students held Israeli flags in front of the Columbia protest, a young demonstrator, her face mostly masked by a kaffiyeh, stood in front of them with a sign that read, “Al-Qasam’s Next Targets,” a reference to the wing of Hamas that led the Oct. 7 attacks. At Yale, according to a video shared by Crispe, a demonstrator read a “poem” threatening those who “finance, encourage and facilitate this mass killing against us: May death follow you, wherever you go, and when it does I hope you will not be prepared.”
. . .The sad fact of campus life today is that speech and behavior that would be considered scandalous if aimed at other minorities are treated as understandable or even commendable when directed at Jews. The calling card of antisemitism has always been the double standard. How would the Yale administration have reacted if Crispe and Tartak had been Black students who said they were taunted, harassed and assaulted (whatever the ostensible political motive) by a mob of their white peers?
From the Harvard Crimson, published at a university where protests are muted, but a student organization was expelled for illegal demonstrations:
An excerpt from the above:
The Crimson reported on Monday that the Harvard Undergraduate Palestine Solidarity Committee was suspended for “violating student organization rules”— but that doesn’t mean that student organizing efforts will suddenly cease. It’s likely that, like on campuses across the country, the opposite will occur.
While inflated accusations of antisemitism on college campuses may undermine the ability to call it out where it actually exists in the pro-Palestine movement, the antisemitic scenes unfolding at Columbia University — and now other campuses, too — are as blatant as ever.
The ongoing demonstrations are led by Columbia Students for Justice in Palestine (whose post-Oct. 7 statement makes the PSC’s words seem benign) and conducted in partnership with an organization called Within Our Lifetime and a few other campus groups.
WOL’s demonstrations at Columbia this weekend were advertised as “Flood Columbia For Gaza,” seemingly referencing Hamas’s name for the Oct. 7 massacre: “Operation Al-Aqsa Flood.”
. . .Pro-Palestine groups must acknowledge that proud extremist antisemites are joining campus protests at universities much like ours, and confront the fact that their hateful and violent theories of change are seeping into on-campus advocacy.
These extremists do not care about promoting peaceful coexistence and ending the onslaught on innocent civilians in Gaza. They are there because these protest spaces have opened a conduit that is permissive of violent extremism and overt eliminationist antisemitism. It seems student organizations have allowed it, or at the very least, turned a blind eye in the name of coalition-building.
That said, the students who were arrested for their specific encampment protest within Columbia’s gates — while their words and choices may be objectionable to some — were largely non-violent. Even the police said so.
But non-violent is not the same as non-hateful, and a peaceful act does not negate overt antisemitism and intimidation of students on Columbia’s campus.
. . .The chaos at Columbia — which blurred the lines between student and non-student protestors and unleashed a whirlwind of antisemitism reminiscent in tone to the “Unite The Right” rally in Charlottesville, V.A. — is a prime example.
If they are dedicated to peacebuilding, pro-Palestinian campus organizations — as they determine the goals of their movements, how to frame their rhetoric, and with whom to build coalitions — must reckon with an irrefutable fact: Over seven million Jews live between the river and the sea, too, and they sure as hell aren’t going “back to Poland,” where over 85 percent of the Jewish population was murdered in death camps.
Simplify their existence to settler-colonialism all you want, and the fact still stands.
A lasting ceasefire, Palestinian liberation, and any positive future in the region will not come from demonizing and attacking Jews and Israelis. It will not happen through eliminationist slogans and events where “Zionists are not welcome.” Boycotting Starbucks probably won’t do it either.
Until that reality is fully recognized in the ethos of pro-Palestine student organizations, their voices and demands will fall on deaf ears. They will be co-opted by violent and hateful extremists, making administrators all the more emboldened to repress their non-violent demonstrations.
Author Nekritz says that pro-Palestinian demonstrators will attain their goals only when they “treat other people with respect, afford our opponents dignity, and foster conversations across deep disagreement.” Good luck with that!
Below: Brendan O’Neill at Spiked is not known for gentle persuasion, and his anger is on view in this article. He sees the Columbia protests, as do others here (as well as I) as a harbinger of the dismantling of Enlightenment values after the entitled, propagandized, and antisemitic college students of our era grow up. (Note: that is of course not all college students, or even a majority, but does include the most vociferous and activist ones.)
Excerpts:
Hands down the worst take on the ‘Gaza Solidarity Encampment’ that has taken over Columbia University in New York City for the past week is that students have always done things like this. Students have forever occupied buildings and quads to make a political point. Students have long agitated against war. Students often find themselves in the grip of passionate radical intensity. Look at the Vietnam era, says every columnist in Christendom, as if the Gaza camp were just another explosion of youthful anti-imperialism.
The wilful naivety of this take is unforgivable at this point. To liken Columbia’s strange, seething ‘pro-Palestine’ camp to earlier campus uprisings against militarism is to gloss over what is new here. It is to whitewash the profoundly unsettling nature of this rage of the privileged against the world’s only Jewish nation. Until someone can point me to instances of those Sixties anti-war kids hurling racist invective at minority groups and demanding the wholesale destruction of a small state overseas, I’ll be giving their Gaza camp commentary a wide berth.
The camp might look and sound like student politics as normal, with its juvenile bluster, megaphoned virtue and the occasional appearance of pitiable university officials warning campers of suspension. But scratch the radical surface and you’ll swiftly find an ugly underbelly of reactionary cries and even outright racism. No sooner had the students erected their tent city ‘for Palestine’ last Wednesday than it became a magnet for genocidal dreaming about the erasure of Israel and plain old bigotry against Jews.
Columbia has rang out with cries of ‘We don’t want no two states / We want all of it!’. You don’t need to be an expert in Middle East affairs to decipher this demand. It’s a sick call to seize the entirety of Israel – all of it – and create a new state more in keeping with the Israelophobic yearnings of both privileged Westerners and radical Islamists. Their longing for Israel’s erasure was made even clearer in a follow-up chant: ‘We don’t want no two states / We want ‘48!’ That is, 1948, a time when the modern state of Israel didn’t yet exist. They want a world without Israel. They want to lay waste to the national home of the Jews.
. . .We need to be honest about what is happening at Columbia. This is solidarity with a pogrom. It is sympathy for fascism. It is privileged leftists getting a cheap moral kick from a mass act of racist violence against Jews that they catastrophically mistake for a blow against imperialism. It is the Socialism of Fools.
More than that, it is a howl of rage against civilisation. This rancid camp with its flashes of outright Jew hate is not an extension of the anti-war activism of old – it’s an extension of the loathing for civilisation that the young have been inculcated with these past few years. To these protesters, the Jewish State, and Jews themselves, represent Western values and Western modernity, and thus they must be raged against. Israel has become a moral punchbag for the sons and daughters of privilege whose hatred for their own societies has driven them over the cliff edge of reason and decency.
How foolish we were to think that education might deliver the young from the benighted ignorances of the past. For today, it is the most educated, the dwellers of the academy, who have allowed the world’s oldest hatred to wash over them. We can now see the consequences of teaching the young to be wary of Western civilisation and to treat everything ‘Western’ as suspect and wicked. All they’re left with is the lure of barbarism, the demented belief that even savagery can become praiseworthy if its target is ‘the West’. If events at Columbia do not wake us up to the crisis of civilisation, nothing will.
From the Wall Street Journal, where author Jason Riley is an opinion columnist. And as he’s African-American, he adds a civil-rights perspective to his piece, and calls for authority to curb illegal demonstrations:
Excerpts:
In 1957, white mobs in Little Rock, Ark., in defiance of the Brown ruling, were preventing black students from safely attending school. President Dwight Eisenhower decided to do something about it. In a prime-time television address, the president explained that “demagogic extremists” and “disorderly mobs” were thwarting the law and that he had an “inescapable” responsibility to respond if Arkansas officials refused to protect black students. “Mob rule cannot be allowed to override the decisions of our courts,” he said. Then Eisenhower sent in the 101st Airborne Division.
The particulars then and now may differ, but the same principle is at stake. The federal government was obligated to come to the aid of an ethnic minority group being threatened by mob violence. Jews in 2024 deserve no less protection than blacks in 1957. And if university officials can’t handle the situation, or won’t let police deal properly with the unrest, Mr. Biden needs to step up.
. . .Mr. Biden’s response to antisemitism is also tempered by political expediency. The young people acting out on campuses are a crucial voting bloc that Democrats worry about losing to independent candidates such as Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Cornel West. “I condemn the antisemitic protests,” the president said on Monday, before quickly adding: “I also condemn those who don’t understand what’s going on with the Palestinians.” That sounds like someone who knows how badly he needs Michigan, a state with a large Arab-American population that has soured on him for supporting Israel.
Contrary to what Mr. Biden suggested, the outrage over what is happening to Jews isn’t the result of ignorance or a misunderstanding. Rather, it stems from yet another viewing of a movie Jews have seen too many times. It’s the one where those in a position to do something choose to do nothing.
Biden’s statement was craven: an attempt to placate everyone. The man is incapable of condemning attacks on one side without offering a bouquet to the other. He’s certainly desperate to get as many votes as possible, but I’m tired of his waffling. The fact is that the demonstrators at Columbia are worthy of condemnation for their act alone. It’s as if he said, “I condemn the attack of ships in the Red Sea, but I also condemn those who don’t have empathy for the Houthis.”
I suppose this counts as Readers’ wildlife today, as we’re dealing with the primate H. sapiens. We have videos and photographs from a demonstration in Chicago.
Yesterday my colleague Peggy Mason (like me, an atheistic Jew) went downtown to get pick up her repaired watch, and ran smack into a huge pro-Palestinian demonstration around Michigan Avenue. These protests occurred widely across America yesterday, perhaps in solidarity with the entitled demonstrators squatting, snacking, and shouting on the campus of Columbia University (see this morning’s Hili Dialogue and the tweets below). I’ll first show two videos taken by Peggy and then add a group of her photos. First, her words:
This is just beyond anything I ever thought I’d see in my lifetime. I was downtown today and there was a huge pro-Palestinian march on Michigan Avenue. Also huge police presence walling them in. Signs included anti-Zionism≠Anti-semitism, which is obviously not true here or in London or anywhere. Next to that sign was a throwback to the Elders of Zion – “Their god is CAPITAL and God is our Witness.”
The people in the march appeared to be quite pleased with themselves. There was no opposition to them. Tourists ignored them. I had no clue what I could do as a single person. I did nothing but take pictures for Jerry. I just don’t see how we return to comity and civility.
And two videos. First, the cops keep the demonstrators in tight order.
More shouts. I can’t make out the words beyond “Genocide Joe”, but readers can help with that and other chants.
And some photos. Note in the first one the claim that anti-Zionism does not equal anti-Semitism, which of course is an excuse to be anti-Semitic. I disagree with the slogan anyway, as to oppose an established country now, formed as a homeland for Jews expelled or demonized elsewhere, and long after the Holocaust made its existence necessary, is to say that you don’t think the country should exist—that it should be eliminated (and perhaps merged with Palestine, with dire results), or the Jews should be deported from Israel. Either way it’s anti-Semitic, so these protestors are flatly making a false statement.
Notice the blood libel here: the sign that says “Their God is Capital, and God is our witness.” That’s simply the old claim that Jews worship money, and it’s a poster I hadn’t seen. This is the kind of stuff, in conjunction with things like the London police driving away people who look “openly Jewish” (see this morning’s Hili Dialogue), that makes me believe that the protests are moving from being anti-Israel to being anti-semitic. Note also the “From the River to the Sea” poster.
Sundry other photos by Peggy:
This kid is doomed to being propagandized:
Of course I don’t deny these people the right to demonstrate and say whatever they want. (I’m pretty sure they had a permit.) What I am saying is that their speech is both hateful and scary, and not a good portent for Jews.
Truly, these people want to see Israel gone, wiped off the map—by “any means necessary.” And the nature of chants and slogans is changing. As I said this morning, at Columbia you can hear stuff like, ““Remember the 7th of October” (and they’re happy about that), followed by “Ten thousand times”. They are happy about the 7th of October attack, and they want it to happen again and again! It’s no coincidence that this is precisely what Hamas says. I can’t help feeling, and it chills me to the marrow, that many of these protestors think that Hamas did a good thing on October 7th. After all, they say, they are no real “civilians’ in Israel, and that apparently includes babies, who are just infant colonizers.
You will not convince me that all these people want is a peaceful and terror-free coexistence between Israelis and Arabs. They are in favor of getting rid of Israel, and you know what that means. Meanwhile, things at Columbia are heating up last night and this morning, and the slogans appear to be in Arabic. Some tweets:
I am not sure, as the tweet below avers, that all the people in the video are “terrorists or “openly supporting terror,” which seems very hyperbolic. I am putting up the first tweet just to show you how academia has become ideology.
Look at the epithets hurled at the rabbi and the Jewish students as they’re followed off campus. Click the button but read the epithets at the bottom of the screen. They’re clearly anti-Semitic, e.g. “Go back to Poland.” And the second tweet points out Jews as “targets”. What else could that mean?
Here's a terrorist directing the Hamas' military wing al-Qassam Brigades to target and kill Jewish students at @Columbia.
Here's another one of their leaders, praising the October 7th massacre ("the Al-Aqsa Flood") and lauding Hamas terrorists who raped, tortured, murdered, and kidnapped thousdans of civlians as "the sacrificial spirit of the Palestinian Freedom Fighters that will guide every… pic.twitter.com/OznpFA5YZQ
I forgot that Columbia University officials are being grilled in Congress about anti-semitism on its campus. You can watch it live below, and things are getting heated, as they did in the House hearings involving the presidents of MIT, Harvard, and Penn. The Republicans are loaded for bear, but I think I’ll have to watch most of this later. CNN has an article, with a live feed, about what’s going on. Here is some of their news:
All four Columbia officials testifying before Congress unequivocally stated that calls for the genocide of Jews violate the university’s code of conduct.
Rep. Suzanne Bonamici asked Columbia President Minouche Shafik, board co-chairs David Greenwald and Claire Shipman and David Schizer, co-chair of a task force on antisemitism, for a simple yes or no response. All four said “yes,” calls for the genocide of Jews would violate Columbia’s code of conduct.
The response offered a stark contrast to the lawyerly answers that university presidents provided during the December hearing before the same committee. That moment went viral, sparking an uproar that eventually contributed to the ousters of the presidents of Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania.
Of course, the Columbia officials had the advantage of having months to prepare for that question.
Days after the December hearing, Columbia issued a statement saying: “Calls for genocide against the Jewish community or any other group are abhorrent, inconsistent with our values and against our rules.”
Columbia certainly has learned from what happened in the last hearings! But apparently Columbia doesn’t adhere to the First Amendment, under which calls for genocide are, under many circumstances, legal. This means that their code of conduct does not completely comport with the First Amendment.
Here, quickly, are the YouTube notes:
The Committee on Education and the Workforce, chaired by Virginia Foxx (R-NC), will hold a hearing to call on the leadership at Columbia University to answer for the rampant antisemitism engulfing their campuses and threatening their Jewish students.
Here’s FIRE’s free-speech ranking for Columbia University. It’s below average: #214 out of #248 schools (Harvard was the lowest). Click to look it up:
What a life! First I defend the speech rights of pro-Palestinian student who may well favor the elimination of Israel, and now I’m back again at Vanderbilt University, where, according to both the student newspaper and the Jewish paper The Algemeiner, students have rejected precisely one out of 11 student groups that applied to joint the school’s Multicultural Leadership Council (MLC): Students Supporting Israel. Wouldn’t you know it!? (One other group, Vanderbilt United Mission for Relief and Development, is awaiting a vote.)
There are two articles that say largely the same thing, so I’ll quote from the shorter Algemeiner piece. But let us not forget that Vanderbilt become an “Our Hero” school when its Chancellor, Daniel Diermeier (Chicago’s former Provost) had students removed and arrested after occupying the administration building for nearly a whole day, protesting Vandy’s supposed complicity in supporting Israel against Gaza. Many of the students were also given interim suspensions, and there’s no sign that those suspensions will be lifted. It was not free speech that Diermeier was opposing, for he’s a big advocate of such speech (after all, he’s from the University of Chicago). He was enforcing “time and place” regulations for protest, and it’s simply against Vandy’s rules to sit inside the administration building.
According to these two articles, the rejection of Students Supporting Israel (SSI) was a decision of Vanderbilt students, not the administration, and I guess they just don’t like Israel. After all, Jewish Voice for Peace and Students for Justice in Palestine, both hate-filled groups favoring the elimination of Israel, are already members of the MLC (so is a subgroup from Hillel, but I bet it’s been a member forever).
Click below to see the piece from the Vanderbilt Hustler, the student newspaper:
Click below to go to the Algemeiner piece:
I’ll quote from The Algemeiner, but you can check the other piece, too:
According to The Vanderbilt Hustler, [Students Supporting Israel] is the only one to be rejected from this year’s applicant pool, an outcome that SSI president Ryan Bauman said is evidence of febrile opposition to dialogue and coexistence among some segments of the student body. The only Jewish group to be admitted, Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), is a fringe anti-Israel organization that did not condemn Hamas’ Oct. 7 massacre across southern Israel and has long celebrated terrorism against Israelis.
Among the nine groups to be admitted to the MLC this year were the Taiwanese American Student Association, Vanderbilt Pride Serve, the Vanderbilt Association for South Asian Cuisine, and the Vanderbilt Iranian Student Association. One of the 11 total organizations that applied, Vanderbilt United Mission for Relief and Development, is still awaiting an upcoming vote.
As a requirement of its application, SSI was told to deliver a presentation to the MLC but given only a few minutes to do so. Afterward, the group was cross-examined by the MLC — of which Students for Justice in Palestine is a member organization — about their opinions regarding “genocide” and “apartheid,” an apparent attempt to use the proceeding as a soapbox for anti-Zionist propaganda.
“We told them that we didn’t show up to discuss politics,” Bauman told The Algemeiner during an interview on Tuesday. “We told them we were there to celebrate Israeli culture and further the pro-Israel movement and invited them to have other dialogues at another time. We were then told to leave, and they held a closed session. And as you can see, it resulted in us being rejected by a wide margin.”
Is there any reason besides antisemitism or anti-Zionism that SSI would be the only group to be rejected? If you know Jewish Voice for Peace and especially Students for Justice in Palestine, you’ll know that they’re to a large extent hate groups who favor the abolition of Israel (SJP also celebrated Hamas’s October 7th attack on Israel). Is it too much to ask for a group supporting Israel to be added to the mix? Apparently so.
One more note from The Algemeiner:
This is not the first time that Students Supporting Israel has been denied membership in a student organization. In 2021, the president of Duke University’s Student Government vetoed a vote approving recognition of SSI, an incident which set off volleys of criticism and a sharp rebuke from the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law.
“Grant them the same access,” Brandeis Center president Alyza Lewin said at the time, warning of potential civil rights violations. “Treat them no differently than any other student recognized organization. If the university chooses not to intervene and does not make sure that SSI gets equal access and it is understood to be no different than any other organization, there could be potential legal liability for the university.”
That also holds for Vanderbilt, whose reputation for fairness could be besmirched by this act. As I said, I don’t blame the administration, which has been exemplary. Chancellor Diermeier also adopted the position of institutional neutrality as embodied in The University of Chicago’s Kalven report, making Vanderbilt one of only a handful of schools to take this essential position. Pity his efforts are being tarred by a bunch of hypocritical students.
NBC 10 in Philly reports a disturbing case of censorship, and of course it’s Jewish stuff that’s censored. Fortunately, a court stepped in and undid the censorship with a restraining order. Click the headline to read, and you can also find a shorter account on ABC 6 in Philly.
What happened is summarized by the bullet points in the report above:
The decision sparked outrage and a protest from local Jewish groups as well as a court order requested by the Israeli Film Festival, according to a lawyer representing the festival. The lawyer accused BMFI of breaching its contract by pulling the film. BMFI later confirmed they would screen the film following the court order.
What’s bizarre about all this is that while the pro-Palestinian groups wanted to cancel the entire showing, the BMFI decided to pull just one of the movies, and one that had absolutely nothing to do with the war, or anything related to it.
Guy Brodetzki, an Israeli man who currently resides in Lower Merion, also organized a grassroots group of concerned citizens called the Hope for Israel Alliance – Philadelphia. Brodetzki told NBC10 “The Child Within Me” has nothing to do with the Israel-Hamas War.
“Very famous singer. The movie is about him. And he’s very special,” Brodetzki said. “He was gay when it wasn’t that easy to be gay. He’s the son of Holocaust survivors. Many of his songs are about being a child of Holocaust survivors. This is the movie. There’s no mentioning of the Arab-Israeli conflict at all. There’s no mentioning of the war. There’s no mentioning of Palestinians. Nothing. It’s all about him. It’s about Jewish-Israeli culture. So why on earth would you want to cancel the showing of this kind of movie?”
Before lawyers got involved, BMFI issued a pathetic excuse for canceling the movie. Get a load of this dissimulation!:
“Bryn Mawr Film Institute is not a political organization. We don’t endorse or oppose any causes. In past years, we have not regarded hosting a screening from the Israeli Film Festival as a political partnership or taking a stance on any issues,” a BMFI spokesperson wrote. “This was our feeling when we arranged the 2024 screening many months ago. However, as the situation in Israel and Gaza has developed, it has become clear that our showing this movie is being widely taken among individuals and institutions in our community as an endorsement of Israel’s recent and ongoing actions. This is not a statement we intended or wish to make. For this reason, BMFI is canceling the sole screening of the music documentary, The Child Within Me.”
That’s pathetic, showing a complete lack of backbone and principle. It’s like a library pulling a book from the shelves because it offends some of the public. If they’re not political, then they shouldn’t worry about looking as if they endorsed a film. Does a library endorse Mein Kampf, for crying out loud? As ABC 6 reported, “Film Institute Executive Director Samuel Scott said the issue was not the film itself but concerns over heated political protests regarding the film’s screening.
And then the law stepped in:
Brodetzki’s group planned a protest outside the Bryn Mawr Film Institute on Tuesday. After the protest was planned, Lori Lowenthal Marcus, an attorney representing the Israeli Film Festival, told NBC10 the movie would still be screened at BMFI Tuesday evening following a court order. Marcus accused BMFI of breaching its contract when they attempted to pull the film from the festival.
Here’s the restraining order forcing the BMFI to show the movies. It’s short and sweet:
That’s all it took, and the film festival caved, saying that they were “flawed human being” making “bad calls” (see below). Their intention was surely not to hurt and offend Jews, but it was certainly to avoid Palestinian ire. It is due to fear of Palestinian action against the film that the BMFI took action. I wonder if they would bow to pressure from any other group about non-Israeli films.
So here’s the apology, which, as Shania Twain said, “don’t impress me much.”
There’s a new 38-minute movie out, “Man of Steele”, made by filmmaker Eli Steele about diversity, the attempted removal of AP classes, and antisemitism in a ritzy California school district. The movie, however, was was apparently removed from both YouTube and Vimeo—just for two seconds of video that someone claimed constituted “copyright infringement”. It appears to be fair usage, which isn’t really infringement, but fortunately you can still watch the movie. As Steele notes in the second headline below (click on each one to read):
The complainant was Menlo-Atherton High School’s newspaper, M-A Chronicle, and they objected to the inclusion of a two-second clip in the Killing America trailer. I checked the trailer’s YouTube page and, indeed, it had been removed.
Here’s are three Substack sites that explain the situation (the links to the movie are below, or you can click on the first headline).
I’ve watched the movie, and you won’t lose much more than half an hour if you do, but I have to say that it’s a bit of a dog’s breakfast, as it mixes together diverse subjects (removal of AP classes from a high school, equity, diversity, a school board’s musing over the advanced-placement classes, and the reaction of one parent whose son goes to the Bay Area school at issue). Perhaps I was tired, but I didn’t find it particularly coherent. That said, it’s still worth watching to see the parents battle over whether “tracking” students creates inequities and is unfair, or whether it allows students to reach their full potential. It’s worth it to see the school board dissimulate, and it’s worth it to see the odious, antisemitic and pro-Palestinian lies that some teachers tell to their students. But the film fails explain clearly how equity is connected with anti-Semitism, although one can intuit that the connection is via a DEI mentality, which promotes equity and denigrates Jews at the same time (Jews are seen as white, oppressive colonialists). And the occasional insertion of Russian stuff, like their national anthem, baffles me. Is Steele saying that Marxism is behind some of this? Who knows?
In the end, one doesn’t know what happens in the school district, but perhaps because the school board hasn’t decided what to do.
Here, from one of the posts, is the creator’s explanation of why he wanted to get the movie out (I know him only by the name “Man of Steele”):
That is why I’m releasing the film now — to force the following issues to the forefront:
Free Speech — what are we teaching students at high school newspapers when we tell them to embrace censorship, not free speech, as their weapon of choice?
Artistic Expression — are we going to let documentaries and other art forms be censored by activists, especially those in wealthy, elite neighborhoods?
Hate/Antisemitism — Why has this school and district largely ignored the rising antisemitism on campus? We know if it was blacks who were on the receiving end, the response would be different. This double-standard must end.
Ideological Capture/Lowering of Education Standards — For too long these education activists, many from Stanford University and beyond, have been given free reign to impose their ideologies onto students. As a result, the quality of education has declined significantly.
People often ask why I made Killing America and Diana Blum, the film’s main subject, once said something that summed up my thoughts perfectly: “With this film, I wanted to give parents a voice because they’ve been silenced and ridiculed for so long by the school board, activist teachers, and the school authorities. This film is our way to get around that ideological resistance and be heard for once and for all.”
I don’t have to say it but the irony here is that it is these education ideologues that are trying to take our voice away once again.
To watch the movie, click on the headline below, go here (same place), or watch it on Steele’s tweet below.
Again, I emphasize that you should watch this movie, but realize that it’s not a fully-formed documentary. The fact that the school is trying to censor it on trivial grounds tells you all you need to know.
After enduring a week of unwarranted takedowns of the Killing America trailer on @Youtube and @Vimeo as well as receiving a baseless cease and desist letter that seeks to prevent my documentary from being shown in its original form, I’ve decided to release the full (38 min)… pic.twitter.com/KL6RxeJ3KE
If you want to donate to Steele to support the movie, go here. I also found this on the donation page, which clarifies the film a bit.
THE STORY: In August of 2023, I was contacted by Bay Area parents who recently learned that Sequoia Union High School District had been removing honors classes for the past 8 years. Not only that, they were infusing other classes with liberated ethnic studies curricula. At first, I thought that this was an old story. We saw how Virginia and Manhattan parents fought over the schools for the past three years.
Then October 7 happened.
It quickly became apparent to us how the immediate and unapologetic rise in antisemitism in the Bay Area schools was related to the elimination of honors classes as well as the oppressor-oppressed model that ethnic studies brought into the classroom. We knew then that we had a film here and “Killing America” is the result.
Yes, I know that Harvard University has one big graduation for all undergraduates and grad students (I went to it when I got my Ph.D. in 1978; Alexander Solzhenitsyn gave the commencement address in a famous speech that called out the West for its “spiritual degeneration”). At that time, there was but one “identity” ceremony that included everyone. E pluribus unum! (One small exception: people who got their Ph.D.’s in different fields had separate degree-granting ceremonies.)
I’m not sure when this changed, but now Harvard has many different graduation ceremonies for different identity groups. And, of course, they are organized by the DEI office. Here’s this year’s panoply of “identity ceremonies” listed by the conservative National Review:
Harvard University’s Office for Equity, Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging will once again host “affinity celebrations” at its 2024 commencement, according to documents obtained by National Review.
Harvard plans to hold a “Disability Celebration,” a “Global Indigenous Celebration,” an “Asian American, Pacific Islander, Desi-American (APIDA) Celebration,” a “First Generation-Low Income Celebration,” a “Jewish Celebration,” a “Latinx Celebration,” a “Lavender Celebration” — which refers to LGBT students — a “Black Celebration,” a “Veterans Celebration,” and an “Arab Celebration.” The university will also hold a central commencement ceremony for students of all backgrounds.
. . . . The only publicly available mention of affinity celebrations on any Harvard website is published on the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences’ page. The note does not mention the specific events or groups recognized, simply describing them as “student-led, staff-supported events that recognize and celebrate the accomplishments of graduates from marginalized and underrepresented communities.”
“Desi-American” means people whose ancestry is Pacific Islander, Indian, Bangladeshi, Pakistani or other Asians, identity groups that may not be so fond of each other! Is there any oppressed group missing here? The “First Generation-Low Income Celebration” puzzles me, as the two features don’t necessarily go together, and of course immediately upon leaving the ceremony the graduates have abandoned that identity.
There was one notable group missing at Harvard last year, and you can guess which one it was. That’s right—the Jews! But now, facing a federal Title VI civil rights investigation for a campus climate of antisemitism, and the fracas around the “Jewish genocide” hearing in Congress that in the end brought down Harvard and Penn’s Presidents, the school decided it had better do something to effect some climate change, though not in the way that the antisemitic Greta Thunberg would favor.
Frankly, I think these separate graduations are ludicrous and, in the end, purely performative. Do they move society forward? No. Are they divisive? Probably, in that they continue the obsessive academic focus on identity. “Identity politics” isn’t inherently bad—after all, it was the impetus behind the Civil Rights Movement of the Sixties. But these days, fostered and promoted by DEI offices, it has gone way too far, making someone’s identity, based on features they can’t control, the most important aspect of their persona. This is why Steve Pinker, who’s at Harvard and laid out in the Boston Globe a five-point plan for fixing Harvard that includes this recommendation:
Disempowering DEI. Many of the assaults on academic freedom (not to mention common sense) come from a burgeoning bureaucracy that calls itself diversity, equity, and inclusion while enforcing a uniformity of opinion, a hierarchy of victim groups, and the exclusion of freethinkers. Often hastily appointed by deans as expiation for some gaffe or outrage, these officers stealthily implement policies that were never approved in faculty deliberations or by university leaders willing to take responsibility for them.
An infamous example is the freshman training sessions that terrify students with warnings of all the ways they can be racist (such as asking, “Where are you from?”). Another is the mandatory diversity statements for job applicants, which purge the next generation of scholars of anyone who isn’t a woke ideologue or a skilled liar. And since overt bigotry is in fact rare in elite universities, bureaucrats whose job depends on rooting out instances of it are incentivized to hone their Rorschach skills to discern ever-more-subtle forms of “systemic” or “implicit” bias.
Universities should stanch the flood of DEI officials, expose their policies to the light of day, and repeal the ones that cannot be publicly justified.
It is, as I said, Harvard’s DEI office that creates these identity-based graduations, reinforcing the malign atmosphere Steve describes in his first paragraph. Am I happy that Harvard, under the gun for antisemitism, now includes a Jewish ceremony? No, of course not: it’s disgusting—pandering to both Jews and DEI in general. It is, after all, DEI that, by fostering a climate that sees Jews as white oppressor colonialists, fosters antisemitism.
This conclusion isn’t rocket science. One Jewish student is quoted in the National Review about the issue:
For some, like Harvard Divinity School student Shabbos Kestenbaum — who spoke about the situation on the ground at his school during a House Education and Workforce Committee roundtable in late February — the addition of a separate celebration for Jewish students simply perpetuates the underlying dynamics driving antisemitism at Harvard.
“Rather than acknowledge the harmful ways in which Harvard DEI has contributed to campus antisemitism, the university further marginalizes individuals into groups of race, ethnicity, and religion,” Kestenbaum told National Review. “Harvard DEI is simply out of control.”
One way to stop this, as Steve suggests, is simply to disempower DEI. Perhaps colleges can keep on staff a few individuals to whom one can bring complaints of bigotry, but there should be none of the training, propaganda, and divisivenesss that DEI sows on campus. Even at the “free speech” University of Chicago, our climate is permeated by DEI, which sends me announcements of events on a nearly daily basis.
