Writing about the University of Chicago situation, Jerry Coyne explains how SJP orchestrates these protests (Campus newspaper: SJP plans Columbia-like disruptions at the University of Chicago). Given its tactics and goals, one cannot stop wondering why this organization is not classified as illegal. In another post, “McWhorter et al.: some new articles on Columbia University and similar college protests”, Jerry summarizes several recent mainstream press articles analyzing the protests. A few highlights below.
John McWhorter writes for the NYT:
I thought about what would have happened if protesters were instead chanting anti-Black slogans or even something like “D.E.I. has got to die,” to the same “Sound Off” tune that “From the river to the sea” has been adapted to. They would have lasted roughly five minutes before masses of students shouted them down and drove them off the campus. Chants like that would have been condemned as a grave rupture of civilized exchange, heralded as threatening resegregation and branded as a form of violence. I’d wager that most of the student protesters against the Gaza war would view them that way. Why do so many people think that weekslong campus protests against not just the war in Gaza but Israel’s very existence are nevertheless permissible?
Particularly insightful is an article from the Wall Street Journal column by Steven Stalinsky, the executive director of the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI). MEMRI is an organization that translates articles, speeches, and sermons from Arabic into Hebrew, English, and other languages. Jerry writes:
Stalinsky notes that those who promote terror in the Middle East are also promoting these college protests (I suggest that they’re funding them, too), and certainly approve of them, for the protests will move worldwide Islamism forward. Globalize the intifada!
According to Stalinsky:
Major terror organizations have expressed support for these protests and disruptive actions, which have long been a key part of Hamas’s plan to win hearts and minds in the West. As early as a decade ago, during the July-August 2014 Israel-Gaza war, Hamas’s Interior Ministry issued guidelines to social-media activists on framing events for a Western audience.
The Atlantic takes a deep dive into the underlying problem—how our universities end up where we are now. The essay The Campus-Left Occupation That Broke Higher Education is worth your time. Here is just one exert:
Long, intricate, but essentially unbroken line connects that rejection of the liberal university in 1968 to the orthodoxy on elite campuses today. The students of the ’68 revolt became professors—the German activist Rudi Dutschke called this strategy the “long march through the institutions”—bringing their revisionist thinking back to the universities they’d tried to upend. One leader of the Columbia takeover returned to chair the School of the Arts film program. “The ideas of one generation become the instincts of the next,” D. H. Lawrence wrote. Ideas born in the ’60s, subsequently refined and complicated by critical theory, postcolonial studies, and identity politics, are now so pervasive and unquestioned that they’ve become the instincts of students who are occupying their campuses today. Group identity assigns your place in a hierarchy of oppression. Between oppressor and oppressed, no room exists for complexity or ambiguity. Universal values such as free speech and individual equality only privilege the powerful. Words are violence. There’s nothing to debate.
Coverage of our local events:
The Times of Israel: “Hundreds arrested across US campuses as police clamp down on anti-Israel protests.”
Daily Trojan: “Faculty support student protest
against Israelfor Palestine.”Daily Trojan: “‘
IntifadaGaza Solidarity Occupation’ at USC, and the aftermath — live updates.”NYT: “University of Southern California Confronts an Unfamiliar Era of
Rabid Anti-semitismProtest.”
As a last cheerful bit, The Free Press quotes a Columbia student who said on camera:
Zionists don’t deserve to live comfortably, let alone Zionists don’t deserve to live, the same way we’re very comfortable accepting that Nazis don’t deserve to live, fascists don’t deserve to live, racists don’t deserve to live.
Well said indeed. Thank you for such a clear explanation.