We Bear Witness: Episode 2

What starts on campus spills into the streets

Today we present the second video in a series of documentaries produced by a member of The Circle in collaboration with JFrg at UCLA. The first video, posted on our Substack, was called Masking Identity.

What Starts on Campus Spills Into the Streets

This short video (1m 30 sec) explores the connections between antisemitism in student groups at UCLA and a violent anti-Jewish protest that took place in front of a synagogue in a Jewish neighborhood in Los Angeles. We wrote about this ugly incident here.

For an analysis of the incident, see the article “The Pogrom on Pico Boulevard” by Noah Pollack published by The Free Press. This is Noah’s description what happened on June 23:

Over the course of several hours, with dozens of LAPD officers decked out in riot gear largely staying out of the fray, around 100 pro-Hamas activists attacked, bear-sprayed, harassed, and brawled with Jews up and down Pico Boulevard.

The police occasionally stepped in, but their main activity Sunday afternoon seemed to ensure that the activists were able to successfully shut down the front entrance to the synagogue, ruin the event, and harass Jews more or less with impunity. Dozens of video clips from Sunday afternoon have been posted online (a good roundup is here). The striking thing about the footage is that despite the significant police presence, there is scant footage of the police forcefully intervening in the numerous fistfights, brawls, and beatings.

More on the inaction by LAPD:

Police were unwilling to confront, arrest, and prosecute bad actors. Jews were being policed in the name of “safety.” In Los Angeles and other big cities, and on many elite campuses, the message from authorities is essentially: things would be so much easier if you stayed off campus, avoided the library, didn’t go to your synagogue, and overall just stayed away from the mobs that regularly gather to confront you.

This is yet another exhibit of double standard:

It’s important to note that this approach applies only to certain kinds of people. If a hundred masked Christian Republicans, say, had gathered in front of a Los Angeles mosque on Sunday and assaulted Muslims, we would now be several days into a national news cycle about Islamophobia and injustice in America. There would be joint LAPD-FBI task forces kicking down doors, and press conferences, vigils, presidential speeches, and multipart investigative reports from numerous leading publications.

Most importantly,

Why did it have to escalate like this? Because, as they have realized on elite college campuses and in blue cities across the country, anti-Israel activists understand that they enjoy something like immunity. They can’t murder or severely beat people, but pretty much all other criminality—vandalism, graffiti, trespassing, harassment—will go unpunished.

We must start fighting the radical antisemitism on our campus. There must be zero tolerance for violence and vandalism on USC’s campus. Allowing low-grade antisemitic harassment, such as we witnessed at the encampments (see here, here, here, and here), to go unpunished only leads to more-brazen acts of harassment and escalation of the violence. This must end. As Noah concludes:

Until political leaders ban masking during demonstrations; until our DA prosecutes criminals; until our mayor and governor instruct the police to protect Jewish institutions in the exact same way they protect other institutions; until the same rules apply to everyone, regardless of their identity, it will simply and grimly be true that California’s political leadership is upholding a two-tiered system of justice toward the second-largest Jewish community in America. And in that case, Los Angeles may not host such a large Jewish community for much longer. 

The same is true for USC. As outlined in the Report on Campus Climate and Call for Action, decisive action is urgently needed.