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WSJ: How Campus Anti-Israel Protestors Were Encouraged and Trained By Outside Activists
An interesting report that helps explain why the messaging, tactics, and methods adopted by campus protestors have been so similar across the country.
The Wall Street Journal has an interesting article explaining how the leaders of campus protests learned some of their strategies and tactics from national organizations and outside activists. It begins:
The recent wave of pro-Palestinian protests on college campuses came on suddenly and shocked people across the nation. But the political tactics underlying some of the demonstrations were the result of months of training, planning and encouragement by longtime activists and left-wing groups.
At Columbia University, in the weeks and months before police took down encampments at the New York City campus and removed demonstrators occupying an academic building, student organizers began consulting with groups such as the National Students for Justice in Palestine, veterans of campus protests and former Black Panthers.
They researched past protests over Columbia's expansion into Harlem, went to a community meeting on gentrification and development and studied parallels with the fight over land between Palestinians and Israelis. They attended a "teach-in" put on by several former Black Panthers, who told them about the importance of handling internal disputes within their movement.
"We took notes from our elders, engaged in dialogue with them and analyzed how the university responded to previous protests," said Sueda Polat, a graduate student and organizer in the pro-Palestinian encampment.
. . .
Focusing on Columbia, the article notes how the current protests grew out of earlier efforts, and earlier conflicts between protestors and the university.
In March, there was a "Resistance 101" training scheduled at Columbia with guest speakers including longtime activists with Samidoun: Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network, a Vancouver, British Columbia-based group that celebrated the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel. The administration twice barred the event, citing some of the organizers' known support of terrorism and promotion of violence. Columbia students hosted the event virtually nonetheless, which prompted Columbia President Minouche Shafik to suspend several of them. . . .
"There is nothing wrong with being a member of Hamas, being a leader of Hamas, being a fighter in Hamas," [Samidoun coordinator Charlotte] Kates said. "These are the people that are on the front lines defending Palestine."
Samidoun didn't respond to emailed requests for comment. The German government banned the group last November after saying it supported terrorism and antisemitism, and incited the use of violence to enforce political interests.
The article also talks about how such training and coordination have been funded, noting that National Students for Justice in Palestine (the target of a recently filed lawsuit alleging collaboration with Hamas or Hamas-supporting entities), is funded through the Wespac Foundation, a New York-based nonprofit, and shows how NSJP has recommnded tactics and coordinated messaging for its various campus affiliates.
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Violent, outside agitators. Who’d have thought?
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13383089/Columbia-University-protest-leader-son-millionaire-Brooklyn.html
No — the “outside agitators” largely have some tie to the local university or the community, perhaps as little as a girlfriend on campus, but they are a distinctly different group from the national organizers.
You have to admit that these people are good, and they’ve been at it since Ward Connerly was on the UCal Board. They’ve learned from the mistakes that the Klan made — they don’t have a large centralized organization that can be taken out with a civil lawsuit the way that the Klan was. Instead they have independent actors acting independently even though they are associated with national organizations, and that is a redundant mosaic without a clearly identified hierarchy.
Take, for example, Rachel Webber — https://canarymission.org/professor/Rachel_Weber
As an independent attorney, she’s representing the UMass Hamas Fan Club, including the 57 who chose to be arrested (at midnight) for refusing to leave the UM admin building (which had closed 6 hours earlier). She’s “associated” with Palestine Legal, but it’s Palestine Legal and not her who is bringing the OCR complaint against UMass (for said arrests). And then she is also a UMass Instructor teaching STPEC 492H: Focus Seminar I: Abolition: Theory and Practice. (Any 492 course — 491 for fall — is an “experimental” course which means that it does not have to be approved by the Faculty Senate.)
And then the financing is almost impossible to trace, and it includes FEDERAL money — I believe that Palestine Legal is getting ED money while it files OCR complaints with ED. It’s also funded by TIDES, and then all the local groups are also donating money back and forth so much that it’s damn hard to trace.
Now I know a lot of things aren’t RICO — but at what point would this be RICO??? I suspect there is significant financial gain for some in this — remember the BLM scandals?
But as to the “outside agitators” that are boots on the ground, I suspect that most of them are there because the girls will/are sleeping with them. You’ve got a lot of “White Guilt”, a lot of messed up White girls of Irish or Italian ancestry (in MA, other European ancestry elsewhere) who sleep with these guys because it makes them important and involved in the cause, and then the fact they do brings in thugs who are more in it to sleep with said girls.
Think Charles Manson and his “family.” Same dynamics.
Never. This has been yet another episode of Simple Answers to Stupid Questions.
Couldn’t you have stopped before your last paragraphs, where you really went off the deep end? Are you afraid of being taken seriously, so must undo yourself with talk of all the copulating you imagine must be going on?
“Are you afraid of being taken seriously”
With Dr. Ed, this might be a rhetorical question.
At a certain point, it’s difficult to tell if it is a lack of self-awareness (Poe’s law) or if he has developed a schtick, and, um, he’s schticking to it.
[shrug]
“There is nothing wrong with being a member of Hamas, being a leader of Hamas, being a fighter in Hamas,” [Samidoun coordinator Charlotte] Kates said.
Yes there is.
I believe there is an issue with the US Code, maybe more than one.
Perhaps one of the law professors would be kind enough to write a brief description of the problem(s) with each.
Also, isn’t there an additional issue if you cross state lines in the process?
Agree; yes there is.
I fully expect many on here to pick up way more than these excerpts actually lay down.
And for many of those to be the same people eager for physical harm to come to these students.
The projectionist speaks.
Isn’t it amazing how the left can hear “dog whistles” when Republicans speak and declare said Republicans racist but can’t seem to hear clear threats of genocide by these protesters?
Can’t be genocidal against Whites!
That’s just a conspiracy theory no matter what you see with your own eyes.
Other than Dr. Ed, who has expressed any desire for physical harm to come to any of the protesters?
“Desire” is not the correct adjective, and you know it.
Ah, but they have the desire to hear “desire”.
Haha your contrarianism once again has you defending Ed.
I’ll take Ed over you any day. He brings facts to the game, you bring insults.
Once again:
https://rosebyanyothernameblog.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/grahams-hierarchy-of-disagreement-flat.png
Resorting to insults is an admission you have no logic. Congratulations on your honesty.
I’ll take Ed over you any day. He brings facts to the game,
Hahaha.
Also the constant advocacy of murder, you left that very important part of Ed’s commenting style out.
Adjective?
Noun.
Desire isn’t an adjective at all, so yeah.
The correct noun here would be “eagerness” or perhaps “enthusiasm” or “excitement.”
Most recently you have DWB: “Where is Jim Rhodes when we need him!”
https://reason.com/volokh/2024/05/04/hans-bader-on-selective-law-enforcement/?comments=true#comment-10547968
But the real stuff is regarding actual bloodshed at UCLA. I’ll ignore all those who cheered on the violence against the protesters as justified as stupid tribalism.
I posted some of the camps have been taken down without police use of force:
https://reason.com/volokh/2024/05/02/ucla-chancellors-statement/?comments=true#comment-10545579
TwelveInchPianist was pretty unhappy with that happening because it let the students get a victory which would teach a bad lesson about protest.
Bob from Ohio, Brett Bellmore, some others I don’t know well made it quite clear they wanted these ‘Hamas allies’ to be taught a lesson.
And you’ve made it quite clear that anything to the right of Marx is your enemy.
Didn’t you just post a link to the pyramid?
What did you post about how just bringing insults is bad?
I fully expect you to continue your advocacy for arson followed by violent response, coupled with ongoing confusion between police and military forces.
Government use of force is not materially different.
And the arson thing is just putting more thoughts in my head, eh?
You’re the one who keeps making analogies to Kent State. Burning down a building is the major difference in run-up between then and (at least so far) now.
So you think Kent State was an example of an appropriate response?
No, I think you keep citing it because you think its the kind of response that will get what you want. There is no other apparent reason to do so.
I cite it because it is a lesson that many on here either don’t want to learn, or think the students deserve a whiff of the grape.
No difference between civilian law enforcement and the National Guard?
Do tell.
LOL
Government use of force carries the same risks regardless of the specific entity, especially nowadays with militarized police.
If you can find a relevant distinction, by all means correct me!
So, Civilian Law Enforcement and the National Guard are the same.
I wasn’t aware the world was so black and white.
Weird.
I’m still not seeing a *relevant* distinction.
National Guard isn’t supposed to be the go-to resource for going after lawbreakers. Police are that resource.
National Guard is for when police are inadequate, when they can’t, or hypothetically won’t, address a major lawless situation.
The IRS writing you a letter saying that you really need to pay your taxes is totally the same as Lil Kim using anti-aircraft artillery to execute internal threats to the regime, don’t you see? It’s all violence by the state. If only you were Sarcastr0, this would be totally obvious.
So you’re arguing the difference is the magnitude of force the national guard brings to bear versus the police?
I’ll give you can bring to bear; I’m not sure I buy will bring to bear.
“arson thing is just putting more thoughts in my head, eh?”
No. Its your repeated dismissal of arson as a serious crime during the BLM riots. Even though it resulted in at least one death in Minneapolis you consistently said it was not a violent crime.
That is what he’s referring to.
I did say that attempted arson of an abandoned building wasn’t as big a deal as January 06.
But no, I am not a fan of arson. How could you think this was a believable accusation?
So you’re saying you couldn’t find anything wrong in the article itself, just in what you expect some people’s response to be?
I mean, the first post takes it places it didn’t go to.
Remind me, Sarcastr0, what was your position on the “It’s OK to punch a Nazi” movement on the “progressive” Left? Were you as vociferously against it as you are now? Somehow, I doubt it.
(For the record, Hamas’s antics on 10/7/23 were hardly less brutal than those of the Nazis.)
Ah. The dreaded “outside activists.”
I well recall how much trouble they caused during the civil rights era.
The WSJ, Adler, and the right in general should be embarrassed to associate themselves with this complaint. It absolutely stinks of racism.
Look, whatever you think of the current demonstrations – and I don’t lie them much myself – there is nothing inherently wrong with seeking outside help in organizing a political movement.
It depends who the “outside activists” are. If they are a bunch of murderous terrorist who want to send Jews back to Auschwitz, as one of the outside activists recently stated, then yes, there is something very wrong about it.
“It absolutely stinks of racism.”
No, it doesn’t.
B.L.,
First, I tried to make it clear that I was not whitewashing anything going on today, just that the phrase itself is neutral in the abstract. Of course whether the outsiders,and the relevant causes, are doing harm or good depends, as you say, on the specific case.
What I read Adler and the WSJ as implying is that these outsiders are always bad. They are here, but not in every possible situation that comes up anywhere.
My reference to racism was simply intended to point out that this accusation has a sordid history, as it was widely used by the segregationists to discredit civil rights demonstrators.
It is part of the language of Bull Connor and Lester Maddox et al, and does in fact have strong racist connotations.
“What I read Adler and the WSJ as implying is that these outsiders are always bad. They are here, but not in every possible situation that comes up anywhere.”
It’s more that this is a nationally movement and not organic to the local campi. That becomes relevant when firing faculty members gets involved, and that is already happening — the CHE had an article about this happening.
And as to racism, the majority of BLM protesters were White women, and I suspect the same is true here.
You sound like the ADL when they complained that saying “war-mongering Communists” was anti-semitic.
“What I read Adler and the WSJ as implying is that these outsiders are always bad.”
If they meant *that,* they were wrong, of course.
But if they were objecting to these particular activists, would they be right?
Not until someone identifies particular activists. And not until the critics make clear they confine their targeting to the particulars.
Even if the outside help is foreign and has associations with terrorist organizations?
Normally with specious accusations of racism I can at least understand the theory that the accuser is getting at. But here I have to admit defeat. What aspect of this do you feel is in any way racist?
NaS,
I mean the phrase itself, not necessarily those throwing it around today.
It was common, in the Civil Rights Era, for the segregationists to claim, in the face of demonstrations, that all the problems were caused by “outside agitators,” (often labelled Marxists as an added charge) as they were called, and that the local “nigras” were perfectly happy with things as they were. IOW, it was thrown around in defense of racism, much like “states’ rights,” since cleverly rebranded as “federalism,” was.
So again, it is, to my mind, an echo of the claim that the actual demonstrators are pawns of outsiders there for their own purposes.
Please note that I agree with B.L., NaS, and Rossami, that the it is what the outsiders are doing and advocating for that makes them good or bad, not the simple fact that the are outsiders. The latter seems to be the WSJ’s view.
Sorry if I wasn’t clear.
‘I meant to scream “RACIST!” in a nuanced way.’
No, Azilia.
Please reread.
You want to invoke racism, the civil-rights movement of the 60s, etc. But you aren’t claiming this is the same situation re the social-justice LARPERS on campus.
These students aren’t being massively, unconstitutionally disenfranchised. Peaceful channels haven’t been significantly closed off as was the case with black people protesting segregation.
Of course, by “peaceful” I don’t mean “camping on University property contrary to the rules.
Since this has prompted so much denouncing of wokeness in academia, I actually think, yeah, it’s all tied up with racism all right. The same sort of people who hated students for protesting in the 60s hate them for protesting now.
No, I’m not contending that these demonstrators are being mistreated in the same way as the civil rights demonstrators.
I am making a simple observation that this “outside activists” criticism is familiar to me from the days when it was used against those demonstrators, and that it is no more a valid criticism on its own now than it was then.
And that familiarity, and lack of validity, tends to make me look on those wielding it somewhat dubiously.
I don’t consider all the critics – of whom I am one, after all – racists. I do think that some just see this as a culture war opportunity, no more.
It takes away their claimed moral high ground of “spontaneous outrage” and “groundswell of support”.
And since some of what is so consistent is criminal behavior, it opens them up to legal accountability for the people they trained. “Outside activists” are not inherently evil but when they explicitly train on using illegal tactics and violence, then yes, these outside activists are evil.
RICO!
“Outside activists” are not inherently evil but when they explicitly train on using illegal tactics and violence, then yes, these outside activists are evil.
I agree with you as far as violence goes, and on a lot, but not all, “illegal tactics.” Isn’t that what civil disobedience is about? Is civil disobedience always evil?
It absolutely stinks of racism. I get that this refers to the tropes being hauled out into new service, but this was confusingly worded.
Glad you got the message, Sarcastro.
As I said, I apologize for the fact that my comment was unclear.
Suppose the outside help had organized these “spontaneous” protests before the attack on Israel, in order to have the protests in place in time for the inevitable response, in coordination with the attack itself. Don’t you think that would make a wee bit of a difference?
Suppose it wasn’t going to matter what Israel’s response was going to be, the plan was to protest ANY response as an act of genocide, much as Putin’s characterized the Ukrainians as Nazis pretty much regardless of what they did, just for having ghe stubnornness of not being under his thumb? Just as part of an effort to help weaken its defenses and disrupt its alliances?
If Putin had realized Ukraine wasn’t going to be a cakewalk, he would probably have killed to be able to get a similar student assistance network together to shut down American campuses protestesting similar Ukraininan aggression, atrocities, and genocide against Russians if he could have swung it.
Similar outside help for spontaneous anti-Ukrainian-atrocities responses would likely also have been legal. But don’t you think that if the American people realized the “spontaneous” demonstrations had been organized by the attackers as part of the propaganda wing of attack, as part of the plan of th attack itself, with scripts put together before the attack, that might have affected their opinion of them, and the truth of the scripts’ claims?
Come on, Y.
I thought you were better at reading comprehension than that.
Certain phrases have a certain valence, regardless of whether they are accurate in a specific instance. “Outside activists,” or “agitators” is one such phrase.
Why the willful refusal to understand that? Does a reference to a “cabal of international bankers” have no antisemitic overtones, even if the phrase is used to describe the doings of a bunch of Methodists and Episcopalians who work as international bankers?
And if you thought those people were up to no good, would you feel a touch uncomfortable using the particular phrase?
Doesn’t it seem a little odd that everyone seems to have the same model of tent, all brand new, all same green color, all there and ready to set up very early?
I don’t know if its true everywhere. But there have been a bunch of pictures circulating showing the same model and color of tent set up in a bunch of places.
What bearing does that have on my point?
None.
Look, what Adler ad the WSJ seem to be doing is criticizing the protests not because of the positions the students are taking, but because they are getting help from nonstudents.
That’s insane.
I have apologizes for lack of clarity in my initial comment on this subject. Now, I’m done. Anyone who still refuses to grasp my point, and wants to refute something I didn’t say, is either being stupid or just has not read what I wrote.
Oh, and yes, the same tactic and name-calling was used in defense of Jim Crow, and to criticize civil rights demonstrators (quite possibly by the WSJ itself). Don’t want to hear it? Too bad.
I don’t know if its true everywhere. But there have been a bunch of pictures circulating showing the same model and color of tent set up in a bunch of places.
Coincidentally, I do know. Just this afternoon I walked up to MIT, about a mile from where I live, to look at what was going on. I was there 30 min to an hour.
1. The tents were not all the same color and model, nor did they look particularly new, or large. I didn’t count colors, but there was no preponderance of green tents. If I had to guess I’d say that most were the sort that students who liked to go camping would own. There was one group of about five larger and similar-looking tents. There was, AFAICT, no way to know if they were personally delivered by George Soros or rented from some local business, maybe one of these. (Interesting if they rented from Sinai Rentals.)
2. The scene was peaceful. (Granted, there were a fair number of police around. ) The demonstrators were chanting the usual nonsense, and there were large crowds of onlookers. I saw no fights, or verbal altercations, or police warnings, or arrests.
3. The encampment itself was surrounded by a fence draped with (green!!) cloth. Next to it was a grassy area filled with signs showing pictures of the hostages. The fence itself had a sign that asked “friends of the movement” to not remove signs or flags posted by counterprotestors. It also had some Israeli flags attached.
4. My untrained eye spotted no Gestapo agents, or men in SS uniforms, wandering around. I did see one guy, probably a student, wearing a yarmulke and a Chabad t-shirt, sitting unmolested on a bench, studying.
So, this was one school, and it was just me observing one place for a little while, so I don’t want to generalize, but I did think some might be interested.
Sure, I would imagine they have plenty of non-Hamas supporters they can call on for help.
Oh, come on. More disinformation from right wing media.
No. I’ve been dealing with these people for 30 years — they truly want to overthrow this country…
“These are the people that are on the front lines defending Palestine.”
Bullshit.
They are rapists, murderers, terrorists, and thieves. Their rule over Gaza has been a 20-year disaster for the Gazans.
Since Soros funded much of this, isn’t this criticism anti-semetic?
The US Government is funding much of it.
Same thing
The Ford Foundation may be the source of even more money than Soros’s various fronts.
Have you overlooked the Rockefeller Brothers Fund and Tides Foundation?
Has Prof. Adler ever expressed concern about the right-wing organizations whose purpose and effort are to spread conservative bigotry (gay-bashing, transphobia, xenophobia, etc.) on college campuses across the country?
Or, more likely, is he an admirer, advisor, or participant? Maybe he got an award from one or two of them for caring more about right-wing politics (the right-wing jerks in the United States and the right-wing belligerents in Israel) than about elementary-school-age Palestinian corpses.
(I have no more use for people who support or enable Hamas — a group that includes Egypt and the Netanyahu government — than I do for conservative bigots or the terrorists afflicting Palestinians in the West Bank.)
So organized conspiracy to commit a variety of crimes. Might this be the rare exception to Popehat’s “It’s Not RICO” post?
Sidenote – my bookmark for that post is now returning a ‘page not found’ error. Does anyone have an updated link?
No.
Thanks for filling for Dr. Ed in this latest edition of Easy Answers to Dumb Questions.
IF there is personal economic gain (like there was with BLM), why wouldn’t it be RICO when Trump’s demand that GA find his missing votes *is* RICO?
Because “personal economic gain” is neither necessary nor sufficient to establish RICO (not that “personal economic gain” has anything to do with the point of this article anyway).
Thanks for tagging back in from Rossami!
Also, Trump is charged with violating Georgia’s state RICO law, which is nothing like the federal RICO law.
Such an intelligent way to answer a real question.
https://rosebyanyothernameblog.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/grahams-hierarchy-of-disagreement-flat.png
Resorting to insults is an admission you have no logic. Congratulations on your honesty.
Apparently he’s using the site for his new stuff and not saving all the old stuff? “I’ll be importing some old favorites from the now-defunct Popehat blog.” Either he hasn’t gotten around to it or it didn’t make the cut.
I found an archive at https://perma.cc/3ALZ-H55U for that RICO post, though.
.
That person sounds like every bit the bigoted, despicable extremist that Ben-Gvir, Netanyahu, Smotrich, and the other superstitious righ-wing belligerents in Israel’s government are.
I’m hardly happy Smotrich and Ben Gvir are in the Israeli government. And I’m not going to waste much time defending their positions. But there is nonetheless a big difference between taking a maximalist position in a political and diplomatic border dispute and deliberately killing and kidnapping hundreds of people.
Conservatives seem to see what Hamas did as substantially different that what Israel’s settlers have been doing. Better people know better, and recognize that Hamas and the bigoted, violent right-wingers in Israel’s government operate at essentially the same level of evil.
Both will be defeated by better people. With America’s help, one way or another.
It is different.
As the “revisionist” historians who replaced the Dunning school acknowledged, some Reconstructionist officials really were corrupt. Most were inexperienced. Many were incompetent. Some were out for revnenge. Same with the Union soldiers who ran the occupation. Some Negros got land from dispossessed rebels, who thought the dispossession grossly unfair, outright theft. There were real problems. There are always going to be problems when you take people from lowly positions and put them in charge of things they aren’t used to doing, or when you do things like confiscate people’s land for supposed misbehavior as the Union Army indeed did.
Nonetheless, I think it absurd, rediculous, to claim the Union army occupiers, the Reconstruction administration, and Republican/fusion governments, were as a whole on anything remotely like a moral par with the Ku Klux Klan, or that their behavior somehow justified the various lynchings and massacres the Ku Klux Klan and other Southern “freedom fighters” andd Redeemers did.
The Reconstruction folks were no saints. But the Redeemers would have found any excuse to blow up any incompetence or injustice into an atrocity tale.
I don’t think anybody should expect people to like living under military occupation. Nor am I suggesting Israel has any more saints then the US reconstructionst governments did. The resentment is understable. There have been settlers who have gone on rampages, and courts that have sided with the settlers when they did.
At the same time, israel unilaterally withdrew from the Gaza strip nearly 20 years ago as an experiment, give a little land, get a little peace. If the Gazans had tried a little peace for even a few years, things could have gone further. But Hamas almost immediately took over the government, assasinating its political opponents by throwing them off rooftops, and set out to build an army, diverting food aid to feed its soldiers and construction aid to build its tunnel network (where do you think all that concrete came from)?
The fact that Hamas has stolen all aid, and repeatedly launched unsuccessful attacks, and not Israel, are the main reasons why Gaza is in the shape it has been in prior to the current war. Why, for example, demand that Israel supply Gaza while Hamas is pelting rockets at it? Egypt also has a border with Gaza. Why does nobody accuse Egypt of starving Gaza for sealing its border? As a neutral country, it’s a much more logical place to send aid through then a combatant country. If food aid to Gazans is so important, why is there no pressure on Egypt to open its border? Why does Egypt get to avoid all consequences for its decision to seal?
As far as the current war is concerned, every modern urban war has had lots of civilian deaths. Israel is entitled to demand unconditional surrender and fight until the last hostage is found and the last Hamas soldier killed or captured. If Hamas wants to hide in dense urban areas to maximize civilian casualties for ita ptopaganda purposes, that frankly isn’t Israel’s problem, just as the fact yhat Hitler chose to hide out in a bunker didn’t make the many civilian deaths that occured in the coursr of taking Berlin either murder or genocide. They are just what happens when the side that started the war chooses to hold out until the end in an urban area, rather than surrendering and saving its soldiers’ and civilians’ lives.
there is nonetheless a big difference between taking a maximalist position in a political and diplomatic border dispute and deliberately killing and kidnapping hundreds of people./i>
True. OTOH, the sorts of activities endorsed by these assholes go a bit further than, say, taking an aggressive negotiating position.
Maybe the WSJ could look in to who organized the masked thugs responsible for the violence at UCLA, and ask the cops who made the decision to let the organized violence continue for so long.
But of course they won’t; much like Tom Cotton and “Sprint” Hawley, they promote and support *that* kind of organized vigilante violence and associated official corruption.
The middle ceased to hold.
And???
And maybe the Volokh Conspiracy will ditch the right-wing bigotry, or maybe at least a couple of the Volokh Conspirators will occasionally decry that bigotry rather than attracting the bigots as a target audience, and maybe Eugene Volokh will stop publishing racial slurs, and maybe the Conspirators will devote one-tenth the space to addressing the war-criming, superstitious bigots in Israel’s government that they use to criticize students who object to the wholesale slaughter of children by an out-of-control right-wing military, and . . . maybe this will continue to be a white, male, bigotry-ridden, polemical right-wing blog that misappropriates the reputations of some legitimate schools every day.
The campus protests are unnecessary at best and counter-productive at worst: public opinion is overwhelmingly opposed to the Israeli acts of genocide (distinct from genocide itself), yet now due to the protests that may change.
Iran remains ever so slightly less popular than Israel and recent events seem to have promoted a change of attitude within Israel itself: in Iran’s deliberately measured response to Israel’s unprovoked attack on Iranian sovereign soil, Israeli defenses missed roughly 33% of incoming targets and 12% of the 66% which they did repel (or 8% overall) were detected due to Saudi intelligence and monitoring. So far, there has not been a resounding public “thank you” from Israel to the American, British, and Saudi forces providing 33+8=41% of Israel’s security.
China’s proposal for Israeli reparations and disarmament has substantial merit, as does the unilateral Israeli cease-fire proposal — an additional step towards Saudi/Israel normalization — made in the most recent issue of Foreign Affairs magazine. China’s proposal is wonderfully devoid of stereotypes… which may be its downfall: perhaps humorously to some, the proposal asks a group of Jews to voluntarily pay full price for something. Overlooking that fly in the ointment, Israel needs to more quickly recognize that it relies on others — even those it calls enemies — more than it wishes to believe.
Who funds Westpac, is my question. Their agenda seems clear.
Who funds Israel’s bigoted, violent, superstition-driven, right-wing belligerents?
America does. But maybe not for long.
Then what, clingers?
I suppose I’ll add Jonathan’s posts on the protests to the “inherently suspect” pile, along with David, Josh, and Eugene’s posts. This piece is long on insinuation and short on facts.
I don’t find it remarkable, or suspect, for student organizations seeking effective means of protest to learn from other protest movements or to take advantage of information provided by advocacy groups that transcend any single institution. Indeed, it is only reasonable that they strategize and network in this way, given that the counter-response we’re seeing (at every level – political, media, institutional) might as well be issued from Hasbara central. When every university president is talking about the importance of “free speech” while conflating a few instances of harassment with a broader political message – in order to shut down the very debate they contend in the same breath to be protecting – it makes sense to respond to this insipid pablum in a coordinated, uniform way.
The “libertarians” who still bother reading the VC should keep in mind that the upshot of all of these attempts to tie student groups to “Hamas” is to criminalize speech. For now, politicians and government officials are able to focus on the disruptive effects of protesters’ chosen methods – a ruined campus lawn here, a barricaded building there, etc. – even as their asinine speeches increasingly lean on the putative reprehensibility of the speech itself. That’s how they’re getting public buy-in. But throughout all of this rhetoric is an attempt to characterize the protests as “material support” for Hamas, regardless of method, which is the magical loophole that will allow the hammer to truly come down on pro-Palestinian dissent in this country.
That is what people like David and Josh want, and soft-headed academics like Jonathan and Eugene are abetting – a criminalization of speech.
Encouraged and trained by outside activists?
That sounds like what the Federalist Society, Young Americans for Freedom, the Leadership Institute, Turning Point, and other conservative groups do with the fledgling bigots and aspiring culture war casualties on American campuses every day.
Have you overlooked the Rockefeller Brothers Fund and Tides Foundation?
While the students are camping out outside, can I camp out in their dorms? I just need to think of a sufficiently social-justicy rationale.
As Americans we get full credit for having elected Trump in 2016, albeit by a minority of the popular vote and despite the boundless contempt many, including yours truly, have for him, don’t we? So would someone like our resident antisemite Reverend Kirkland explain to me why the Palestinians shouldn’t get full credit for Hamas, who they favored over the PA and have continued to be led by up until the present? Are the Palestinians much less culpable for their choice of leaders?
(I was going to say leaders going back to the Mufti of Jerusalem, but the British chose him for their own purposes. Still, the Palestinians have chosen many execrable leaders on their own.)
How about it, Reverend?
Whatever happened to criminal conspiracy laws?
“Some tools they learned were practical, such as how to raise money via student fundraisers and donations from friends and supporters to buy tents for encampments.”
Wow. It’s hard to argue with this, amirite?
Look, it’s not exactly shocking that students are communicating and that they are learning how to organize and raise money. Whether it’s for vegan food in their encampments, or a $400k kegger at UNC.
Not exactly the “smoking gun” of outside agitators that people have been claiming.
Stupid college kids do stupid things- Ric Romero.
Hey Loki.
Don’t forget they are also “researched past protests over Columbia’s expansion into Harlem, ”
I guess it’s terrible for a football coach to study film of past games.