The Forces Behind Campus Protests, Unions Support Lawlessness and Vandalism, Humor of the Week from Toronto, and More
The Forces Behind Campus Protests, Unions Support Lawlessness and Vandalism, Humor of the Week from Toronto, and More
Newsletter (May 24, 2024)
Who Is Behind the Campus Protests and What Are Their Goals?
Who is behind the campus protests? Evidence—some we reported previously—continues to mount that the protests are not a grassroots, student-initiated movement. Now Congress has launched an investigation into who exactly is behind them. The Free Press reports (May 16, 2024):
Congress has launched a probe into the organizations funding the anti-Israel protests on college campuses to investigate possible money laundering or terrorism financing. One of the twenty groups being looked at is The People’s Forum. Read our reporting on its multimillionaire Marxist backers here.
In “How to Fight the Hamas Demonstrators” (May 21, 2024) on HxSTEM, Sergiu Klainerman and John Londregan discuss how militant outside organizations radicalized student protesters:
While the bulk of the demonstrators may be ignorant, the organizers worked hard to put the demon into their demonstrations. They operated from polished manuals detailing the best means to recruit naive students.
They provide a link to one such manual used at Princeton. Klainerman and Londregan unpack the malicious nature of the protests:
While it may be tempting to dismiss the demonstrations as so much youthful folly, the dark symbolism of the Hamas flags, or even Hezbollah’s (as has been seen in Princeton), raised by the participants, sometimes replacing standing America flags (as has happened recently at Chapel Hill and the University of Chicago), epitomizes the malice on display on many campuses. There can be no innocent excuse for the behavior of the protesters, the ugliness of the slogans with which they harass Jewish students, and the force with which they call for violence against any administrator daring to enforce the rules the demonstrators violate. Nor is invading campus buildings, intruding on the workplaces of administrators and interrupting the normal functioning of the institutions a minor peccadillo—occupations are intrinsically violent.
Looking at possible actions to combat antisemitism, the authors warn against poorly designed responses, like recent antisemitism bill passed by Congress. (We previously discussed problematic aspects of the bill—such as how it empowers, rather than constrains, the campus DEI bureaucracy.) The authors conclude:
If a liberal education inoculates one against prejudice and hatred, then the cure for those under the ill influence of bad speech is good speech. So speak up! If you don't like having college campuses occupied by apologists for Hamas, you can say so, to your friends, your neighbors, to people you know, or, with a little bit of more courage, to people in power. The least you can do, if you were able to read this to the end, is to sign our public statement condemning the onslaught of hatred that has taken over our beloved academic institutions.
We urge you to read and sign the excellent open letter that Klainerman and Londregan refer to: “A Statement by Concerned Individuals About the Anti-Semitic Protests on College Campuses.” Two excerpts from the letter:
We the undersigned condemn the anti-Israel and, in many cases, antisemitic demonstrations and encampments plaguing college campuses across the country. While we defend the right of protesters to express their anti-Israel and even their anti-Jewish views, we are appalled by them. It is one thing to criticize policies of the Israeli government—no government should be immune from criticism. It is, however, another thing altogether to call for the destruction of the state of Israel and for violence against Jews or anyone else.
and
Hamas’s crimes against humanity were designed to force Israel to choose among unpalatable, indeed horrible, alternatives. Reasonable people can disagree about which among the available courses of action is the lesser evil, but it is obvious that responsibility for the subsequent tragedy in Gaza lies with Hamas and its apologists. We call on the demonstrators to desist in their ugly display of ignorance and hatred, and we urge university administrators to faithfully enforce reasonable time, place, and manner restrictions for the sake of public order and safety, in a manner consistent with core free speech protections.
Read the full letter and see the list of signatories here.
For a deeper dive into the forces driving the protests, see the excellent piece in Tablet by Park MacDougald, “The People Setting America on Fire” (May 6, 2024), subtitled “An Investigation Into the Witches’ Brew of Billionaires, Islamists, and Leftists Behind the Campus Protests.”
The Impact of Antisemitism and Anti-Zionism on Students
Student Voices from Barnard, Columbia, Barnard, Tufts, and UCLA
In our last newsletter, we cited a recent report by Hillel International documenting the impact of the protests on Jewish students across the U.S. More jarring testimonies continue to appear. Writing for Moment, Dan Freedman and Jacob Forman present a compilation of student testimonies in their piece “Campus Protests in the Voices of the Students Who Experienced Them” (May 21, 2024).
Where Antisemitism Can Find You
Unfriend a Jew: A personal account from our community. Writing for the Jewish Journal, our own Gary Wexler relates a heartbreaking personal account of lost friendships in the wake of the October 7 massacre (“Answering a Friend Who Becomes an Antisemite,” November 30, 2023):
Israel and the Jewish people are in a battle for our vibrant existence. We have to stand up against the onslaught on our bodies and souls. We need to know who our friends are, and who are not.
Don’t date a Jew. Writing for The Free Press, Polina Fradkin documents experiences of Jews in the dating scene (“The Tinder Inquisition,” May 8, 2024). What is happening on dating apps offers a glimpse into how Jewish students are being ostracized on their university campuses.
Cancel a Jew. A common demands of the campus protesters is to sever ties with Israeli universities and to boycott Israeli academics (see an open letter against this new wave of academic boycotts). However, you needn’t be an Israeli academic to be cancelled in a professional space, as Jerry Coyne, a retired professor of biology from the University of Chicago found out. Jerry was invited to Amsterdam to participate in a seminar on the politicization of biology. But the organizers cancelled the event because of Jerry’s pro-Israel views. You can read the whole story, “I’ve Been Deplatformed at the University of Amsterdam for Having the Wrong Stance on the Palestine/Israel Conflict,” (May 14, 2024) at Why Evolution Is True.
An Unholy Alliance Between Unions and Pro-Terror Organizations
Why do organizations whose stated purpose is to protect working people against unfair employment practices have a foreign policy at all, much less take sides in the Middle East conflict? Philosophically, both labor organizations and terrorist “liberation movements” are rooted in Marxism, postmodernism, and anti-Western ideologies. During the Cold War, they were actively supported and cultivated by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union as a means of destabilizing the West and hastening the arrival of the World Revolution (see, for example, here and here).
We have reported on a disturbing solidarity between one pro-union student group at USC (the Student Coalition Against Labor Exploitation) and the Divest From Death Coalition (the organization making demands on behalf of the protesters) in our May 1st newsletter. We also reported that the union representing USC graduate students filed charges of unfair labor practices against the university over the arrests of protestors. Now, more examples of an unholy alliance between labor unions and terror-supporting organizations have come to light across the country.
The subject is explored in an op-ed, “The UAW Has a Gaza Policy” (May 5, 2024), written by the Editorial Board of the Wall Street Journal. Note that the UAW is the union representing USC’s and UC’s graduate students.
The union’s leader is all in for campus lawbreaking and he’s denouncing Israel for its war against Hamas.
UAW President Shawn Fain chose to dive into the debate over anti-Israel campus protests this week and how police should respond. Writing on X (formerly Twitter), he said his union opposes “the mass arrest or intimidation of those exercising their right to protest, strike, or speak out against injustice.” That would be a fine statement in a vacuum. In the context of the protests, it’s a defense of mass trespassing and harassment of Jewish students at Columbia, UCLA and elsewhere.
From our neighbors: UAW 4811, which represents 48,000 graduate students and other academics at 10 University of California campuses and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, has authorized a strike in protest of the university’s handling unlawful protests and encampments (“University of California Workers Authorize Union to Call for Strike Over Protest Crackdowns” by Jonathan Wolf, the NYT, May 15). The unions misrepresent their motivation as a defense of free speech, but as we have discussed previously, violent protests and vandalism are not protected by the First Amendment. University of California officials are now seeking a court order to immediately end an imminent strike at UC Santa Cruz that could spread to others campuses in the system (“UC Seeks Injunction to Halt Strike as Academic Workers Threaten to Expand Walkouts,” reports the LA Times, May 21, 2024).
The satirical dissident website at MIT, the Babbling Beaver, provides a remarkably insightful and concise summary of the collaboration between the unions and pro-terror groups in their piece “Who Hijacked MIT’s Grad Student Union?”:
When Islamic terrorists murdered, raped, and tortured 1,200 people, union leaders mobilized for action.
Why? Because expressing intersectional solidarity with freedom fighters opposing white settler colonialism is clearly an MIT Graduate Student Union issue. So is demanding that MIT Boycott, Divest, and Sanction America’s strongest ally in the Middle East. And what could demonstrate your social justice bona fides better than chanting for global intifada?
After running wild for three weeks, they finally got arrested and suspended. Never mind that their protests were conducted in blatant violation of MIT’s time, place, and manner restrictions on disruptive demonstrations. Punishments aren’t being adjudicated according to union disciplinary procedures!
MIT’s Graduate Student union plans to use all its resources to defend its officers and members against this egregious injustice….
The Marxist-Leninists at the United Electric, Radio & Machine Workers of America must be thrilled. Because whatever the issue, it’s really always about the revolution.
Typical of the Babbling Beaver’s “Real Fake News,” the article, though satire, is based on real events at MIT that the article links to.
A Few More Reads Worth Your Time
Michael Lind, for Tablet, “The Left’s Campus Protest Scam” (May 15, 2024), on the motifs and goals of the radical faculty supporting who support whatever protest happens to be in vogue:
“The issue is not the issue.” This saying of the campus left is as true today as it was in the 1960s. Whatever the ostensible issue may be that provides the occasion for a nationwide wave of campus protests, the list of demands presented to university administrators by student protesters and allied outside agitators is remarkably similar—suggesting that the point of the exercise may lie closer to home.
For half a century now, the passion of idealistic students involved in campus protests that were purported to be about national and global issues—the Vietnam War, racism, police shootings, climate change, and now Israel’s war against Hamas—has been diverted into narrow efforts to multiply jobs and teaching opportunities for leftist professors, administrators, consultants and other foot-soldiers and clients of the progressive wing of the Democratic Party. In turn, these campus activists have helped to transform American universities from engines of upward mobility and economic growth to taxpayer-funded ideological indoctrination center….
The demand to make indoctrination in the ideology of their subjects mandatory for graduation for all students in all degree programs—including medical and engineering programs, as well as Ph.D. programs in the hard sciences, where “diversity statements” are now routinely required from new hires—has obvious material benefits, increasing work and pay for the activist professors and the cronies and former students who are hired to teach the compulsory courses. Moreover, the professors in these sub-intellectual studies programs undoubtedly sense that they are privately held in contempt by many university administrators and regents and donors who value traditional subjects with well-defined subject matters and greater degrees of intellectual rigor, like the sciences and engineering and medicine and law. What delicious revenge it must be for thinly educated and poorly qualified leftist academics to persuade gullible students to camp out in the quad and yell until the university agrees to force those hated chemistry majors and business majors and computer programming majors to take a course in ethnic studies or LGBTQ ideology or climate change activism in order to graduate? …
The kaffiyeh may have replaced the kente cloth, but the self-serving strategy in which leftist professors persuade naive students to blackmail university administrators into giving them more subsidies, status, and institutional power has not changed since Black Panther Education Minister George Murray led the movement for Black studies at San Francisco State in 1968. Decades from now, when today’s campus protests have receded into history, their legacy may be the permanent transformation of American universities from engines of upward mobility and scientific progress to fairgrounds with expensive tickets and midway tents on a quad, displaying exotic varieties of leftist identity politics.
Sam Harris’ podcast episode on the protests: “Campus Protests, Antisemitism, and Western Values” (May 13, 2024).
Sam Harris, author of The End of Faith, discusses the recent campus protests, why focusing narrowly on the problem of “antisemitism” will be counterproductive, the widespread confusion about the threat of Islamic extremism, and the necessity of defending Western values.
If you prefer reading to listening, a transcript of the episode is available on Sam’s blog. A couple of quotes provide a taste of Sam’s insights:
Many of these students are not merely protesting injustice and cruelty and innocent death, and just happen to be harassing the wrong people. Rather, many of them are supporting injustice and cruelty and innocent death, explicitly. “Globalize the Intifada” isn’t a call for peace; it’s a call for the indiscriminate murder of Jews. I’m willing to cut college kids a fair amount of slack, but you mean to tell me that students at Harvard and Princeton and Stanford don’t know that Palestinian intifadas entail a fair amount of suicidal terrorism and the deliberate murder of noncombatants? (The deliberate murder of noncombatants.) I might have been confused about a few things when I was 19, but I was never that confused.
On broader implication and self-destruction of universities:
I wouldn’t even know where I would want to send my daughters to college at this point. Happily we don’t have to think about this for a couple of years. But all the best schools, and even the second and third best schools, appear to be in the process of destroying themselves. Again, I realize that it’s a minority of students protesting on even the most beleaguered campuses. But it’s the response of the institutions themselves that has been so reprehensible.
And why should everyone—not just Jews—care about it:
However, I think talking about “Zionism” is totally counterproductive. We should talk about Israel’s right, as the lone democracy in the Middle East, to defend itself. I also think that focusing on antisemitism at this moment—as much as it really is a problem—is the wrong approach to addressing a much more fundamental problem: which is the hatred of Western civilization coming from so many of its own inhabitants and beneficiaries, and the very real clash between the West (which includes Israel every other civilized democracy) and Islam—in particular Islamism and Jihadism. Depending on the context we can call it “radical Islam” or “Islamic extremism” or “Islamofascism.” Call it whatever you want, but what you can’t do, honestly, is say that this species of belligerent lunacy has no connection to the mainstream religion of Islam.
On a Positive Note
The majority is with us! Jerry Coyne writes on Why Evolution Is True (May 22, 2024), “Harvard/Harris Poll Shows Unexpectedly High Sentiment for Israel (But Some Bad News for Biden.” Most people, including most young people, are open to rational assessments of the facts and understand the complexity of the Middle East.
A Moving Video from El Al
And for Comic Relief: A Message from the University of Toronto
A letter from the University of Toronto administration states:
The University and student representatives have worked together to mitigate the prior concerns regarding sanitation [at the protest site]. Moreover, the ceremonial fire inside the encampment is burning under the careful supervision of experienced Indigenous Firekeepers in a manner that suits the unique conditions of the site.
The letter is real—see the May 16 entry on the university’s Messages to the University Community webpage, reproduced below.
You can’t make stuff like this up.
It's amazing how the Soviet Union is dead yet its evil lives on after it.
Just because the ghouls of the Politburo decided to adopt a program of Jew hate 1) to cover up its own crimes and failures by aiming hatred at a (very familiar) scapegoat; and 2) in the hope of getting the Arab world on the side of its lame plan for world domination, decades later its program of Jew hate aka anti-Zionism lives on in the demented protests of the West's most miserable children, who imagine that if they chant loud enough terrorism can be transformed into some valid form of Justice and that the evils of Western Civ can be erased and atoned for if only we kill enough Jews.
"[T]he hatred of Western civilization coming from so many of its own inhabitants and beneficiaries" has been raging on America's neo-Marxist campuses for decades now, I'm glad that Sam Harris and people like him can at last acknowledge this, but it's too bad that it took a Hamas takeover of the Ivy League for it to finally become impossible to deny.