US Universities Struggle as Pro-Palestinian Demonstrations Grow - Dozens were arrested Monday at N.Y.U. and Yale, but officials there and at campuses across the country are running out of options to corral protests that are expected to last the rest of the school year.

Universities Struggle as Pro-Palestinian Demonstrations Grow
The New York Times (archive.ph)
By Alan Blinder
2024-04-23 04:48:02GMT


Police arrest protesters outside of New York University on Monday night. Credit...Adam Gray for The New York Times

At New York University, the police swept in to arrest protesting students on Monday night, ending a standoff with the school’s administration.

At Yale, the police placed protesters’ wrists into zip ties on Monday morning and escorted them onto campus shuttles to receive summonses for trespassing.

Columbia kept its classroom doors closed on Monday, moving lectures online and urging students to stay home.

Harvard Yard was shut to the public. Nearby, at campuses like Tufts and Emerson, administrators weighed how to handle encampments that looked much like the one that the police dismantled at Columbia last week — which protesters quickly resurrected. And on the West Coast, a new encampment bubbled at the University of California, Berkeley.

Less than a week after the arrests of more than 100 protesters at Columbia, administrators at some of the country’s most influential universities were struggling, and largely failing, to calm campuses torn by the conflict in Gaza and Israel.


Despite arrests at Columbia last week, protests continued on campus on Monday.Credit...C.S. Muncy for The New York Times

During the turmoil on Monday, which coincided with the start of Passover, protesters called on their universities to become less financially tied to Israel and its arms suppliers. Many Jewish students agonized anew over some protests and chants that veered into antisemitism, and feared again for their safety. Some faculty members denounced clampdowns on peaceful protests and warned that academia’s mission to promote open debate felt imperiled. Alumni and donors raged.

And from Congress, there were calls for the resignation of Columbia’s president, Nemat Shafik, from some of the same lawmakers Dr. Shafik tried to pacify last week with words and tactics that inflamed her own campus.

The menu of options for administrators handling protests seems to be quickly dwindling. It is all but certain that the demonstrations, in some form or another, will last on some campuses until the end of the academic year, and even then, graduation ceremonies may be bitterly contested gatherings.

For now, with the most significant protests confined to a handful of campuses, the administrators’ approaches sometimes seem to shift from hour to hour.

“I know that there is much debate about whether or not we should use the police on campus, and I am happy to engage in those discussions,” Dr. Shafik said in a message to students and employees early Monday, four days after officers dressed in riot gear helped clear part of Columbia’s campus.

“But I do know that better adherence to our rules and effective enforcement mechanisms would obviate the need for relying on anyone else to keep our community safe,” she added. “We should be able to do this ourselves.”

Protesters have demonstrated with varying intensity since the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel. But this particular round of unrest began to gather greater force last Wednesday, after Columbia students erected an encampment, just as Dr. Shafik was preparing to testify before Congress.

At that hearing in Washington, before a Republican-led House committee, she vowed to punish unauthorized protests on the private university’s campus more aggressively, and the next day, she asked the New York Police Department to clear the encampment. In addition to the more than 100 people arrested, Columbia suspended many students. Many Columbia professors, students and alumni voiced fears that the university was stamping out free debate, a cornerstone of the American college experience.

The harsher approach helped lead to more protests outside Columbia’s gates, where Jewish students reported being targeted with antisemitic jeers and described feeling unsafe as they traveled to and from their campus.

The spiraling uproar in Upper Manhattan helped fuel protests on some other campuses.

“We’re all a united front,” said Malak Afaneh, a law student protesting at University of California, Berkeley. “This was inspired by the students at Columbia who, in my opinion, are the heart of the student movement whose bravery and solidarity with Palestine really inspired us all.”

The events at Columbia also rippled to Yale, where students gathered at Beinecke Plaza in New Haven, Conn., for days to demand that the university divest from arms manufacturers.

Yale’s president, Peter Salovey, said Monday that university leaders had spent “many hours” in talks with the protesters, with an offer that included an audience with the trustee who oversees Yale’s Corporation Committee on Investor Responsibility. But university officials had decided late Sunday that the talks were proving unsuccessful, and Dr. Salovey said, they were troubled by reports “that the campus environment had become increasingly difficult.”

The authorities arrested 60 people on Monday morning, including 47 students, Dr. Salovey said. The university said the decision to make arrests was made with “the safety and security of the entire Yale community in mind and to allow access to university facilities by all members of our community.”

In the hours after the arrests, though, hundreds of protesters blocked a crucial intersection in New Haven.


Students protesters occupied an intersection near the campus of Yale University on Monday.Credit...Adrian Martinez Chavez for The New York Times

“We demand that Yale divests!” went one chant.

“Free Palestine!” went another.

Far from being cowed by the police, protesters suggested that the response at Beinecke Plaza had emboldened them.

“It’s pretty appalling that the reaction to students exercising their freedom of speech and engaging in peaceful protest on campus grounds — which is supposed to be our community, our campus — the way that Yale responds is by sending in the cops and having 50 students arrested,” said Chisato Kimura, a law student at Yale.

The scene was less contentious in Massachusetts, where Harvard officials had moved to limit the possibility of protests by closing Harvard Yard, the 25-acre core of the campus in Cambridge, through Friday. Students were warned that they could face university discipline if they, for instance, erected unauthorized tents or blocked building entrances.

On Monday, Harvard’s Palestine Solidarity Committee said on social media that the university had suspended it. National Students for Justice in Palestine, a loose confederation of campus groups, said it believed the decision was “clearly intended to prevent students from replicating the solidarity encampments” emerging across the United States. Harvard said in a statement that it was “committed to applying all policies in a content-neutral manner.”

Elsewhere in the Boston area, protesters had set up encampments at Emerson College, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Tufts University. But those protests, for now, appeared more modest than the ones at Yale and in New York, where demonstrators constructed an encampment outside N.Y.U.’s Stern School of Business.


Protesters outside of New York University, before police arrived.Credit...Adam Gray for The New York Times

“Students, students, hold your ground!” protesters roared. “N.Y.U., back down!”Credit...Adam Gray for The New York Times

N.Y.U. officials tolerated the demonstration for hours but signaled Monday night that their patience was wearing thin. Police officers gathered near the protest site as demonstrators ignored a 4 p.m. deadline to vacate it. As nightfall approached, sirens blared and officers, donning helmets and bearing zip ties, mustered. Prisoner transport vans waited nearby.

“Students, students, hold your ground!” protesters roared. “N.Y.U., back down!”

Soon enough, police officers marched on the demonstration.

“Today’s events did not need to lead to this outcome,” said John Beckman, a university spokesman in a statement. But, he said, some protesters, who may not have been from N.Y.U., breached barriers and refused to leave. Because of safety concerns, the university said it asked for assistance from the police.

At Columbia, Dr. Shafik ordered Monday’s classes moved online “to de-escalate the rancor.”

She did not immediately detail how the university would proceed in the coming days, beyond saying that Columbia officials would be “continuing discussions with the student protesters and identifying actions we can take as a community to enable us to peacefully complete the term.”

Some students and faculty members said support for Dr. Shafik was eroding, with the university senate preparing for the possibility of a vote this week to censure the president. Supporters of the censure complained that Dr. Shafik was sacrificing academic freedom to appease critics.

But Dr. Shafik was castigated on Monday by the very people she was accused of appeasing when at least 10 members of the U.S. House of Representatives demanded her resignation.

“Over the past few days, anarchy has engulfed Columbia University,” Representative Elise Stefanik, Republican of New York and one of Dr. Shafik’s chief interrogators last week, wrote with other lawmakers. “As the leader of this institution, one of your chief objectives, morally and under law, is to ensure students have a safe learning environment. By every measure, you have failed this obligation.”

A university spokesperson said that Dr. Shafik was focused on easing the strife and that she was “working across campus with members of the faculty, administration, and board of trustees, and with state, city, and community leaders, and appreciates their support.”

Amid the acrimony, and with scores of green, blue and yellow tents filling the Columbia encampment, parts of the campus sometimes took on an eerie, surreal quiet on a splendid spring day.


Some faculty members said support for Dr. Shafik was eroding.Credit...CS Muncy for The New York Times

At Columbia, many Jewish students stayed away from campus for Passover.Credit...Bing Guan for The New York Times

The unease was never all that far away, though, even with many Jewish students away from campus for Passover.

“When Jewish students are forced to watch others burning Israeli flags, calling for bombing of Tel Aviv, calling for Oct. 7 to happen over and over again, it creates an unacceptable degree of fear that cannot be tolerated,” Representative Daniel Goldman, Democrat of New York, said outside Columbia’s Robert K. Kraft Center for Jewish Student Life.

By then, in another symbol of the crisis enveloping Columbia, Mr. Kraft, an alumnus and owner of the New England Patriots, had launched his own broadside and suggested he would pause his giving.

“I am no longer confident that Columbia can protect its students and staff,” he wrote in a statement, “and I am not comfortable supporting the university until corrective action is taken.”

 

[Frostnipped Todger]

I was just ranting on the hypocrisy of antifags claiming to punch nazis and combat antisemitism while turning into the same thing they claim to despise

It was never about principle, it was always about power.

 

[Sargon's wife's son]

These are the same individuals who want people arrested for criticizing trannies and st. Floyd. These are the same individuals who claim freedom of speech is a threat to muh democracy. These are the same individuals who rant about brutally purging "nazis" (=everyone they don't like) from society.

They're being served their own medicine, and they deserve it.

You know this reminds me of when Franco started marching on Madrid for the last time after smashing most of the republican army they tried to negotiate with him any basically was having none of it because they were pretending to be moderates he took Madrid and had all of the communists anarchists and liberals put up against the wall and shot.
And this was after they spent the better part of two years raping and murdering nuns burning down churches

 

[clipartfan92]

D.C. police rejected GWU’s plea to sweep out university protesters
The Washington Post (archive.ph)
By Peter Hermann
2024-04-26 23:51:30GMT

Spoiler

D.C. police rejected pleas from George Washington University officials to clear pro-Palestinian demonstrators out of an on-campus encampment early Friday morning, saying they worried about the optics of moving against a small number of peaceful protesters, according to two officials familiar with the talks.

Officers had assembled around 3 a.m. and were prepared to enter the encampment, but senior leaders in the police chief’s and mayor’s office ordered them to stand down, the officials said. The demonstrators were small in number and largely peaceful, and the city officials told their university counterparts they wanted to avoid images of violent altercations between police and protesters flashing across TV screens across the country. The George Washington campus is just west of downtown Washington, five blocks from the White House.

As of Friday night, D.C. police had not sought to arrest anyone in the encampment, though university officials surrounded it with barricades and were not allowing new people to join. The city officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive police operations, said they had no immediate plans to clear the area known as University Yard along H Street between 20th and 21st streets NW. They noted that could change if the demonstrators began committing or advocating violence, or if radical groups joined the group’s ranks.

A spokeswoman for George Washington University did not answer questions about school officials’ discussions with law enforcement authorities. The school said in a statement, “After demonstrators refused multiple instructions to relocate, GWPD requested additional support from the DC Metropolitan Police to ensure the safety and security of all our community members through a measured and orderly approach.”

D.C. police also declined to comment on agency officials’ discussions with the university, and it was not immediately clear what tactics they considered using as officers prepared to enter the encampment Friday morning. D.C. police are accustomed to dealing with daily demonstrations over all manner of political issues in the nation’s capital, and they typically try to convince demonstrators to voluntarily surrender. But they can also use more aggressive tactics, donning riot gear, forming lines and forcefully trying to move large groups.

A statement from a D.C. police spokesman said officers have been monitoring the demonstration. Thus far, D.C. police have kept up a low-key presence near the protest sight.

“As always, we are continually assessing and evaluating the circumstances on the ground to inform our response,” the statement said.

Chuck Wexler, the executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum, which advises law enforcement agencies on best practices, said it is rare that an agency would turn down a request from a university to clear unwanted demonstrators from its campus, which is private property. At protests over the war in Gaza on other college campuses, police have sometimes sparred with demonstrators as they have sought to make arrests and break up encampments.

But Wexler said the university should demonstrate to police “a compelling reason” for them to intervene, and D.C. police appeared to be taking a wait-and-see approach.

“If these are peaceful demonstrators and MPD says, ‘Look, we’ll stand by. We’re not leaving, we’re simply saying at this moment we don’t see a compelling need to come in,’ then that’s okay,” he said.

In Boston, law enforcement officers moved in on pro-Palestinian demonstrators attempting to form a human wall. The exchange was so tense that police reported at least four injured officers, and multiple students at Emerson College said they were shoved to the ground.

In Southern California, law enforcement officers looking to break up an on-campus tent encampment pushed through a growing crowd, struggled with protesters and ultimately arrested more than 90 of them.

Atlanta police said officers used chemical irritants when they faced off with demonstrators at an encampment at Emory University. And in Texas, state troopers dressed in riot gear took dozens of protesters into custody at the direction of Gov. Greg Abbott (R). Some troopers marched through campus on horseback. Others set up a barricade by pushing demonstrators with their bikes.

In D.C., the protesters are on private university property, and absent seeing a crime being committed, D.C. police said they need to be invited to take action on the campus. To do that, school officials would have to declare the demonstrators illegal trespassers who refuse to leave, or cite other possible crimes.

The D.C. officials who described the decision not to break up the George Washington University encampment said they had flashbacks to June 2020, when images of mostly peaceful protesters being forcefully shoved out of Lafayette Square by Park Police officers with batons and chemical irritants made national news. The officials said city leaders suggested alternatives to force an end the demonstration at George Washington University, but they did not describe what those were.

By late afternoon Friday, the number of demonstrators in the encampment had dwindled to about three dozen. The university then warned students who remain in the encampment they could face temporary suspension or be administratively barred from campus.

In a statement, Arielle Geismar, the student government association president, said she urged the administration “not to use violence or actionable force by asking either [university police] or [D.C. police] to forcibly remove students.”

Geismar said that “students across the country have been brutalized and hurt during forced removals. I’m extremely worried about student safety.” She said school leaders have not briefed her on their plans.

Emily Davies contributed to this report.

At USC, arrests. At UCLA, hands off. Why pro-Palestinian protests have not blown up on UC campuses
Los Angeles Times (archive.ph)
By Teresa Watanabe
2024-04-27 02:44:36GMT

Spoiler

So far, the demonstrations by pro-Palestinian demonstrators have been peaceful at UCLA, while across town, the LAPD arrested 93 protesters at USC. (Ringo Chiu; Wally Skalij / For The Times; Los Angeles Times)

At USC, Los Angeles police officers in riot gear swarmed the campus, arresting 93 pro-Palestinian protesters and clearing their tent encampment.

Across town at UCLA, scores of Palestinian supporters set up about 20 tents, created a perimeter around their “Palestine Solidarity Encampment” and peacefully protested day and night — all without arrests, suspensions or intervention by campus staff, who watched from the sidelines. Private security guards with bikes separated the pro-Palestinian group from Israel supporters, and UCLA eventually added metal barricades after counter-protesters repeatedly tried to breach the encampment and in at least one case witnessed by The Times entered and shoved a woman to the ground.

The scenes this week illustrate starkly different responses to campus protests, which are sweeping the country as students at more than 20 colleges and universities have launched encampments, demonstrations and other actions to express solidarity with Palestinians, urge an end to Israel’s military operations in Gaza and demand divestment from firms that do business with Israel.

USC — along with other private institutions such as Columbia and Pomona — cracked down on violations of campus rules with police force and student arrests.

In the public University of California system, by contrast, UCLA, UC Berkeley and UC Santa Barbara have used a far lighter hand, tolerating students who flouted bans on overnight camping and other rules as long as they remained peaceful and did not impede campus operations or interfere with teaching and learning.

Part of the difference is rooted in the legal requirement for public universities to honor the 1st Amendment, which does not apply to private institutions. But not all public campuses have refrained from an aggressive response. The University of Texas at Austin, for instance, sent in armed state troopers who arrested more than 50 people this week for staging what witnesses said was a peaceful protest. The university president, defending his response as a legitimate action to maintain campus order, is facing a faculty vote of no confidence.

The more permissive UC response has been shaped by decades of experience with high-profile protests and in particular the 2011 uproar at UC Davis, where campus police pepper-sprayed students who were peacefully protesting economic and social inequality during the Occupy movement. Video of the incident went viral, and the widely condemned police actions resulted in the firing of at least one officer, a $1-million legal settlement with the student demonstrators and a UC systemwide review and report on how best to handle campus protests.

The report, noting the need to balance 1st Amendment rights with campus safety and security, made 49 recommendations, placing communication and dialogue as a “cornerstone” of responses, with police force used as the very last resort. In a key underlying principle, the report called for “a substantial shift away from a mindset that has been focused primarily on the maintenance of order and adherence to rules and regulations to a more open and communicative attitude.”

“What’s so bad about students pitching tents on a green? That doesn’t threaten the core teaching and research mission,” said Christopher Edley Jr., a UC Berkeley law professor who co-authored the report. “It’s messy and appears to create turmoil, but ... you’re dealing with a large community of 20-year-olds who we expect to be passionate and who we know are collecting experiences as well as knowledge. It’s incumbent on us to be as tolerant as possible without compromising fundamentals.”

Even some sharp critics of pro-Palestinian protests, which they see as antisemitic, have refrained from calling for an end to the encampments. Assemblymember Rick Chavez Zbur (D-Los Angeles), whose district includes the UCLA campus, said he was “appalled and disgusted” by calls to destroy Israel and praise for the Hamas militant group and believes UC officials are not doing enough to safeguard Jewish students. But he said he supports the rights to free speech, to peacefully assemble and to protest, and would continue to fight for their protection “no matter how strongly I may disagree.”

UC Davis Police Chief Joseph Farrow, who chairs the UC Council of Police Chiefs, said campuses generally favor a lenient approach to protests, including encampments, within reason.

“If people are gathering peacefully and in an area not doing harm or disrupting operations, universities will probably let that go,” he said.

By contrast, USC senior administrators directed their campus security officers to clamp down on violations of its rules against overnight camping, said Assistant Chief David Carlisle of the Department of Public Safety. He said his team, which numbered about 25 officers, warned students against camping and moved in to remove tents and sleeping bags when their orders to do so were ignored. He said the crowd became “hostile,” so campus authorities decided to call in the LAPD, which deployed nearly 100 officers and made the arrests.

USC is now allowing students to stay outside overnight as they continue their protests — but not in tents. Carlisle said the difference is that they are not violating bans on overnight camping.

“When it becomes clear that they are intending to set up a tent city, that would violate university policies,” he said.

USC President Carol Folt defended her decision in a message to the USC community Friday.

“This week, Alumni Park became unsafe. No one wants to have people arrested on their campus. Ever,” she wrote. “But, when long-standing safety policies are flagrantly violated, buildings vandalized, DPS directives repeatedly ignored, threatening language shouted, people assaulted, and access to critical academic buildings blocked, we must act immediately to protect our community.”

But many USC students and faculty members condemned the university’s decision to call in LAPD officers, saying their presence escalated tensions. One Palestinian American student, who did not want to be named due to safety concerns, said the aggressive actions of police and campus security were unexpected and unwelcome but “nothing compared to a genocide, to occupation, to apartheid” which she said Palestinians are suffering.

Former UC Santa Cruz Chancellor George Blumenthal said that decisions over how to respond to campus protests aren’t easy. At least a few times a year, he said, he tussled with the tricky issue of what to do when student protests blocked the only two entries to campus. He generally allowed them to shut down the campus for a day, despite backlash from some “furious” faculty who wanted him to more quickly restore access. Then he got more criticism when he did call in police to reopen the campus.

“It’s easy to overreact too quickly,” he said. “When you bring in police and start arresting students, there is definitely an aftermath.”

In a newly issued open letter, nearly 470 faculty and staff across all nine UC undergraduate campuses expressed support for students who nonviolently demonstrate, saying the right to do so needed “active protection” after New York police arrested more than 100 Columbia University peaceful protesters, suspended them from courses and evicted them from student housing. The letter called out UC’s own controversial history involving protests, including the pepper-spray incident, the 2015 arrest of UC Santa Cruz students protesting tuition hikes and the 2020 firing of graduate student workers involved in a wildcat strike.

“Arresting or punishing students who protest peacefully and nonviolently on our campuses is antithetical to our university’s highest ideals of learning and scholarship and violates our university’s fundamental values of decency and respect,” the letter said. “Especially during difficult moments of intense political contestation, it is essential that all members of our university community respect each other and not engage in authoritarian power plays.”

UC’s more tolerant approach played out at the three campuses where students staged protests this week.

At UC Berkeley, nearly 100 tents remained up in the “Free Palestine Camp” by Sproul Hall, the historic home of the campus’ free speech movement. With the last day of instruction Friday and finals starting after that, the campus is prioritizing the academic interests of students, said Dan Mogulof, assistant vice chancellor for executive communications.

He said the campus has refused demands to shut down the encampment, along with a two-month protest at Sather Gate, to honor the right to engage in nonviolent political activities. Students have complied with campus directives to take down signs hanging on the gate but have needed repeated reminders against using amplified sounds. Last month, Chancellor Carol Christ decided to post monitors at the gate to reduce conflict after receiving complaints about the activities there.

“We’re dealing with these protests in the exact same way we have dealt with nonviolent political protests in the past and that is in line with the UC systemwide standard that instructs us not to request law enforcement involvement preemptively and only when there is a direct threat to the physical safety of the campus community,” Mogulof said. “We’ve seen at our own campus and others that calling in law enforcement can have unintended consequences.”

Berkeley’s measured response, while criticized by some, has been praised by others on both sides. In a social media post, the Jewish Community Relations Council Bay Area affirmed the protesters’ right to free speech even though their words were “abhorrent” and said UC Berkeley administrators were “committed to ensuring Jewish safety and participation in campus life.”

Hundreds of UC Santa Barbara students completed a daylong occupation of the student resources building without mishap this week. The event featured workshops, art projects and other actions to express solidarity with Palestinians, call for a cease-fire and demand an end to Israel-related investments. No encampment was set up.

Bishnupriya Ghosh, a professor of English and global studies and member of Academics for Justice in Palestine, credited collaboration and communication for the peaceful outcome, including regular discussions with Chancellor Henry Yang and other senior leaders.

The campus response “has not been draconian at all because of open channels of communication to administration, which have been very productive,” Ghosh said.

UCLA’s response to the protest activities also drew mostly favorable reviews. Saree Makdisi, an English professor of Palestinian heritage, said he appreciated the respectful tone of the Bruin Alert that went out Thursday, announcing that the school would “support a safe and peaceful campus environment that respects our community’s right to free expression while minimizing disruption to our teaching and learning mission.” He said he only wished UCLA had acted earlier to set up barricades around the encampment to protect those inside from what he said was physical and verbal aggression from Israel supporters who appeared not to be students but outsiders.

Edley, the UC Berkeley law professor, said his biggest critique of the overall campus response was a failure to more creatively use the moment to help deepen understanding of the fraught, complex and contested history of the conflict. Faculty might have bought space in student newspapers, for instance, to publish essays from all perspectives “in a vigorous search for shared truth.”

“This is a great university, and the opportunity to deeply inform students about this problem is profoundly important,” he said. “So I hate to see it reduced to a problem of law and order.”

Times staff writers Jaclyn Cosgrove and Angie Orellana Hernandez contributed to this report.

Columbia Bars Student Protester Who Said ‘Zionists Don’t Deserve to Live’
The New York Times (archive.ph)
By Katherine Rosman
2024-04-27 01:40:09GMT

Spoiler

Columbia University announced on Friday that it had barred from its campus a leader in the pro-Palestinian student protest encampment who declared on video in January that “Zionists don’t deserve to live.”

Video of the incendiary comments resurfaced online Thursday evening, forcing the school to again confront an issue at the core of the conflict rippling across campuses nationwide: the tension between pro-Palestinian activism and antisemitism.

The student, Khymani James, made the comments during and after a disciplinary hearing with Columbia administrators that he recorded and then posted on Instagram.

The hearing, conducted by an administrator of the university’s Center for Student Success and Intervention, was focused on an earlier comment he shared on social media, in which he discussed fighting a Zionist. “I don’t fight to injure or for there to be a winner or a loser, I fight to kill,” he wrote.

A Columbia administrator asked, “Do you see why that is problematic in any way?”

Mr. James replied, “No.”

He also compared Zionists to white supremacists and Nazis. “These are all the same people,” he said. “The existence of them and the projects they have built, i.e. Israel, it’s all antithetical to peace. It’s all antithetical to peace. And so, yes, I feel very comfortable, very comfortable, calling for those people to die.”

And, Mr. James said, “Be grateful that I’m not just going out and murdering Zionists.”

In announcing their decision to bar Mr. James from campus, the university did not make clear if he had been suspended or permanently expelled.

Other protest groups condemned the comments and pointed out that one student’s statements do not reflect the tenor of the movement as a whole. But the remarks were widely shared on social media and go to the heart of a question that has animated criticism of the protests: How much of the movement in support of the Palestinian people in Gaza is tainted by antisemitism?

College administrators have pledged to Congress that they will take swift action against hateful attacks on Jewish students and antisemitic threats. “I promise you, from the messages I’m hearing from students, they are getting the message that violations of our policies will have consequences,” Columbia’s president, Nemat Shafik, told congressional leaders last week.

On Friday, a school spokesman said, “Calls of violence and statements targeted at individuals based on their religious, ethnic or national identity are unacceptable and violate university policy.”

Brian Cohen, the executive director of Columbia/Barnard Hillel, the center for Jewish campus life, described Mr. James’s statements as dangerous. “I think students who make comments like that don’t belong on campus,” he said.

Noa Fay, 23, a first-year student at the School of International and Public Affairs, said she was shocked by the “unabashedness” of the video. “It’s one of the more blatant examples of antisemitism and, just, rhetoric that is inconsistent with the values that we have at Columbia,” she said. “I was mostly very surprised to see that it was just so out in the open.”

Early Friday morning, Mr. James posted a statement on social media addressing his comments. “What I said was wrong,” he wrote. “Every member of our community deserves to feel safe without qualification.” He noted that he made these comments in January before he become involved with the protest movement and added that the leaders of the student protests did not condone the comments. “I agree with their assessment,” he wrote.

Mr. James did not respond to a request for comment, and student protesters declined to address the matter at a news conference on the Columbia campus Friday afternoon.

But in an interview earlier in the week, Mr. James drew a distinction between the ideas of anti-Zionism, which describes opposition to the Jewish state of Israel, and antisemitism. “There is a difference,” he said. “We’ve always had Jewish people as part of our community where they have expressed themselves, they feel safe, and they feel loved. And we want all people to feel safe in this encampment. We are a multiracial, multigenerational group of people.”

Sophie Ellman-Golan, the communications director of Jews for Racial & Economic Justice and a Barnard College graduate, said she found Mr. James’s comments awful and upsetting but she added that it was clear his views did not represent those of the other campus protesters.

Ms. Ellman-Golan said that in her 10 years as an organizer, there were always people who tried to inject hateful messages into public action, and that such messages tended to be amplified by those looking to smear entire movements.

“For people who want to believe that characterization, that our movements are inevitably and permanently hostile to us as Jews, this is catnip, right?” she said. “It’s irresistible.”

A spokeswoman for Jewish Voice for Peace, a pro-Palestinian advocacy group, said in a statement that the organization was glad Mr. James had realized he was wrong and had acknowledged that his words were harmful.

“We believe that all people have the capacity to transform — many of our own members once supported Israel’s violence against Palestinians,” the statement said, adding that “within the movement we are committed to holding one another accountable to respecting the dignity of all human beings.”

One student protester who is Jewish and who has spoken to Mr. James about the video said she believed he was committed to nonviolence and acceptance of all people. She said that he had reacted emotionally after being trolled online and that it was unfair that his decision to vent his frustration on social media was being used against him.

It remains unclear how many students are directing the Columbia protests, but Mr. James, 20, emerged as a public face of the demonstrations this week when he led a news conference to assert the demands the movement is making of the Columbia administration.

“This encampment — a peaceful, student-led demonstration — is part of the larger movement of Palestinian liberation,” Mr. James said at the conference.

In his biography on X, he calls himself an “anticapitalist” and “anti-imperialist.”

Mr. James was raised in Boston, and graduated from Boston Latin Academy, according to a 2021 interview with The Bay State Banner.

He told The Banner that at Columbia, he planned to study economics and political science. “The ultimate destination is Congress,” he said.

Columbia’s University Senate Calls for an Investigation Into the Administration
The New York Times (archive.ph)
By Stephanie Saul and Anna Betts
2024-04-26 22:52:27GMT

Spoiler

Columbia University’s senate voted on Friday to approve a resolution that called for an investigation into the school’s leadership, accusing the administration of violating established protocols, undermining academic freedom, jeopardizing free inquiry and breaching the due process rights of both students and professors.

The university’s president, Nemat Shafik, has been under attack for her decision last week to summon the New York Police Department to campus, resulting in the arrest of more than 100 student protesters, and for her earlier congressional testimony, in which professors accused her of capitulating to the demands of congressional Republicans over free speech and the disciplining of students and professors.

The resolution, adopted by a vote of 62-14, with three abstentions, fell short of a proposal earlier in the week to censure Dr. Shafik, which many senators worried could be perceived as yielding to Republican lawmakers who had called for her resignation over her handling of antisemitism claims.

The senate resolution was based partly on a damaging report by the senate executive committee, which accused Dr. Shafik’s administration of engaging in “many actions and decisions that have harmed” the institution — including the hiring of an “aggressive” private investigation firm.

The report, which was discussed in Friday’s meeting, said that investigators harassed students and used “intrusive investigation methods,” which included “investigators’ attempt to enter student rooms and dormitories without students’ consent.”

Investigators, the report said, demanded “to see students’ phones and text messages with threats of suspension for noncompliance.”

The report found that, “Overall, the fundamental lack of good-faith engagement with all campus constituencies and groups has exacerbated the situation and has served to divide our community.”

The resolution also calls for establishing a senate task force to investigate university decision-making.

In a statement following the senate vote, a spokesman for the university said the administration and the senate “share the same goal of restoring calm to campus so everyone can pursue their educational activities. We are committed to an ongoing dialogue and appreciate the Senate’s constructive engagement in finding a pathway forward.”

The resolution may have little practical impact. The senate, made up of faculty, students and administrators, is not empowered to remove the president. But some senators expressed concern during the two-hour meeting that the resolution could further erode Dr. Shafik’s relationship with the Columbia community, heightening the crisis facing the campus.

The chaos engulfing the university over the war between Israel and Hamas, and the administration’s handling of an encampment of student protesters on campus, have led to calls for Dr. Shafik’s resignation from disparate groups, including congressional Republicans and pro-Palestinian demonstrators.

During the meeting on Friday, Nachum Sicherman, a professor of economics, urged senators to take outside interference into account and to vote against the proposal.

“We are in a serious crisis, and I don’t see how weakening a president who is under attack from both the right and left is going to help resolve the crisis,” he said.

During the debate, which was at times heated, some senators raised questions about whether the body should have specifically addressed claims of antisemitism on campus.

Carol Garber, a professor of behavioral sciences, said she feared that the senate resolution “has ignored the impact of the hostile and aggressive language and actions toward Israeli and Jewish students, faculty and staff on this campus.”

The resolution said that university actions in response to current events had made “studying, teaching and research increasingly difficult for many students, faculty and other members of the Columbia community.”

Columbia protesters say they’re at an impasse with administrators and will continue anti-war camp
Associated Press (archive.ph)
By Noreen Nasir, James Pollard, and Nick Perry
2024-04-27 03:08:15GMT

Spoiler

NEW YORK (AP) — Columbia University students who inspired pro-Palestinian demonstrations across the country said Friday that they reached an impasse with administrators and intend to continue their encampment until their demands are met.

The announcement after two days of exhaustive negotiations came as Columbia’s president faced harsh criticism from faculty — something that has been seen at several other universities where professors and staff similarly condemned leadership over the use of police against demonstrators, leading to fierce clashes, injuries and hundreds of arrests.

The tensions add pressure on school officials from California to Massachusetts who are scrambling to resolve the protests as May graduation ceremonies near.

As the death toll mounts in the war in Gaza and the humanitarian crisis worsens, protesters at universities all over the U.S. are demanding that schools cut financial ties to Israel and divest from companies they say are enabling the conflict.

Some Jewish students say the protests have veered into antisemitism and made them afraid to set foot on campus, and safety concerns have prompted some of the heavier-handed approaches.

In one crackdown, in Denver, police swept through an encampment Friday at the Auraria Campus, which hosts three universities and colleges. Forty protesters who set up there the day before were arrested on what the campus said were trespassing charges for violating a camping ban.

At Columbia, student negotiators representing the encampment said that after meetings Thursday and Friday, the university had not met their primary demand for divestment, although there was progress on a push for more transparent financial disclosures.

“We will not rest until Columbia divests,” said Jonathan Ben-Menachem, a fourth-year doctoral student.

Columbia officials had said earlier that talks were showing progress.

“We have our demands; they have theirs,” university spokesperson Ben Chang said, adding that if the talks fail, Columbia will have to consider other options.

Meanwhile, Columbia’s president, Minouche Shafik, faced a significant — but largely symbolic — rebuke from faculty Friday but retained the support of trustees, who have the power to hire or fire the president.

A report by the university senate’s executive committee, which represents faculty, found Shafik and her administration took “many actions and decisions that have harmed Columbia University.” Those included calling in police and letting students be arrested without consulting faculty, failing to defend the institution in the face of external pressures, misrepresenting and suspending student protest groups and hiring private investigators.

“The faculty have completely lost confidence in President Shafik’s ability to lead this organization,” said Ege Yumusak, a philosophy lecturer who is part of a faculty team protecting the encampment.

In response, Chang said in the evening that “we are committed to an ongoing dialogue and appreciate the Senate’s constructive engagement in finding a pathway forward.”

Also Friday, student protester Khymani James walked back comments made in an online video in January that recently received new attention. James said in the video that “Zionists don’t deserve to live” and people should be grateful James wasn’t killing them.

“What I said was wrong,” James said in a statement. “Every member of our community deserves to feel safe without qualification.”

James, who served as a spokesperson for the pro-Palestinian encampment as a member of Columbia University Apartheid Divest, was banned from campus Friday, according to a Columbia spokesperson.

Protest organizers said James’ comments didn’t reflect their values. They declined to describe James’ level of involvement with the demonstration.

On the opposite coast, protesters at California State Polytechnic University, Humboldt, barricaded themselves inside a building for the fifth day Friday. The administration gave them until 5 p.m. to leave and “not be immediately arrested,” a deadline that came and went.

University officials did not immediately respond to a request for an update or provide information on what they planned to do, and the campus has been closed for the remainder of the semester.

At Arizona State University, protesters pitched tents, including some that police dismantled, and at least one person was handcuffed and taken away Friday.

Police previously clashed with protesters Thursday at Indiana University, Bloomington, where 34 were arrested. There were about 36 arrests at Ohio State, and one at the University of Connecticut.

The president of Portland State University took a different approach Friday, announcing a forum to discuss protesters’ concerns and a pause on further gifts and grants from Boeing, after students asked that the school cut ties with the aerospace company.

The University of Southern California canceled its May 10 graduation ceremony Thursday, a day after more than 90 protesters were arrested on campus. The university said it will still host dozens of commencement events, including all the traditional individual school ceremonies.

Elsewhere in New York, about a dozen protesters spent the night in tents and sleeping bags inside a building at the Fashion Institute of Technology.

Protesters also stayed overnight at the encampment at George Washington University. Officials said in a statement that those who remained were trespassing on private property and disciplinary actions would be pursued against students involved in the unauthorized demonstrations.

At Emory University in Atlanta, video that circulated widely on social media showed two women who identified themselves as professors being detained, with one of them slammed to the ground by an officer as a second one pushed her chest and face onto a concrete sidewalk.

University President Gregory Fenves said via email that some videos of clashes were “shocking” and he was “horrified that members of our community had to experience and witness such interactions.”

Fenves blamed the campus unrest on “highly organized, outside protesters” who he said arrived in vans, put up tents and took over the quad. But in an earlier statement, school officials said that 20 of the 28 people arrested were members of the university community.

Since the Israel-Hamas war began, the U.S. Education Department has launched civil rights investigations into dozens of universities and schools in response to complaints of antisemitism or Islamophobia. Among those under investigation are many colleges facing protests, including Harvard and Columbia.

 

[Chandelier]

Abbott sent the National Guard in faster than he ever did for the Floyd protests or Uvalde. BDS protests are illegal in Texas, so there is your freedom of speech. A foreign nation can pull the strings and muh free speech anti wokie Republicans are okay with that.

 

[dustbuster]

Abbott sent the National Guard in faster than he ever did for the Floyd protests or Uvalde.

Me waiting for his promise to direct the "pardon board" officers who are his appointees to pardon Daniel Perry.

We're at 3 years now right?

 

[Vecr]

I don't know man, isn't antisemitism supposed to be legal? Even if all your accusations land, there's no point is giving these people attention in real life.

 

[dustbuster]

I don't know man, isn't antisemitism supposed to be legal?

Yes, you can hate jews all you want without being arrested.
It's the public camping, littering, threats, and violence which are the problem with these mobs.
Oh yeah, and HAMAS is a designated international terrorist organization so anyone associated is subject to asset forfeiture and arrest.

 

[KiwiFuzz2]

I genuinely don't understand the difference in this situation between being anti-Israel and being pro-Hamas.

If you're a fuckin' Jew-hater, one side took your spot at Harvard and the other side flew fuckin' planes into buildings and beheaded somewhere between 1-40 babies and would shoot half your loved ones on sight for not being sufficiently devoted to Allah and would rape the other half before shooting them. And it would be a kindness to shoot them and not wire the whole family together and burn them alive.

I don't want to come off all Alan Jackson but this was Israel's 9-11 and Hamas absolutely knew they were going to get reamed beforehand and they did it anyway, and the way I see it, every dead Palestinian kid is on them.

Islam is incompatible with western civilization. Fuck 'em all, and fuck all their supporters and enablers.

 

[dustbuster]

I genuinely don't understand the difference in this situation between being anti-Israel and being pro-Hamas.

I'll help.
I'm mildly "anti-Israel" as an idea. I think the insistence of European Jewry to pick a fight with clannish barbarians in the levant was fucking dumb when they could have taken a tropical western pacific paradise as a safe homeland. It's caused endless wars for little gain.
Reminds me of the Mormons from Starship Troopers.

I'm also generally "anti-hamas".
A stupid decision by jews 70~ years ago does not negate their right to ethnic existence and hamas is merely the latest name for the global islamic jihad which has been waging war on civilized society since approximately 700 A.D.
Barbarians deserve to be marched upon and put to the sword until they cease raids upon civilization.

 

[YOU'RE TAKING TOO LONG]

image of Jaoquin Phoenix in harlequin attire holding a firearm to a late night talk show host

 

[Mitt Doggy Dogg]

I saw a article saying their are paid actors at most of these protests, being paid by far left non-profits. It would make the most sense how so many of these protests are going on, I mean these kids are protesting in favor of literal terrorists after they terrorized abunch of people at a music festival and then got their asses kicked. In my personal opinion they got what they deserved.

 

[Vecr]

I'll help.
I'm mildly "anti-Israel" as an idea. I think the insistence of European Jewry to pick a fight with clannish barbarians in the levant was fucking dumb when they could have taken a tropical western pacific paradise as a safe homeland. It's caused endless wars for little gain.
Reminds me of the Mormons from Starship Troopers.

I'm also generally "anti-hamas".
A stupid decision by jews 70~ years ago does not negate their right to ethnic existence and hamas is merely the latest name for the global islamic jihad which has been waging war on civilized society since approximately 700 A.D.
Barbarians deserve to be marched upon and put to the sword until they cease raids upon civilization.

Makes a lot of sense. I support Israel somewhat, but obviously Hamas and others like them are a disaster for the world. People should be able to oppose Israel if they want to though, I don't like the EAR/Anti-BDS laws either.

 

[SBG]

Don't think this has been posted yet about Justine Brooke Murray being followed around by a really fat creepy Michael Tracey near one of these schools.

Sounded like Tracey was wanting to debunk the Jewish woman's claim that people were being antisemitic for blocking people from a campus that didn't go to school there, not realizing just how weird it'd look to be following around a woman like this.

https://twitter.com/mtracey/status/1783994612102705187

Regarding the actual protests going on, it mostly seems pretty calm and boring. Which makes it funny how many are trying to get up in arms over it given how they were fine with all the BLM stuff just a few years back. You have guys like Hasan delivering pizzas to a protest and people doing interpretive dances in support of Palestine, which is more goofy than dangerous.

Feel like the lesson in all this is the Palestinian side has been massively better about doing propaganda in comparison to the Israeli/Jewish side (if you ignore the road blockades). The pro-Israel side has made itself the boring side to go with while if you go pro-Palestine you can show support by wearing a fun scarf and eating junk food in a park.

Edit:

I saw a article saying their are paid actors at most of these protests, being paid by far left non-profits.

Sounds like "community organizers". Leftist protests frequently will get consultants to help organize the crowds or direct chants, keeps things more on point when they're trying to film videos or get some nice photo ops.

 

[Soyjak Enjoyer]

A shame the school year ends in a week at most universities, this was the most fun news cycle in a while.
The funny thing is this is the future of protesting in the social media age. Whatever principled cohesive message you start out with is going to attract insane radicals who see it as a platform to spread their message and trust fund college kids who saw 10 tiktoks on the issue, and those people will receive all the media coverage. Every protest for the foreseeable future on any issue is going to play out like this

 

[AssignedEva]

From George Washington University. Oy vey, it's happening again!
https://nypost.com/2024/04/26/us-ne...reatens-extermination-of-jews-spotted-at-gwu/

My impression from that sign is it's saying Israel is using October 7th as an excuse for the "final solution" to the "Palestinian question"; it's critical of Israel's genocidal actions and drawing parallels between that and the Nazis. That makes more sense to me than reading that sign as "kill all Jews". It would still count as antisemitic under the IHRA definition, because they've specifically said "drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis" is an example of antisemitism.

 

[clipartfan92]

Columbia University has a doxxing problem
The Verge (archive.ph)
By Gaby Del Valle
Photography by Amella Holowaty Krales
2024-04-26 16:45:53GMT

Spoiler

The troubles on Columbia University’s campus began over six months ago, long before last week’s protests. Shortly after Hamas’ October 7th attack on Israel, a box truck covered in LED screens displaying the names and photos of dozens of Columbia students started circling a pro-Palestine protest near the university’s Morningside Heights campus. The truck, paid for by the conservative nonprofit Accuracy in Media, called the students “Columbia’s Leading Antisemites.”

“I literally did not leave my apartment the days my friends told me about it,” a computer science undergraduate, whose name was listed on the truck, told me outside the Columbia encampment on Tuesday afternoon. The student, who did not wish to be identified for fairly obvious reasons, said her name was listed on the truck because a club she was no longer a part of had signed onto an open letter urging Columbia to cut ties with Israel. It was a traumatizing experience for her. “I completely wiped as much as I could of my online presence and stayed in my apartment as much as I could,” the student said. “I felt like I couldn’t go to classes.”

Like most of the other people who filtered in and out of the encampment, the student stayed masked as we spoke. Students covered their faces with surgical masks, sunglasses, and kaffiyehs, both to prevent spreading covid-19 in close quarters and to shield themselves from the prying eyes of outsiders who they feared would target them over their involvement in the encampment.

At Columbia and elsewhere, pro-Palestine protesters have attempted to balance their public-facing activism with increasingly dire concerns over their privacy and safety. People who have attended marches or rallies, organized fundraisers for displaced Palestinians, or belonged to certain campus clubs have found themselves and even their families on the receiving end of relentless online harassment after their names were publicized by anonymous accounts that claim to combat antisemitism. In some cases, they have even lost their jobs.

For the students targeted by the “doxxing truck,” the intent was clear: they were being intimidated for supporting Palestinians and, in some cases, for their race or religion. (One student whose name and photo were displayed on the truck sued Accuracy in Media in November for “defaming and stigmatizing” him. The student was the former president of an Arab cultural group on campus and says he did not sign onto the letter.) The harassment of student activists at Columbia and elsewhere has only intensified since then, often spilling over into the physical world.

In the enclosed environs of a college campus, a student’s first and last name is not exactly top secret sensitive information. But when placed into a certain context and disseminated through certain media streams outside the confines of the university, a name becomes a liability — and for bad-faith actors, a weapon that can be wielded against students.

“Early on, in October, I tried to speak with administrators to help them understand the gravity of the target they were placing on their students by allowing this doxxing to continue,” Darializa Avila Chevalier, a Columbia alum who was involved with Students for Justice in Palestine as an undergraduate, told me on Wednesday. Columbia announced a “doxxing resource group” last November, a response Avila Chevalier and other students described as insufficient. (Columbia University did not respond to a request for comment.)

Avila Chevalier, who graduated from Columbia in 2016, was among the first students to be featured on Canary Mission, a database that describes itself as dedicated to exposing antisemitism. Since its inception, Canary Mission has conflated antisemitic hate speech with pro-Palestinian activism; Avila Chevalier was posted on the database for her involvement in the BDS (Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions) movement. The Israeli government has used Canary Mission to bar political activists from entering the country, Haaretz reported in 2018. Since October 7th, Canary Mission has doxxed protesters across the country.

A graduate student involved in the encampment pushed back at the notion that protesting Israel’s treatment of Palestinians is antisemitic. “A lot of the organizing is run by Jewish students,” he said. “There was a seder here, there was a passover celebration here, and all of that is neglected.” The graduate student was previously doxxed by Canary Mission over his undergraduate activism at a different university.


The quad of Columbia University on April 25th, 2024.

The week before, police officers in riot gear descended upon Columbia University’s campus to break up an encampment set up by student protesters. Moments later, university president Minouche Shafik claimed she sent the officers in for students’ safety. “I took this extraordinary step because these are extraordinary circumstances,” Shafik wrote in a statement published last Thursday afternoon. “The current encampment violates all of the new policies, severely disrupts campus life, and creates a harassing and intimidating environment for many of our students.”

Police arrested more than 100 students who had occupied Columbia’s south lawn to demand that the university divest its $13 billion endowment from companies that support Israel. Officers tore down the tents students had set up the previous morning around 4AM and trampled on signs declaring the encampment a “liberated zone,” an echo of the anti-war protests that swept college campuses across the country, including Columbia’s, in 1968. Less than a day later, the tents were back, with hundreds of new students taking the place of their classmates who had been arrested and barred from campus.

Visitors to the encampment are greeted by a tall sign announcing its community guidelines — no littering, no drugs or alcohol, no engaging with counterprotesters, no talking to cops — and a handful of volunteers in yellow vests who control the incoming flow of people. The lawn is a maze of green and blue tents, some of which are decorated with Palestinian flags. The arrangement appears to shift from day to day; tents go up and come down, tables are rearranged, but the sense of organized chaos persists. The liberated zone, as the students have taken to calling the quad, is a hive of activity. Students flit around unpacking boxes of snacks and making signs. Inside, I spot two obviously DIYed shirts that read “Minouche Sha-fuck you.” Almost all the students are masked; the reporters among us are identifiable by both our press badges and our bare faces.

“You see people trying to make themselves almost unrecognizable out of fear of losing jobs, fear of being attacked by this administration,” Dalia, a first-year student at Columbia, told me. Dalia, who is Palestinian, said she enrolled at Columbia because of the legacy of professors like postcolonial scholar Edward Said. She has now begun to see the campus as a hostile place for Muslim and Arab students. Three days before Dalia and I spoke, Shai Davidai, an adjunct professor at Columbia’s business school, posted a video on X of Muslim students praying. The caption: “This is Columbia University, right now. Please share to let the world know.”


After months of doxxings, student demonstrators at Columbia University obscure their faces.

“I think the fact that such open anti-Palestinian rhetoric, anti-Islam rhetoric is able to proliferate by members of this community — by certain faculty — without any single response or utterance from the administration is crazy,” Dalia said. (Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) asked Shafik about Davidai by name during a congressional hearing last week. Shafik said that he was under investigation for harassment and added that “attacking our students is unacceptable.” On Monday, Davidai was denied entry to Columbia’s main campus, though he was still allowed to access the business school.)

Dalia and I spoke in a cordoned-off press area of the encampment on Monday. In the days since the university sent in the NYPD to arrest the first wave of protesters, the students who took over the quad had set up a media operation of sorts. They let reporters in a few at a time, or sometimes not at all, and asked us not to photograph students without their consent. Instead of approaching protesters for interviews, reporters were asked to wait in the press area until liaisons — other students — brought over people who were interested in being interviewed. Critics in the media have accused the student protesters of illiberally trying to stifle the free press. The students, meanwhile, maintain that they’re trying to protect the most vulnerable among them while ensuring that their message — the desire for Columbia to divest from business interests in Israel — remains at the forefront.

A protest’s power lies in its numbers. In singling demonstrators out and targeting them one by one, the people going after students aren’t just targeting individuals; they’re trying to hobble a broader movement.

Several students told me they were harassed after speaking to the press. Jonathan Ben-Menachem, a PhD candidate in Columbia’s sociology department, said he received a flood of emails accusing him of being a “self-hating Jew” after writing an essay about how he feels safe on campus. Jared, a graduate student at Columbia, said he and other Jewish students have been called “Judenrat” and “kapos” for supporting the encampment. “I had previously been giving interviews with my last name, and a family member of mine was left a voicemail asking if he was a self-hating Jew just like me,” said Jared, adding that Arab and Muslim students are bearing the brunt of the harassment. “There’s definitely a lot of threats from the outside, but this is not a threatening mob,” he said of the encampment.


A graduate student described the student encampment as “basically just a bunch of nerds.”

The encampment, all things considered, is extremely chill. When I walked around on Monday, I saw students lounging in their tents, doing homework, and generally hanging out. There was a craft corner where people could make pro-Palestine signs: among them were pieces of cardboard and cloth that read “Anti-imperialism is feminist” and “End the blockade.” In the middle of the quad, students had set up a snack table — complete with a “nut zone” to accommodate their peers with allergies — that also had sunscreen, water bottles, and ibuprofen available.

“It’s basically just a bunch of nerds,” Jared told me on Wednesday. “And then I go home, check Twitter, and I hear like, ‘Pro-Hamas mob has taken over Columbia.’ There’s a huge disparity between what’s going on here and how it’s been portrayed by the media.”

The most tense hours I’ve witnessed at the encampment occur like clockwork, during the university’s designated media hours of 2 to 4PM. The encampment and its surrounding areas are at their most chaotic during the brief media window: reporters mill about looking for students to talk to, student volunteers scramble to coordinate interviews, and right-wing agitators roam around, hoping to lure undergrads into giving them an inflammatory quote. By 5:30 or 6PM, once the camera crews are mostly gone and the media frenzy has died down, campus life — the encampment included — regains a sense of normalcy.

On Monday afternoon, hundreds of Columbia faculty held a walkout in support of the arrested students, demanding that Columbia lift their suspensions and reinstate their access to campus. “To send riot police to pick up peaceful protesters on our campus was unprecedented, unjustified, disproportionate, divisive, and dangerous,” Christopher Brown, a professor of history, told the crowd of a hundred or so people who assembled on the university steps. “That show of force was a sign of weakness. In trying to show that they meant business, what they showed was their incompetence.”

Brown suggested that Shafik’s crackdown on protesters was an affront to their safety and to the notion of academic freedom. Other professors expressed concern that even innocuous statements in support of their students would get them into trouble with the university. One faculty member who has been the victim of online harassment described a “culture of fear around speaking up for Palestine” at the university.

“I think what we’re seeing is that many faculty are afraid to speak up for their students who have faced harassment, doxxing, arrest, or even eviction over the past several months because their employment at the school is so unprotected and precarious,” the faculty member, who wished to remain anonymous, told me. More than half of Columbia instructors are so-called “contingent” faculty. Over 160 untenured Columbia professors have signed an open letter in support of the arrested, suspended, and protesting students; nearly half the signatories were anonymous.


Students lounge in their tents, do homework, and hang out.

At a Tuesday afternoon press conference on the edge of Morningside Park, Marianne Hirsch, a literature professor who specializes in Holocaust studies, said the university had fostered “an atmosphere of fear and intimidation in which some people are afraid to tell you their names.”

Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian student who has been involved in the negotiations with Shafik’s office, also spoke, saying international students were especially at risk. “I am here on a foreign visa. That’s why for the past six months, I’ve barely appeared on the media,” Khalil said. “That’s why I’m not suspended. I did not participate, fearing that I will be arrested and ultimately deported from this country.”

Later that day, around 10PM, Shafik announced a midnight deadline to reach an agreement with students on “clearing the West Lawn and restoring calm to campus.” Amid negotiations with student representatives from Columbia University Apartheid Divest — the group behind the encampment — Shafik threatened to call both the National Guard and the NYPD, the student group said in a statement. The few hundred students who stayed on the lawn started preparing for arrests, according to the Columbia Daily Spectator. In the end, neither the police nor the National Guard were called: instead, Shafik extended the deadline until the early hours of Friday.

By Wednesday, the media circus was in full swing. As I spoke off the record with two members of the encampment whose faces were covered by sunglasses and scarves, a man approached us and asked why we weren’t in class; off to the side, I noticed provocateur and Proud Boys founder Gavin McInnes. A few hours later, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) held a press conference on the other side of the quad. “This is dangerous. This is not the First Amendment. This is not free expression,” Johnson said amid boos and chants of “Mike, you suck.” Then he urged President Joe Biden to call in the National Guard.


The press scrum at the university gates is only slightly more chaotic than the media frenzy inside.

Rep. Omar made her own visit on Thursday. Omar’s daughter was one of the students suspended when the encampment was cleared last week. Shafik’s early Friday deadline was swiftly approaching. That night, Shafik said there would be no arrests. “There is a rumor that the NYPD has been invited to campus this evening,” she wrote in an email sent to students at 11:08PM. “This rumor is false.”

For Sofia, an undergraduate student who declined to give her last name, the university’s willingness to facilitate the arrest of its own students in the first place suggests that Shafik’s concerns about safety are largely rhetorical. The arrests, she told me on Monday, are “in and of themselves a doxxing event, because all of that becomes public record.” After the first wave of arrests on April 18th, some publications, including the New York Post, published the full names and other identifying information of some students.

If, at a future point, Columbia chooses to send in the NYPD again, after a week of elected officials suggesting that an encampment full of undergraduates making signs at their crafts corner and hosting Passover seders amounts to a national security emergency, the students who find themselves in handcuffs and zip ties will end up with targets on their backs. According to the NYPD’s own chief of patrol, the students arrested on April 18th “were peaceful, offered no resistance whatsoever.” Reports suggesting that the students pose a danger to their classmates only serve to inflame the harassment they’ve been victims of for months.

Dalia, the first-year student, lamented the outsize attention she and her peers have received compared to the war they’re protesting in the first place. “As Palestinians, as Arabs, we have been inherently at risk,” she said. “However, I also think that there really is no comparison to the horrors that are happening in Gaza, the horrors that are happening in Palestine. No amount of student repression — no amount of doxxing — can be equated to that.”

Throughout the week, the students I speak to redirect the conversation back to the war. They ask why their chants are considered violent while counterprotesters seem to get away with spraying students with hazardous chemicals and sending death threats to students who have lost relatives in Gaza. Thursday night, hours before Shafik’s deadline was set to expire, a group of Christian nationalists rallied in support of Israel outside Columbia’s locked-down campus. “Show your face! Show your face!” the demonstrators chanted at students on the other side of the fence. Then some of them tried to storm the gates.

Faculty senate of Emory college calls for no-confidence vote for president
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution (archive.ph)
By Ty Tagami and Josh Reyes
2024-04-26 21:03:32GMT

Spoiler

Emory College of Arts and Sciences faculty listen to instructions before entering a special meeting Friday, April 26, 2024, to hold a vote of no confidence following the arrests of pro-Palestinian protesters on the campus the day before. The result was the faculty senate for the College of Arts and Sciences voted to hold a collegewide no confidence vote in President Gregory L. Fenves. (Ben Gray / Ben@BenGray.com)

In an overwhelming vote Friday afternoon, the faculty senate for Emory University’s College of Arts and Sciences decided to hold a college-wide no-confidence vote in President Gregory Fenves.

The faculty members initially considered a resolution that called for a censure of Fenves, but those in attendance — enough to fill a lecture auditorium and more participating online — decided the vote should be for no confidence.

With at least a couple hundred present, so many hands were thrust into the air in favor of the motion that there was no need to count, said history professor Clifton Crais, a member of the senate who authored the motion.

“I think that there was just a sense of enormous violation of what a college is all about,” he said.

The vote, which will be cast online, could start as soon as this weekend and be complete by mid-week. It will be open to the entire college faculty of about 500 educators.

The resolution also called the protests a “peaceful demonstration” and said Emory and law enforcement caused disruption that “violated multiple college and university policies and is an affront to everything Emory stands for.”

Professor Pamela Scully said the auditorium erupted in cheers when the name of a fellow professor who was arrested, Caroline Fohlin, was mentioned.

Scully witnessed the police action on campus Thursday and called it a “militarized” response.

She said the administration should have attempted to defuse the situation by talking with the protesters, and most faculty at Friday’s meeting appeared to share her sentiments, she said.

“People were clearly, I would say 99%, collectively outraged at the decision of the administration to call police on protesters,” she said.

Student anti-war protesters dig in as faculties condemn university leadership over calling police
Associated Press (archive.ph)
By James Pollard, Noreen Nasir, and Nick Perry
2024-04-27 09:01:12GMT

Spoiler

NEW YORK (AP) — Students protesting the Israel-Hamas war at at universities across U.S., some of whom have clashed with police in riot gear, dug in Saturday and vowed to keep their demonstrations going, while several school faculties condemned university presidents who have called in law enforcement to remove protesters.

As Columbia University continues negotiations with those at a pro-Palestinian student encampment on the New York school’s campus, the university’s senate passed a resolution Friday that created a task force to examine the administration’s leadership, which last week called in police in an attempt to clear the protest, resulting in scuffles and more than 100 arrests.

Though the university has repeatedly set and then pushed back deadlines for the removal of the encampment, the school sent an email to students Friday night saying that bringing back police “at this time” would be counterproductive, adding that they hope the negotiations show “concrete signs of progress tonight.”

As the death toll mounts in the war in Gaza, protesters nationwide are demanding that schools cut financial ties to Israel and divest from companies they say are enabling the conflict. Some Jewish students say the protests have veered into antisemitism and made them afraid to set foot on campus.

The decisions to call in law enforcement, leading to hundreds of arrests nationwide, have prompted school faculty members at universities in California, Georgia and Texas to initiate or pass votes of no confidence in their leadership. They are largely symbolic rebukes, without the power to remove their presidents.

But the tensions pile pressure on school officials, who are already scrambling to resolve the protests as May graduation ceremonies near.

California State Polytechnic University, Humboldt, gave protestors who have barricaded themselves inside a building since Monday until 5 p.m. Friday to leave and “not be immediately arrested.” The deadline came and went. Only some of the protesters left, others doubled down. After protesters rebuffed police earlier in the week, the campus was closed for the rest of the semester.

In Colorado, police swept through an encampment Friday at Denver’s Auraria Campus, which hosts three universities and colleges, arresting around 40 protesters on trespassing charges.

Students representing the Columbia encampment, which inspired the wave of protests across the country, said Friday that they reached an impasse with administrators and intend to continue their protest.

After meetings Thursday and Friday, student negotiators said the university had not met their primary demand for divestment, although there was progress on a push for more transparent financial disclosures.

“We will not rest until Columbia divests,” said Jonathan Ben-Menachem, a fourth-year doctoral student.

In the letter sent to Columbia students Friday night, the university’s leadership said “we support the conversations that are ongoing with student leaders of the encampment.”

Columbia’s president, Minouche Shafik, faced significant criticism from faculty Friday, but retained the support of trustees.

A report by the university senate’s executive committee, which represents faculty, found Shafik and her administration took “many actions and decisions that have harmed Columbia University.” Those included calling in police and allowing students to be arrested without consulting faculty, misrepresenting and suspending student protest groups and hiring private investigators.

“The faculty have completely lost confidence in President Shafik’s ability to lead this organization,” said Ege Yumusak, a philosophy lecturer who is part of a faculty team protecting the encampment.

In response, university spokesperson Ben Chang said in the evening that “we are committed to an ongoing dialogue and appreciate the Senate’s constructive engagement in finding a pathway forward.”

Also Friday, Columbia student protester Khymani James walked back comments made in an online video in January that recently received new attention. James said in the video that “Zionists don’t deserve to live” and people should be grateful James wasn’t killing them.

“What I said was wrong,” James said in a statement. “Every member of our community deserves to feel safe without qualification.”

James, who served as a spokesperson for the pro-Palestinian encampment as a member of Columbia University Apartheid Divest, was banned from campus Friday, according to a Columbia spokesperson.

Protest organizers said James’ comments didn’t reflect their values. They declined to describe James’ level of involvement with the demonstration.

Police clashed with protesters Thursday at Indiana University, Bloomington, where 34 were arrested; Ohio State University, where about 36 were arrested; and at the University of Connecticut, where one person was arrested.

The University of Southern California canceled its May 10 graduation ceremony Thursday, a day after more than 90 protesters were arrested on campus. The university said it will still host dozens of commencement events, including all the traditional individual school ceremonies.

Universities where faculty members have initiated or passed votes of no confidence in their presidents include Cal Poly Humboldt, University of Texas at Austin and Emory University.

 

[NIA-DOA 2.0]

Let us not kid ourselves here:

This is just a fad in the same way that George Floyd and Ukraine were. Once this stops being trendy, everyone will go consoom something else.

 

[cybertoaster]

Another chapter of "I wish both sides in this conflict die"

I had to do this:
View attachment 5930851

Why the french hat tho?

It's the same stupid thing we see time and again, basically building a cargo cult around the idea of being 1960s radicals with none of the substance.

Maybe the radicals of the 60's were just as stupid and we just think otherwise because of boomer revisionism.

I support Israel somewhat

You won't after they ship all 2 million gazans to the west, the pier its already done.

it mostly seems pretty calm and boring. Which makes it funny how many are trying to get up in arms over it given how they were fine with all the BLM stuff just a few years back.

Because that was part of the plan, this isn't.

Let us not kid ourselves here:

This is just a fad in the same way that George Floyd and Ukraine were. Once this stops being trendy, everyone will go consoom something else.

It wont, floyd was a clearly astroturfed one time incident meant to take trump down, you see this shit happen in third world countries all the time. And as far as these people care ukraine is just whitey killing whitey, plus many are pro-russia.

But this shit is different, these are white-passing euro-ish people on the only ethnostate in the planet killing the people who were already there for centuries, and brown people of that religion conservatives hate so it makes this double-plus bad. Add to that that many of these protestors are not white and indoctrinated to hate white people and colonialism so they wont simply leave, just like the people who protested apartheid didn't leave, not for over 2 decades and after destroying the economy of south africa.

 

[Crex Crex]

All of the moonbats whining about antisemitism have no one but themselves to blame. They've been importing mudskins for the past 20 years while radicalizing useful idiots into anarchist terrorists. It was only a matter of time before all of this shortcircuited. Call me optimistic, but modern leftism has never been more vulnerable.

 

[Smar Mijou]

They're the children of the wealthy and influential, and they're pursuing worthless majors. They can afford to spend four years as LARPers. Mommy and Daddy will make those pesky consequences of their action go away, and the kids will get some comfy job in HR/DEI because of their parent's clout afterwards. And then they'll call people like you and me privileged oppressors.

Personally, I'm actually, seriously, somewhat surprised, and breathing a mild sigh of temporary relief, that as a(n alleged) "evil privileged oppressive cis-white heteronormative male", who "oozes toxic masculinity" for the crime of simply existing, that for once in my adult life that I can actually recall, there is a serious cultural problem that the (((media))), government, and every intersectionality group isn't banding together and dog piling all the blame onto me.

Personally I care how this looks to the world. It's horrendous we allow our campuses to be overrun when we have laws like the riot act for these situations. I'd rather deal with short term optics, bringing out bayonets and shotguns, then letting this go on. Send in the federal marshals.

I wouldn't go so far as to want violence from the government or police, we dont need another 50+ years of Kent State sperging, but the homegrown "protesters" who actually caused trouble should at least get their pee-pees slapped. And the diversity/cultural enrichment imports should immediately be deported back to whatever shithole they came from. And all their college credits should be immediately forfeit for anyone who participated violently, as a lesson that actions do indeed have consequences. Maybe not necessarily lifetime bans and permanent records for citizens, but the H1B/undocumented types should be gifted a 1 way ticket back to their homelands. Cargo class, preferably. I'm all for free speech for US citizens, and censorship, especially from the government, is abhorrent. But when your protest turns to outright harassment, obstruction or impedement of others, and damaging of properties, that's when it has gone too far.

It is bizarre and thunk provoking how these protests have mysteriously sprung up simultaneously major universities nationwide though. I don't necessarily think it's a standard glownigger operation, because you would think that it would be more one-sided in the Jews favor if that were the case. (Puts on tinfoil hat) It's more likely money and support from Israel and Quatari based NGOs, on opposing sides, If I were to guess. You have the usual "Oy vey, shut it down!" from the state police and government officials, but it just feels "different" than, say Occupy Wallstreet. Tim Pool spoke about that time, and how he was on the ground during OW, and watched the psyops and glowniggers undermine that movement in real time. J6 was much of the same as well. Large scale protests against The Stats Quo are usually undermined and compromised before they even gain any real momentum. This just seems like dumb kids being recruited by "both sides" for causes that they know nothing about.

I just wish that they showed as much passion and support for their own country as they show for shitholes in the desert that they couldn't even find on a map unless you pointed it out to them. Of course, when we're constantly shown videos of our "elected leaders" in congress sending another $60 billion overseas while waving Ukrainian flags as we struggle to feed ourselves and pay our bills, what message does that send to our population?

Universities: Protests are democracy in action.
Also Universities: Wait, you're not supposed to protest for *that*!

This coming from the same activist universities that teach that White people are evil, openly said thst they would continue with affirmative action even after the Supreme Court ruled it unconstitutional, and have been pushing communist ideology for decades at this point. But when something doesn't go their way, all of a sudden, these "defund the police" faggots are crying for the police to quell the protesters.

dick around for years and accomplishing literally nothing while wasting American money and lives?
last time I checked Islamania is still running wild because Dubya did jack and shit to them longterm

Well, they were doing relatively "OK", at least until the details about harassing the goat-fuckers in Abu Ghraib and waterboarding the Guantanimo Bay faggots were leaked. Lynndie England ring a bell to anyone else?

BTW it still pisses me off at how bad the US military was cucked by the politicians and (((media))), and everyone clutched their pearls and made her and others out to be absolute monsters over the whole situation. Yeah, "torture" isn't right, but if the situations were reversed, we all know damn well that these sand niggers would have slit her throat and raped her corpse without a second thought at the very first opportunity.

Good News Everyone!


View attachment 5938720

Black man dies after fighting cops with one of the cops kneeling on his back.

https://news.sky.com/story/frank-tyson-video-shows-moments-before-black-man-dies-in-police-custody-13122873?dcmp=snt-sf-twitter

Heres some more context for that one... this nig-nog literally just got out of jail after 24 years, basically half his life, not even 2 weeks before his death from natural nigger tendencies organ failure due to drugs in his system horrible police brutality for daring to kneel on his back for ~30 seconds while arresting him after wrecking the CAR THAT HE HAD JUST STOLEN AND WRECKED before he fled to the AMVETS in East Canton and caused the scene that led to the bartender calling the police that eventually arrested him. PL, but I peripherally know an individual who was actually present at the place when this happened. Let's just say that I wouldn't be shocked one bit if Fentanyl or another "illicit substance" is found in the toxicology report. Of course, if they do try to make this the second coming of Saint Floyd The Breather, that might get retconned and ignored by an especially activist medical examiner.

-- I would love to see literally one way that Jews experience any sort of structural or institutional discrimination that can't also be experienced by "white people" as a whole.

Why, don't you know that Ashkenazi Jews are predisposed to many genetic diseases due to centuries of incestuous inbreeding institutional discrimination, you AnTiSeMiTiC bIgOt?!?!?!?