It’s not the most full-throated attack against the
pro-Hamas protests at Columbia University, but even some faculty are
getting tired of the chants. At the very least, they see the entire
exercise coming off the hinges.
Students have established what is arguably a pro-terrorism camp.
They’ve shut down campus, threatened graduation, and forced classes to
be taken remotely since no one can get work done, lest they be harassed
or assaulted by the pro-terrorist army. There’s no end in sight because
the university president, who likened terrorism to a form of protesting,
won’t allow police to bust up this camp and toss these kids into jail.
John
McWhorter penned an op-ed in The New York Times, which is what you’d
expect an academic to write regarding the mayhem. He’s a music
humanities professor, so his classes have become all but neutralized
since the chants are incessant and blaring. He noted a few things, like
how Jewish people are meant to tolerate the hate hurled toward them as a
sacrifice to the antiracism paradigm within intersectionality. He’s
dead wrong about how antisemitism isn’t the primary driver, taking the
usual ‘it’s really more about Zionism’ route, which is garbage. Most
Jews are Zionists. The term is used to sanitize these rallies, hiding
them from being viewed as all-out Nazi rallies. Though he beats around
the bush, he at least admits that there is nothing intellectual to be
gained from these pro-Hamas gatherings, and it’s veered into abuse (via NYT):
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.
I
understand this to a point. Pro-Palestinian rallies and events, of which
there have been many here over the years, are not in and of themselves
hostile to Jewish students, faculty and staff members. Disagreement will
not always be a juice and cookies affair. However, the relentless
assault of this current protest — daily, loud, louder, into the night
and using ever-angrier rhetoric — is beyond what any people should be
expected to bear up under, regardless of their whiteness, privilege or
power.
Social media discussion has been claiming that the
protests are peaceful. They are, some of the time. It varies by location
and day; generally what goes on within the campus gates is somewhat
less strident than what happens just outside them. But relatively
constant are the drumbeats. People will differ on how peaceful that
sound can ever be, just as they will differ on the nature of
antisemitism. What I do know is that even the most peaceful of protests
would be treated as outrages if they were interpreted as, say,
anti-Black, even if the message were coded, as in a bunch of people
quietly holding up MAGA signs or wearing T-shirts saying “All lives
matter.”
And besides, calling all this peaceful stretches the use
of the word rather implausibly. It’s an odd kind of peace when a local
rabbi urges Jewish students to go home as soon as possible, when an
Israeli Arab activist is roughed up on Broadway, when the angry chanting
becomes so constant that you almost start not to hear it and it starts
to feel normal to see posters and clothing portraying members of Hamas
as heroes. The other night I watched a dad coming from the protest with
his little girl, giving a good hard few final snaps on the drum he was
carrying, nodding at her in crisp salute, percussing his perspective
into her little mind. This is not peaceful.
[…]
When I was
at Rutgers in the mid-1980s, the protests were against investment in
South Africa’s apartheid regime. There were similarities with the
Columbia protests now: A large group of students established an
encampment site right in front of the Rutgers student center on College
Avenue, where dozens slept every night for several weeks. Among the
largely white crowd, participation was a badge of civic commitment.
There was chanting, along with the street theater inevitable, and
perhaps even necessary, to effective protest; one guy even lay down in
the middle of College Avenue to block traffic, taking a page from the
Vietnam protests.
I don’t recall South Africans on campus feeling
personally targeted, but the bigger difference was that though the
protesters sought to make their point at high volume, over a long period
and sometimes even rudely, they did not seek to all but shut down
campus life.
… 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.
Sorry, I forgot—he’s wrong about these protests being “intelligent.”
However, I assume this is as close a condemnation as we can expect from
the faculty or anyone from Columbia unless they want this terrorist
horde coming after them. The inmates are running the asylum, not just
here but on college campuses across the country. And, Mr. McWhorter, the
hatred of Jews is rather overt and explicit. There is no debate about
what people mean when they carry signs with the Palestinian flag with
the words “final solution” emblazoned on it. We all know what that
means, sir.
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