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.”
