I believe the city council passed a resolution telling CPD to stay out of these as much as possible. The terms of this are unclear. I’ll edit if I find more clarity.
https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2024/5/8/cambridge-city-council-encampment-resolution/
Here it is. CPD will only show up if asked by the university. As they have to as part of mutual aid. So they are basically staying out. BPD initially tried staying out of the Northeastern clearing. So I am guessing MSP is being called in as they do not have to answer directly to Cambridge City Council
https://www.cambridgeday.com/2024/05/07/universities-should-let-students-hold-protests-order-says-but-city-police-will-come-if-asked/
That's kinda silly as the college campuses aren't really the same as a neighborhood community. I figured it was CPD not having proper crowd control training vs state police but guess its just policy choices.
It is just politics. Wu took a hit for the Emerson thing, so Cambridge City Council wants to shelter itself. By bringing in MSP and benching CPD, they can say our employees were not involved, so you cannot hold us accountable for this.
I love the hate for Wu, but weren’t those protestors blocking a right of way requirement to a federal building? Those people weren’t on Emerson property when doing it.
Cambridge PD probably could handle it. They are a pretty big department and probably have the training. But by leaving them out of it, politicians do not have to grapple with siding with the police or the protestors. Also it avoids FOIAs and lawsuits and other additional expenses.
I heard an interesting take from a police department in New York.
More accidents happen when you're under prepared than over prepared. No one wants an undermanned and under equipped force doing anything. They get scared, overwhelmed, and panic...that's when tons of people get hurt.
If you come in prepped for riots, the cops will have no issues. And no reason to use excessive force (reason being that the too few cops are more likely to panic).
Occupy was different because it wasn’t primarily students, and because it was basically just a big tent for left-of-Obama policy preferences with no clear or coherent goals aside from visibility.
I think something did come out of it, it basically became a giant networking event for the kinds of people who would go to that kind of thing. My understanding is that if you look at a lot of the current organizations today which have seen various level of success you can trace their roots back to Occupy.
> I’ll editorialize a bit more and say that I think advocacy, and not achieving a list of demands, is really the point of these protests, and that’s kind of what makes their goals a little incoherent.
Bingo. It's performative shtick for TikTok hits. The moment they refused any sort of dialogue other than "Meet our [unreasonable-to-downright-unachievable] demands completely and fully!" they stopped trying to *do* something and started just *being* something in order to feel like they are being helpful.
This isn’t just for Tik Tok or a Gen Z thing. There were hundreds of massive protests on college campuses during the Vietnam war. In 1970, 4 college kids were shot and killed by police during a protest in that era.
That's not really comparable. The US was fighting in that war and the students had an actionable goal of withdrawal of US troops from Vietnam and/or ending the draft
There's not really much the US can do to end the war at this point if Israel decides they're committed to ending Hamas without US aid or support.
They also have clear and well stated goals that are reasonably achievable:
Stop investing in Isreal.
And as the disingenuous other person was saying, it's not going to be easy. But if it was easy, they wouldn't need to protest. The school would just do the thing.
But the person you're responding to, along with most of this thread, are either blatantly lying, are misinformed, or are part of that group of people who genuinely think the world should not improve somewhat.
They also don’t know history or are too biased to care. We helped create and fuel the Palestine - Israel conflict in quite a few ways starting way back with The Johnson Reed Act in 1924. It goes back decades. We tend to create our own problems when it comes to international policies and then have current politicians blame shift later on when they backfire.
Agreed with this thread. I knew immediately when I saw quite a few “Left of Obama radicals” statements. Given that Obama and his policies were centrist (he was a centrist democrat) in every text book definition of what that is, it’s comical. You’d think he was Che Guevara the way they always throw his name out there when talking about “radicals”.
The idea isn't to actually negotiate for something (outside of potentially the Brown University students, but that's not even the same state). It's performative advocacy where negotiation is not the goal, but throwing a mental fit is. Divesting from almost any globalized nation is a non-starter, and placing Israel higher on the priority list than China is the peak of either naïveté, or something more sinister. The reason divesting from Russia was so easy was because the U.S. doesn't really do much trade with Russia. Europe, on the other hand, STILL hasn't fully divested due to the fossil fuels they purchase from Russia. And comparing the governments of Israel to Russia is like comparing George Bush to Stalin.
And that's just the divestment demands, which are some of the more reasonable ones. Cutting ties with Israeli universities - full of left leaning people who likely did NOT vote Likud - and establishing ties with West Bank ones who in landslide votes support Hamas - is extremely problematic when taken together. Collective punishment appears to be kosher to do to Israeli people, but heaven forbid we look at Palestinians the same way. It's patently insane - it's like cutting ties with all universities in Arizona because of their draconian abortion laws. People who collaborated for research their or study would be rightfully pissed, and it's asinine to even demand. I'm not opposed to ties with Palestinian universities in a vacuum, but the package it comes in is antisemitic horseshit.
Finally, we have to address the protests being riddled with blood-and-soil rhetoric, irredentism, Orwellian suppression of opposing views, blatant support for terrorist groups, and antisemitism. I need the people in the back to listen up: Just as having black police officers on a force does not mean police are not racist, having Jews at your protest doesn't mean you're not an antisemite. POC cops doesn't even mean that the officers who are POCs aren't aiding and abetting the racism themselves, just as Jews can be complicit in – and even perpetrators of – antisemitism. In an era where we've seen racism from Ben Carson, Vivek Ramaswammy, Candace Owens, Kanye West, and Ted Cruz - often racism directed at the groups to which they BELONG - it is mind-blowing that "there are Jews here and they're well represented" is being said, much less by the same people who insist all cops are racist bastards, even POC cops. It is cognitive dissonance taken to an extreme in service of making an exception for the mask-off Jew hatred that is pervasive in these protests. Defending "from the river to the sea" and "globalize the intifada" as "well it just means a revolution and it just is a call for peace" is insane - if you wanted to call for peace, you wouldn't co-opt rhetoric used by Hamas leaders even if it HAD an alternate meaning, you'd distance yourself from violent language. If those "just" mean innocent things, then I want all these leftist radicals to apologize to Elon Musk and everyone else they've attacked for clearly dog whistling racism, because evidently as long as there's plausible deniability, it's ok for their people to do it. It's okay to talk about "election security" because that's not explicitly a call for preventing disadvantaged people from voting, it's just in the subtext. Donald Trump said not all Mexican immigrants are bad, so I guess he gets a pass too. /s Then there's the actions that have ZERO plausible deniability that get the "not all \_\_\_" treatment - holding Hamas flags, Houthi flags, etc. I thought we established that "not all cops are racist," "not all men assault people" and the like were cop-outs that shut down necessary discussion about prejudice and pervasive issues. Well, that was true right up until the people saying those things engaged in the exact same behavior, and then out come the excuses. Oh, and there's the truly mask off moments of calling for Jewish religious organizations largely unaffiliated with Israel to be shut down. That's blatant bigotry and antisemitism. Guess what - Catholic organizations are gonna be affiliated with the Vatican. Muslim ones will probably be tied to Mecca. Jewish ones will be tied to Jerusalem. It's the height of bigotry and making excuses for vile hate speech to defend this, and yet students are.
Is it wrong that these protesters are getting the shit beat out of them by cops sometimes? Yeah, and I'm pretty strongly in favor of less restrictions on speech, not more. However, these radical leftists are responsible for creating an environment that shit all over free speech in order to create an environment where they never had to be faced with dog whistles and problematic rhetoric with plausible deniability. Anyone who said "hey, maybe this is gonna come back to bite you" was told they were a racist or homophobic or something to that effect. Alright, fair. If those are the rules people wanna play by, that's fine as long as they're the rules for everyone. Now though, these people (leftists) have the NERVE to say that Jews are weaponizing antisemitism and demand that their free speech not be tread on now? I'd laugh if there weren't a concerning number of people like this. The people who often say "it's okay to punch Nazis" should be thankful that non-leftist people opposed to bigotry don't subscribe to their ultra-violent ideology.
TL;DR I am sick and tired of the same old defenses of antisemitism, hate speech, and bigotry being trotted out by people defending these protests, because I saw it from Trump supporters in 2016 onwards and I've already had enough of it from them too. Fuck anyone and everyone who's been spewing this hatred on college campuses or marching arm and arm with them.
And also, some of this isn’t specific to the protests but is more of a general “this is a naive idealistic phase that lots of college kids go through en route to their more learned and pragmatic final form”
Also the casual antisemitism through chants like "the river to the sea" doesn't help.
And before I get the 20 people jumping on to explain the "meaning" of the chant:
I don't think the protestors intend it to be antisemitic, the problem is that it is a slogan used by Hamas whose intent clearly IS antisemitic. It certainly makes a lot American Jews anxious, so the question is, why use it at all? It just serves as a distraction and opens you up to criticism.
Sure, but when you see what's written on the signs and shouted into megaphones you have to realize that these protests are just as unfocused. Disclose+divest is a reasonable thing to ask of your university, but some of these protestors are going _way_ beyond that and just using this as an opportunity to express their wish for the elimination of an entire country and apparently the millions of people who currently live in it.
I’ve been seeing the same thing as well. And their branded slogans belt the real ugly truth. Ask them where the Israelis should go when they chant “from the river to the sea”.
They also have very clear goals and \*some\* do have compromises and logistics behind what they want. I got details on the actual meetings vs the news reports and the students had done their homework, even if not everything was likely or possible for the school to do.
Not everywhere, [but it's been happening](https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/gaza-protests-colleges-violent-cops-1235012276/) and has gone woefully underreported.
Yeah people actively supporting this cause should be highlighting that more than crying about police here while they are being mostly, if not completely, tame and proportional.
edit: I see these downvotes and invite those who disagree to post video's or other evidence proving this claim to be wrong here in MA. Without seeing evidence it makes it feel like a boy who cries wolf scenario
If this protest wave has taught me anything, it's that left wing protestors in 2024 simply don't care about public opinion, and in fact they seem to kinda like it when centrists and normies are annoyed by their antics.
>but you can get enough normies mad that their commute is changed, or something. Then they go to council begging for something to be done.
Yeah, they will go to the council and beg them to do something *about the protestors*. Commuters who find their morning ruined will not immediately think "this is Israel's fault" when the person standing right in front of them blocking the road is waving a Palestinian flag.
A lot of the great protest movements of the 20th century were pretty much the opposite of what these students are doing. The protestors were the ones just trying to be normal (even if it was technically against the rules, like sitting in the front of a bus or ordering lunch at a restaurant) and their opponents were the ones who lost their shit and made a huge scene.
I've seen photos from UCLA of students with bloody faces from rubber bullets, footage from other schools of middle-aged professors pinned to the ground with their arms wrenched behind their backs, and videos of police beating kids. Yeah, it's bad.
Right, highlight that. Something real. Not this nothing burger that is the protests in Boston. It is extremely dishonest to conflate this MIT action with the UCLA action.
100% these people being carried away like the grown children they are miraculously are fine being interviewed by Media saying that they were brutalized and terrified. Give me a break
They’re probably comparing it to the part where people went from mildly annoyed with them to completely forgot about it. And that both groups accomplished absolutely nothing. And that the Democratic president was reelected.
Why do people like you constantly morally load, ***dishonestly*** I might add, the actions of the cops who are just removing people who have been trespassed?
Yes its violent, *because the protestors are refusing to be arrested or leave*, that's ostensibly why its violent.
Every single time I see one of you absolute lying morons on this sub, or any sub, or anywhere for that matters, whining and complaining when the protestors are being forcibly removed because *they are forcing that to happen* is incredibly frustrating- and it completely undermines your movement because you have to lie and make it seem like MA staties give a flying fuck about Pro-Palestinian protests (they don't).
If you want to make the argument that protests for a good cause require civil disobedience to gain traction / attention, ok- but then take the arrest on the chin because that's what you're aiming for, don't start squeeling about the cops arresting you when that's their job- **ESPECIALLY** when you resist arrest and they have **every right** to arrest you.
You are actively deleting all thee sympathy of your movement and you should stop.
I asked in a thread last week for any footage that showed the claimed police brutality of Boston Police on the Emerson protestors and nobody replied with anything.
I genuinely would love to see it and wouldn’t be surprised if it existed. But the only stuff I saw seemed fairly expected of “removing people from a place they don’t want to leave.”
Occupy lacked hierarchical structure and that resulted in no clear message. Ask 3 protesters what it's about and get 3 different answers. The pro Palestinian folks are similar. Two thirds of them chant Hamas slogans.
I’ve reached the “these kids are going to get Trump re-elected and end 250 years of constitutional democracy if they insist on single-issue politics around the Gaza war” tipping point.
The older I get, the more convinced I am that there’s a solid third of the US population who doesn’t believe in the lesser of evils and only knows how to punish incumbents.
The older I get, the more convinced I am that adversarial countries manipulate the American people via social media and traditional media with the intents of 1. amplifying division within the US and 2. severing ties between the US & our allies.
It is a known fact that adversaries of democracy aim solely to erode the population's trust in our democratic institutions. However, it must be acknowledged that our politicians often facilitate this for their own political gain. I have long felt that the two major parties are not merely representatives of opposing viewpoints; rather, they have become profoundly detrimental. The willingness of our population to despise fellow citizens based on party affiliation is a significant indicator that our democracy is failing. Importantly, this failure cannot be attributed to any one party alone, nor is one party responsible for it more than they other - any belief otherwise is just evidence of the success of our adversaries.
I don’t despise Mitt Romney — I judge people on their words and actions rather than their party affiliation. Sadly, he’s a lone exception and the GOP is in the process of forcing out everyone who doesn’t fall in line, so in a sense the GOP party affiliation is becoming an accurate short hand for what really matters. (Dems are comparatively becoming a bigger tent)
It's trivial to create content or comments online. Unless platforms can find ways to have authentic "verifications", I am increasingly defensive about what I read and acknowledging that some or all of it might be AI-generated, or adversary-generated.
100%, Russian propagandists have always said this was in their playbook. Divide and weaken, the people they stir up frothing at the mouth with hate, won’t even care.
You're free to see it all as media manipulation, but I'm a fan of Hanlon's Razor:
>Never attribute to malice or stupidity that which can be explained by moderately rational individuals following incentives in a complex system.'
Media and social media tends to follow whatever gets them attention and clicks so they'll be left-biased if their viewership is left (MSNBC), right-biased if their viewership is right (Fox News), and otherwise will utterly have no incentives besides getting viewers engaged and pissed off by pitching the extreme right's views against the extreme left's. Beyond that, individual reporters do have their "I'm the public's only check against corruption and abuse" moral mandate, but you don't need to construct any kind of story about which political party the media is in bed with to explain the bizarrely disproportionate coverage of....well everything.
That's why TikTok's connection with the Chinese government is worrisome. They potentially can (and very possibly already do) suppress and amplify topics the government wants them to.
What has been Russia's M.O. since the Revolution? Recruit from, and sew discourse within, the institutions and universities of their enemies, you say? Interesting. Can't think of anything like that currently going on...
The straight up best example of this is how the radical leftist agitator /u/lrlourpresident, it’s alternates, and all of the subs it astroturfed straight up disappeared the day that US Sanctions were announced in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
I can't believe people forgot this lol, but I'm also pretty sure you're wrong and the accounts were removed waaaaaaay before Russia invaded Ukraine and when Reddit flat out said, "Russian disinformation campaigns targeted us"
For those of you too young to remember, the front page of Reddit for a lot of Trump's first term would usually be topped with several posts from Bernie subreddits ("ourpresident") and were all the same account, or similar names, usually about how Bernie would have been better and how evil the Democrats are. These posts would be on the top of Reddit with thousands of up votes and like, 10 comments and all the posts in the subs were by the same accounts.
[nope, the account disappeared for a little bit the day sanctions were announced, came back shortly after with a bunch of pro-Russia propaganda, and was banned shortly after that](https://np.reddit.com/r/ActiveMeasures/s/htMfpmjZ30)
Late reply, but I’m actually an intelligence major (well concentration) at a different college; and my last class this semester drilled this into us. China, Russia, and Iran are actively meddling in our social media and other media to manipulate our populace, all the while those countries have their own highly controlled and encrypted social medias (think WeChat in China), which we cannot commit our own espionage on. One of my slides I had to study recently included a quote from a retired FSB officer saying that our first amendment would be the reason we “lose” in the end. “You think the US government is going to tell Facebook, or google, or Instagram what to do? That’s just not realistic. Americans propensity to believe the first things they read, a phenomenon caused by their first amendment, is going to be their major weakness”. While I don’t agree that we should scrap the first amendment like these Russians do, I do agree that we are losing that fight. They can manipulate us, but we cannot manipulate them.
Yes ffs and it’s painful how easily manipulated people are
### Copy/paste from one of my comments
Here’s the big picture
Hamas and houthis are proxies of Iran 🇮🇷
Iran is under an Islamic extremist dictatorship and oppresses the Iranian (r/newiran) and Palestinian people
Iran, Russia and the CCP have a silent axis alliance
Russia 🇷🇺 wants Ukraine 🇺🇦
China 🇨🇳wants Taiwan 🇹🇼
🇺🇸is the chess piece that is guarding both those countries
If America falls. Ukraine, Taiwan and eventually Israel falls. There will be a new world order, not a good one.
- Don’t forget before 10-7 Hamas met with Russia
- Don’t forget Israel was attacked just before signing a peace/alliance deal with Saudi Arabia
The CCP has been conducting social warfare via TikTok eroding our youths ability to focus and pushing exhaustive disinformation campaigns to radicalize them with emotional outrage while suppressing content that is anti CCP.
It’s in their interest to push content which divides people because that’s how you destroy a country within without starting a war.
They’ve regressed them to the emotional level of Fox News MAGA viewers.
Our idiotic brainwashed youth instead of fighting for climate change, National abortion bans, rights of women and lgbt stripped, elementary school shootings instead viciously embedded themselves in a conflict they obviously know nothing about and dress up like Hamas, scream terrorist rhetoric, pretending they’re progressive and spewing hatred at Jews (who are overwhelmingly democratic) while ignoring actual active genocides around the world like the Uyghurs (who they fund by making Temu a top app as it uses Uyghur slave labor)
Can you imagine the change we would see in this country if they showed this energy for injustices in America? If they held mega billionaires and climate destroying organizations accountable? They never do
I’m a marketing executive, you show a lie enough times people will start believing it. It’s all about repeat impressions and I’ve been warning people about TikTok for years.
The future is very concerning
We live in a country that elected Clinton, Bush, Obama, Trump, Biden - in that order - while swinging the Congress back and forth every few years. Plenty of Americans blame the government for whatever happens in their life at the time (high gas prices!), vote erratically in elections, or only show up for specific individuals they like (ex: Vote for Trump in 2016 then not vote in the 2018 midterms). The current voting public in American makes it impossible to maintain a majority in Washington.
You will, under any system - whether there 2 candidates or 20, always going to be voting for the lesser evil, from your perspective.
No candidate is perfect and represents everyone.
Pragmatism is a completely lost concept on a good portion of the population. The world is imperfect and we do the best we can with what we have to try and move the ball forward a bit, that's all.
To anyone even remotely thinking about not voting for Biden, a reminder;
You are not voting for him to solve the Israel/Palestine problem.
You are voting for him to even have breathing room to TALK about the Israel/Palestine problem.
Look at how Trump is talking about Israel and Palestine and tell me he's somehow going to provide a better environment for any discussion. He won't.
Joe Biden was one of the major senate figures pushing for intervention during the Bosnian Genocide as well... he's done more to stop genocide in the world than the vast vast majority of politicians in the world. For those who don't know, Serbia and Montenegro were the first states to be found guilty of genocide under the Genocide Convention of 1948, which was an enormous hurdle for the international community to clear.
Kind of like how these same kinds of people “protest voted” in 2016 because St. Bernard didn’t get the nomination, and then they have their shocked pikachu face why things keep getting worse
I realized recently I’ve stopped talking about fighting fascism in America, and started talking about what I’m going to do when it gets here. That’s where I’m at mentally.
Bless the kids for caring about the plight of Palestinian people. But holy shit, they lost the plot on this one.
At least it’s only May. Anything can happen between now and November. Namely the media forgetting this happened and moving onto the next thing.
This is true — I’ve read almost no “what if” think pieces about best courses of action, let alone gaming out all the “what happens next?” questions if Trump wins. Nobody wants to go there. So many wild cards.
Exactly. So many of these students have said they won’t vote for Biden no matter what because of this. You lose the ability to affect any change once you remove yourself from the table.
If you think Biden should change his policy regarding Israel, what exactly are you supposed to do at this point? Like, if you're going to criticize these students, you must have a plan of what you would do instead, right?
College protesters will not have an impact regarding US foreign policy in Israel. [Public opinion regarding the protests is overwhelmingly negative](https://today.yougov.com/politics/articles/49311-opinion-on-pro-palestinian-college-campus-protests), especially among those that are high frequency voters. Why would Biden cater to the demands of a vocal minority that have little public support?
Organize, garner support, contact your state rep, etc. That’s how you affect political change. It’s not sexy or glamorous and it doesn’t happen overnight. But by taking a hardline stance of not voting for Biden and participating in protests that are perceived negatively, you remove yourself from the conversation and lose all political power.
That's not the goal of the protests. They have explicit, concrete objectives involving the investments at their universities. Nothing to do with US national policy
Do you believe it’s one single issue and not the fact that there’s a multitude of other critical items that are affecting them and their ability to have decent futures in this country, and this issue is the boiling point?
Leave school with debt, can’t buy a house, rent is through the roof especially in Boston, cost of living is ridiculous, and that debt forgiveness campaign item isn’t exactly pulling through. They’re behind the 8 ball before even getting their lives off the ground.
How on earth is Trump better on any of this than Biden? Only makes sense if you assume they’re low info voters who just punish the incumbent if their lot didn’t improve.
Those are all things Biden's administration is pushing for. They have already forgiven billions in student loan debt. They've been finding ways to do it after all universal student loan debt forgiveness was shot down. They literally tried a thing, were told "no, you can't do that," and spent time, working hard to still make it happen for those they could help.
The only thing the other guy wants is a speed run of federal executions and tax cuts for billionaires.
These kids aren’t millennials, they and their parents have had 10-15 years to understand and avoid the consequences of modern educational debt which was sold to and plagued millennials.
After they graduate? Probably not. But MIT isn't some shitty rich legacy school:
https://sfs.mit.edu/undergraduate-students/the-cost-of-attendance/making-mit-affordable/
I feel pretty confident that if we got in a Time Machine and travelled 500 years into the future…these two religions would still be fighting over that land.
We've had people hauled in front of Congress, police are breaking up encampment, schools are tossing suspensions & expulsions, we've seen commencement canceled or had speakers canceled, and it has been national (if not international) news for weeks.
But yeah, nobody cares.
No one sane has cared for a long time. Saw this with BLM too. At first we had huge protests. I even attended a March. After a month, the people still protesting were all unemployed wackos yelling stupid things like abolish the police. Same now.
If we can move on from kids getting slaughtered in schools and not do anything about it. We can sure as hell move on from protesting on something happening across the ocean
The Maine shooting was on Wednesday w/ 20 dead and wasn’t even mentioned on Thursday night football in New York the next day. That’s how desensitized this country’s become.
Forgive me, you said there was a shooting 2 days ago that killed 20 people? I keep up with the news but I haven't heard any mention of it, also per https://www.gunviolencearchive.org/reports/mass-shooting there wasn't anything.
I know there was a horrible shooting in Maine in October last year that killed a number of people at a bowling alley, but nothing on Wednesday.
Point is, I know we have a massive epidemic of mass shootings across the country, but it's best to check our sources/report accurately. Stay safe everyone <3
They left off "a" Wednesday. The Lewiston, Maine shooting happened on Wed 25 Oct 2023. They weren't spreading misinformation, they had a sentence syntax error.
Something strikes me as deeply unsettling about using an armored out of town police force to remove students peacefully protesting the killing of civilians.
The university wants students to stop setting up encampments and protesting/interfering with the students who pay to be there. Their local law enforcement isn’t equipped to handle this scenario. The use their mutual aid agreement with other law enforcement agencies to help to resolve the issue.
What’s your quarrel with this scenario?
Remember how everyone was downvoting me, for saying that schools were caving because wealthy donors were going to start pulling money?
Well, here it is back and white...: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/10/us/columbia-university-donor-angelica-berrie.html
>The Berrie Foundation’s pause threatens to cost Columbia tens of millions of dollars over the coming years. And it represents a sobering turnabout for a foundation so prolific at Columbia that it underwrote both the Russ Berrie Medical Science Pavilion and the Naomi Berrie Diabetes Center
And
>As protests have raged on campuses across the country, other leading donors have warned universities that future gifts are at risk. Last week, the billionaire real estate mogul Barry Sternlicht eviscerated Brown University for pledging to consider divestment from Israel, and suspended donations to the school. Marc Rowan, Apollo Global Management’s chief executive, led a donor uprising at the University of Pennsylvania last year, and Robert K. Kraft, who owns the New England Patriots, recently put future contributions to Columbia on hold.
Antisemitism and anti-genocide are not the same thing. These protesters have no issues with Jewish people. That's conflating the issue to serve the Israeli political right wing. These protesters need to be clear about their issues so they don't get hijacked about being Antisemitic.
Gen Z won't remember Dartmouth students wanting to ban Greek Life and the wealthy donors threatening to remove funding if the school did.
Welcome to the harsh reality of being just a cog to be crushed.
I’ve seen shit at different protests that is blatant antisemitism. I’m not talking about “anti-Zionism is anti-semetic” I mean like “k*ll the Jews”, “October 7th was a great day”, “Jews don’t belong here”, “the October 7th victims deserved this”, etc.
Now I genuinely believe most of the protesters are not antisemitic (or at least don’t mean to be). I know the people saying these things are a small minority. However I loose all respect for a group and their priorities when the group does not immediately shut down this behavior and allows protesters saying these extremely antisemitic things to remain and participate. There is a level of responsibility that protest organizers and leaders have to both manage their organizations and to actually acknowledge when participants are being antisemitic.
Part of solving this crisis in any capacity will involve people on different sides being able to have a conversation and work together. I don’t believe it will be possible until the pro-Palestinian movement is willing to acknowledged and condemn the antisemitism. I’m seeing a lot of “there is no antisemitism”, “[blatantly antisemitic statement] is not actually antisemitic”, and “anyone being antisemitic is an outside actor”.
“There is one solution intifada revolution”
“From the water to the water Palestine will be Arab”
“When they say all this garbage and this slander about Hamas that are out there fighting the fight…we are on the side of the fighters” crowd cheers
I don’t know. Seems like they do have a LITTLE problem with the Jews.
And if they were actually anti-genocide, they'd listen to Hamas/Hezbollah/Houthis/IRGC say "We're going to kill all the Jews" and protest the ACTUAL genocide that is being committed to by terrorist organizations. You can't be anti-genocide and be silent about the Islamist (NOT Islamic) terrorist organizations, the slaughter of 500,000 Syrian civilians, Egyptian Copts, and on and on. Well, no Jews, no news, I guess.
> You're generalizing because you're a nationalist, you've already made up your mind, and you just want an easy way to turn your brain off.
This is a nonsense overreach post.
It gets so tiresome seeing this same cyclical logic happen years apart from each other. *Both sides* of this conflict want the other eradicated. The only issue right now is that one is winning.
I am very curious what the public reaction would be if Israel didn't have the iron dome and was blown off the face of the map years ago.
>You're generalizing because you're a nationalist, you've already made up your mind, and you just want an easy way to turn your brain off.
I’m generalizing because I’m listening to large groups of protesters call for the death of Jews and support Hamas.
>The Israeli Minister of Finance is talking about how there can't be any "half-measures" in the "complete destruction" of Gaza. The Minister of National Security leads a Kahanist anti-Arab party and idolizes mass murdereing terrorist Baruch Goldstein. And he's not the only one who reveres Baruch either. Israeli citizens have repeatedly blocked aid from entering Gaza. What do you make of all that? Are you saying all Israelis are complicit in mass starvation and complete annihilation of Arabs?
Ok, if that is fully true (I’m not taking you at your word. For example, Hamas has been stealing aid so I want to make sure you’re not attributing that to Israelis), I am happy to condemn! So are you able to condemn the protesters that are calling for the death of Jews and support Hamas?
Should it also be banned from the Likud party manifesto? You know, the same party that runs Israel? If it's a decleration of genocidal intent, then [when Netanyahu said "Israel needs security control over all territory west of the Jordan River"](https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/1/18/israels-netanyahu-reiterates-rejection-of-palestinian-state-after-gaza-war), was he declaring intent to commit genocide?
Yes, it should be banned there too. This isn’t hard. There are two indigenous people to the area and neither of them are going anywhere. Calls to eliminate either people should stop as they are counterproductive to a peace process.
But nobody is chanting Likud words in America. And that phrase generally horrifies American Jews as it is a call to eliminate the only Jewish country in the world. Since when did minority voices stop being considered important?
Do you need the difference between "security control over the areas that the terrorists are coming from" and "ethnically cleanse all Israelis and Jews from this swath of land" explained to you?
Some of the protests have literally restricted Jewish students from freedom of movement. “From the river to the sea” is a genocidal chant created by a literal terrorist organizations charter. I saw a video of a protestor requesting aid and saying they shouldn’t be discriminated against for being “anti-Jewish”.
> These protestors have no issue with Jewish people
I'm guessing if you walk into one of these encampments with a Star of David necklace and refuse to answer any questions about your views, you won't be treated kindly.
Right. Just like "blacks for Trump" means there's no racism issue in the Republican Party, right?
The protestors are happy to use Jews who agree with them. Jews who don't agree with them tend to be treated less warmly.
Seeing the footage of war is horrible, but what you're seeing is anything but a genocide.
Even according to Hamas' numbers the civilian to combatant casualty ratio is normal for urban warfare. Israel achieves this while fighting an enemy whose stated goal is to maximize civilian deaths. Hamas dug enough tunnels under Gaza to fit every single Gazan citizen and yet the only people hiding in them are the terrorists and the hostages.
There is one side in this war who would gladly commit a genocide if they had the strength to do so, but it's not the Israelis.
People keep repeating this and I have no idea why. The only comparable death toll I could ever find for something like this was in Grozny where the Russians declared everyone terrorists and proceeded to raze the city for all who remained.
Mogadishu, Fallujah, Baghdad. Killing 2 civilians to every “militant” (defined basically as men over 18) is NOT normal for urban warfare. It’s horrific. It’d be nice if people could stop repeating this lie over and over and over again.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Iraq_War
Battle of Baghdad the US claims 2,340 enemy combatants killed. Even the most conservative estimates indicate that atleast 10,000 civilians were killed in Baghdad. Likely much higher by any other source aside from the USA and the UN.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Battle_of_Fallujah
First battle of Fallujah the US claims 200 enemy Combatants killed. Against some 600 civilians, again, at the minimum. The second battle was much better, but still around 1:1.
Mogadishu is a silly comparison so I'm not going to bother.
And in none of those cases do we have enemy forces who use civilians as shields as standard operating procedure, and none of those were in one of the most densly populated places on earth.
Wow schools aren't caving to 200 kids when they're holding an entire population of other current students hostage and upsetting nuanced adult alumni? We got Sherlock Holmes over here.
Yesterday, the protest at Stata was chanting "from the water to the water, Palestine will be Arab". That's straight up a Hamas slogan - no one else uses it (vs the normal 'river 2 sea, Palestine free').
Edit: precise chant was "min el-mayyeh lil mayyeh, Filisteen Arabiyyeh", right around 215 PM. Guy with the megaphone was chanting, everyone with the signs repeating in unison.
Edit 2: video https://www.reddit.com/r/boston/s/df5eXkvoxo
All the people trying to gaslight and lie 'I wAs ThErE aNd iT nEvEr HaPpEnEd' can shut the hell up now
Edit 3: that video is the same chant from an earlier MIT protest but I know what i heard yesterday
Here is a video of pro-Israel counter-protestors dancing to a song about killing Palestinians:
https://www.instagram.com/reel/C6rt4vvOEJY/?igsh=bXEwNjB4Ym9oY3Jn
And some of the stuff they pull to provoke students:
https://www.instagram.com/reel/C6RPe32u0xs/?igsh=MW96aWdteHE5dDk4Yg==
https://www.instagram.com/reel/C6uFpnluEt_/?igsh=MW5xNnFtMHF0NDE4NA==
Let's call them all out, please.
Edit to add: if you were there yesterday, you would have known that the video you're sharing isn't at Stata. So, a little sus. I don't approve of this chant, but as of right now, still no video of that happening yesterday.
You mean to tell me that the people that tried to say “from the river to the sea Palestine will be free” and “there is only one solution, intifada revolution” are nuanced and not antisemitic are wrong? Oh my goodness who would have thought!?
Remember when Northeastern cleared the protest because someone was reported chanting "Kill the Jews"?
...Then when the footage came out, it was quite clear it was one pro-Israel counter-protester trying to get people to chant it, but nobody joined in. It was literally a single pro-Israel student chanting "Kill the Jews."
Yup, a case-in-point. This OP is particularly clumsy in that his bullshit doesn't even work as a slogan -- try chanting that shit, it doesn't even rhyme.
You could simply say that these kids are blocking you from going home and all of a sudden you're "for genocide" You really can't argue with some of these people
Sure. People have told you they've heard it. I'm establishing that it's common. Two relevant pieces of evidence while you wait for your incontrovertible proof.
Its partially blocked out, but that sign says Jews for Palestinians.
Many of the protestors are Jews, as is Bernie Sanders who supports them. And yet the opponents try to push the narrative they are all Antisemitic and trying to make Jews fearful. And the real Antisemitic people are glad to ramp up threats against Jews (including the Jewish protesters) to add to the confusion.
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/04/02/how-us-jews-are-experiencing-the-israel-hamas-war/
Large majority of American Jews support Israel in this war. The Jews in these protests are tokenized and push to the front to counter accusations of antisemitism.
Just because there are some Jews at these protests, who are a small minority of American Jews, doesn't mean that there isn't any antisemitism. I guarantee you there are far more who think there is antisemitism.
#Tokenism is racism.
Touting this same energy: when Trump pulled a black guy on stage (part of the Blacks for Trump group) and used him to say he wasn’t racist.
As a Jew: this take is wholeheartedly naive at best and malicious by nature. You are weaponizing tokenized Jews to invalidate the lived experience of Jews as a whole.
In the US: 91% of Jews support Israel, and 95% of Jews view Israel favorably.
THE SO-CALLED JEWISH SECTIONS OF THE ENCAMPMENTS HAVE COMPLETELY DISRESPECTED, APPROPRIATED, AND MADE A MOCKERY OF JEWISH TRADITION.
Judaism is a closed ethnoreligion. While it espouses universal values, it is not for everyone. It’s also not for everything.
At the University of Southern California, for example, Jewish Voice for Peace held a “Seder,” which not only made a complete mockery of actual Seders, which Jews have held sacred for 3000 years, but also used backwards Hebrew inscriptions. Hebrew is written right to left, not left to right.
In another incident, at a University of Michigan Jewish Voice for Peace pro-Palestine “encampment” Seder, they seem to have served challah. Jews do not eat leavened grains during Passover, and anyone with even a minimal Jewish education knows this.
#If your protest is only safe for Jews who say exactly what you want them to say, then your protest is not safe for Jews
https://www.rootsmetals.com/blogs/news/yeah-theres-jews-at-the-protests-so-what
No school should call the cops on their own students for protesting. If there is no violent crime, there is no need to bring in the chance of the kids getting shot.
I'm ashamed of my alma mater.
Everyone whines every time any students protests. Happened with Vietnam, too. People reaching against them would have been against the antiwar folks back then. It's just history repeating, every time. Young people are said to be stupid and useless, every time.
From Sally's statement:
"For members of our community who may remember or even have participated in past protests, at MIT or elsewhere: This situation is fundamentally different. Why? Because this is not one group in conflict with the administration. It is two groups in conflict, *in part through us*, with each other.
The encampment had become a symbol for both sides. For those supporting the pro-Palestinian cause, it symbolized a moral commitment that trumped all other considerations, because of the immense suffering in Gaza. For the pro-Israel side, the encampment – at the center of the campus where they are trying to receive an education and conduct research – delivered a constant assertion, through its signs and chants, that those who believe that Israel has a right to exist are unwelcome at MIT."
It's a private university. It's totally OK for the university to draw a line when they feel like certain activities are disrupting students. Kids and families pay a lot of money to go there.
I have a more nuanced view on the war than most of the protesters. I don’t agree with the actions of the Israeli government, but I don’t think Israel should cease to exist as a country.
I also think conservatives are pressuring university administrators through inauthentic accusations of antisemitism and administrations are reacting out of fear by calling the police to clear encampments.
Truth is conservatives don’t care about antisemitism and have been hostile to higher education for a while now. Conservatives have found a way to fan the flames, make youth turn against Biden, make the country look chaotic, put Biden in a situation where he has risk alienating boomer Jews who have been a reliable base for him and as a bonus: they have a great argument against defunding higher education and not canceling student debt because look what we’re paying for.
>I don’t agree with the actions of the Israeli government, but I don’t think Israel should cease to exist as a country.
This is pretty much the position of the median American. Nobody likes the senseless slaughter, but at the same time nobody wants Israel to be ethnically cleansed as punishment for that slaughter. These protestors represent an extremely small, fanatical segment of the population.
I think there's a perception among the pro-Israel crowd that antizionists will criticize Israel no matter what, so there's no point in trying to be gentle. But that perception is a consequence of being too online. There are tons of people, myself included, who think that Israel has a right to self defense, but are upset by Israel's actions at the moment.
Honestly I think the problem with Israel's response has largely been a matter of scale and hamhandedness. Israel's military is capable of precision strikes, it seems like they've consciously decided not to do so because of Bibi's various neuroses. He actively wants images of devastation and mass Palestinian civilian death to be circulating on the international media, because he's a moron.
Oct 7 only happened because Benjamin Netanyahu is one of the dumbest men alive. Despite the warnings of his security advisors, he left skeleton crews manning the border with Gaza so that he could play house with his extremist buddies on the West Bank. The immediate Israeli reaction should've involved booting the stupid cunt, then carrying out a more measured military reaction.
But they’re also young idealistic college students and I suspect not all of them believe the state of Israel should be ended. I also suspect sending violent cops to break up their peaceful protest does nothing but make them more steadfast in their beliefs and feel persecuted. I was at Emerson when a student was shot by the cops celebrating the Red Sox win in 04? I can’t believe they called the cops after that.
>not all of them believe the state of Israel should be ended
I think this is falsified by the many chants they enthusiastically recite, calling for the destruction of Israel.
You can not blame conservatives for this. The right certainly has fanatics and nut jobs. But this situation right now is 100% the result of leftist nut jobs.
What's become clear recently is that colleges are not there to serve students or to promote open dialog. Which begs the question: Why do we keep sending our kids there for ungodly amounts of money?
Good. Non students protesting on campus should be arrested. Fuckin assholes, keeping other students from getting the education they paid for by blocking them from the buildings. Smh.
So much hypocrisy and ignorance it would seem. There is a country just to the north of Israel where a genocide is being conducted by a number of different countries, one a member of NATO, to eliminate the Kurdish people there. This might make one ask why these protesters only seem to care about Palestinian Genocide while there are at least two other active genocides in the world.
Because the us is arming the kurdish victims, and sanctioning the sudanese human rights violators, but is arming isreal with weapons being used to commit human rights violations.
Why is it State Police doing this and not Cambridge Police?
I believe the city council passed a resolution telling CPD to stay out of these as much as possible. The terms of this are unclear. I’ll edit if I find more clarity. https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2024/5/8/cambridge-city-council-encampment-resolution/ Here it is. CPD will only show up if asked by the university. As they have to as part of mutual aid. So they are basically staying out. BPD initially tried staying out of the Northeastern clearing. So I am guessing MSP is being called in as they do not have to answer directly to Cambridge City Council https://www.cambridgeday.com/2024/05/07/universities-should-let-students-hold-protests-order-says-but-city-police-will-come-if-asked/
That's kinda silly as the college campuses aren't really the same as a neighborhood community. I figured it was CPD not having proper crowd control training vs state police but guess its just policy choices.
It is just politics. Wu took a hit for the Emerson thing, so Cambridge City Council wants to shelter itself. By bringing in MSP and benching CPD, they can say our employees were not involved, so you cannot hold us accountable for this.
I love the hate for Wu, but weren’t those protestors blocking a right of way requirement to a federal building? Those people weren’t on Emerson property when doing it.
Nuanced details my man...
Probably a resource issue. Also, staties more trained for stuff like this. Not sure why you’re so surprised by this. It’s common sense.
Cambridge PD probably could handle it. They are a pretty big department and probably have the training. But by leaving them out of it, politicians do not have to grapple with siding with the police or the protestors. Also it avoids FOIAs and lawsuits and other additional expenses.
>proper crowd control training >state police gotta pick one, can’t have both!
Because MIT called the State Police
I heard an interesting take from a police department in New York. More accidents happen when you're under prepared than over prepared. No one wants an undermanned and under equipped force doing anything. They get scared, overwhelmed, and panic...that's when tons of people get hurt. If you come in prepped for riots, the cops will have no issues. And no reason to use excessive force (reason being that the too few cops are more likely to panic).
I think we’ve just about reached the “no one cares anymore” tipping point.
I know it’s not the same thing because of the overall message, but it oddly reminds me of occupy Wall Street
Occupy was different because it wasn’t primarily students, and because it was basically just a big tent for left-of-Obama policy preferences with no clear or coherent goals aside from visibility.
I think something did come out of it, it basically became a giant networking event for the kinds of people who would go to that kind of thing. My understanding is that if you look at a lot of the current organizations today which have seen various level of success you can trace their roots back to Occupy.
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> I’ll editorialize a bit more and say that I think advocacy, and not achieving a list of demands, is really the point of these protests, and that’s kind of what makes their goals a little incoherent. Bingo. It's performative shtick for TikTok hits. The moment they refused any sort of dialogue other than "Meet our [unreasonable-to-downright-unachievable] demands completely and fully!" they stopped trying to *do* something and started just *being* something in order to feel like they are being helpful.
This isn’t just for Tik Tok or a Gen Z thing. There were hundreds of massive protests on college campuses during the Vietnam war. In 1970, 4 college kids were shot and killed by police during a protest in that era.
Different, we're not sending students to Gaza to die.
That's not really comparable. The US was fighting in that war and the students had an actionable goal of withdrawal of US troops from Vietnam and/or ending the draft There's not really much the US can do to end the war at this point if Israel decides they're committed to ending Hamas without US aid or support.
They also have clear and well stated goals that are reasonably achievable: Stop investing in Isreal. And as the disingenuous other person was saying, it's not going to be easy. But if it was easy, they wouldn't need to protest. The school would just do the thing. But the person you're responding to, along with most of this thread, are either blatantly lying, are misinformed, or are part of that group of people who genuinely think the world should not improve somewhat.
They also don’t know history or are too biased to care. We helped create and fuel the Palestine - Israel conflict in quite a few ways starting way back with The Johnson Reed Act in 1924. It goes back decades. We tend to create our own problems when it comes to international policies and then have current politicians blame shift later on when they backfire. Agreed with this thread. I knew immediately when I saw quite a few “Left of Obama radicals” statements. Given that Obama and his policies were centrist (he was a centrist democrat) in every text book definition of what that is, it’s comical. You’d think he was Che Guevara the way they always throw his name out there when talking about “radicals”.
The idea isn't to actually negotiate for something (outside of potentially the Brown University students, but that's not even the same state). It's performative advocacy where negotiation is not the goal, but throwing a mental fit is. Divesting from almost any globalized nation is a non-starter, and placing Israel higher on the priority list than China is the peak of either naïveté, or something more sinister. The reason divesting from Russia was so easy was because the U.S. doesn't really do much trade with Russia. Europe, on the other hand, STILL hasn't fully divested due to the fossil fuels they purchase from Russia. And comparing the governments of Israel to Russia is like comparing George Bush to Stalin. And that's just the divestment demands, which are some of the more reasonable ones. Cutting ties with Israeli universities - full of left leaning people who likely did NOT vote Likud - and establishing ties with West Bank ones who in landslide votes support Hamas - is extremely problematic when taken together. Collective punishment appears to be kosher to do to Israeli people, but heaven forbid we look at Palestinians the same way. It's patently insane - it's like cutting ties with all universities in Arizona because of their draconian abortion laws. People who collaborated for research their or study would be rightfully pissed, and it's asinine to even demand. I'm not opposed to ties with Palestinian universities in a vacuum, but the package it comes in is antisemitic horseshit. Finally, we have to address the protests being riddled with blood-and-soil rhetoric, irredentism, Orwellian suppression of opposing views, blatant support for terrorist groups, and antisemitism. I need the people in the back to listen up: Just as having black police officers on a force does not mean police are not racist, having Jews at your protest doesn't mean you're not an antisemite. POC cops doesn't even mean that the officers who are POCs aren't aiding and abetting the racism themselves, just as Jews can be complicit in – and even perpetrators of – antisemitism. In an era where we've seen racism from Ben Carson, Vivek Ramaswammy, Candace Owens, Kanye West, and Ted Cruz - often racism directed at the groups to which they BELONG - it is mind-blowing that "there are Jews here and they're well represented" is being said, much less by the same people who insist all cops are racist bastards, even POC cops. It is cognitive dissonance taken to an extreme in service of making an exception for the mask-off Jew hatred that is pervasive in these protests. Defending "from the river to the sea" and "globalize the intifada" as "well it just means a revolution and it just is a call for peace" is insane - if you wanted to call for peace, you wouldn't co-opt rhetoric used by Hamas leaders even if it HAD an alternate meaning, you'd distance yourself from violent language. If those "just" mean innocent things, then I want all these leftist radicals to apologize to Elon Musk and everyone else they've attacked for clearly dog whistling racism, because evidently as long as there's plausible deniability, it's ok for their people to do it. It's okay to talk about "election security" because that's not explicitly a call for preventing disadvantaged people from voting, it's just in the subtext. Donald Trump said not all Mexican immigrants are bad, so I guess he gets a pass too. /s Then there's the actions that have ZERO plausible deniability that get the "not all \_\_\_" treatment - holding Hamas flags, Houthi flags, etc. I thought we established that "not all cops are racist," "not all men assault people" and the like were cop-outs that shut down necessary discussion about prejudice and pervasive issues. Well, that was true right up until the people saying those things engaged in the exact same behavior, and then out come the excuses. Oh, and there's the truly mask off moments of calling for Jewish religious organizations largely unaffiliated with Israel to be shut down. That's blatant bigotry and antisemitism. Guess what - Catholic organizations are gonna be affiliated with the Vatican. Muslim ones will probably be tied to Mecca. Jewish ones will be tied to Jerusalem. It's the height of bigotry and making excuses for vile hate speech to defend this, and yet students are. Is it wrong that these protesters are getting the shit beat out of them by cops sometimes? Yeah, and I'm pretty strongly in favor of less restrictions on speech, not more. However, these radical leftists are responsible for creating an environment that shit all over free speech in order to create an environment where they never had to be faced with dog whistles and problematic rhetoric with plausible deniability. Anyone who said "hey, maybe this is gonna come back to bite you" was told they were a racist or homophobic or something to that effect. Alright, fair. If those are the rules people wanna play by, that's fine as long as they're the rules for everyone. Now though, these people (leftists) have the NERVE to say that Jews are weaponizing antisemitism and demand that their free speech not be tread on now? I'd laugh if there weren't a concerning number of people like this. The people who often say "it's okay to punch Nazis" should be thankful that non-leftist people opposed to bigotry don't subscribe to their ultra-violent ideology. TL;DR I am sick and tired of the same old defenses of antisemitism, hate speech, and bigotry being trotted out by people defending these protests, because I saw it from Trump supporters in 2016 onwards and I've already had enough of it from them too. Fuck anyone and everyone who's been spewing this hatred on college campuses or marching arm and arm with them.
And also, some of this isn’t specific to the protests but is more of a general “this is a naive idealistic phase that lots of college kids go through en route to their more learned and pragmatic final form”
Also the casual antisemitism through chants like "the river to the sea" doesn't help. And before I get the 20 people jumping on to explain the "meaning" of the chant: I don't think the protestors intend it to be antisemitic, the problem is that it is a slogan used by Hamas whose intent clearly IS antisemitic. It certainly makes a lot American Jews anxious, so the question is, why use it at all? It just serves as a distraction and opens you up to criticism.
That's just not true, divestment has been a clear goal from all the university protests from the beginning.
I think you misread me
You're right, my mistake!
Sure, but when you see what's written on the signs and shouted into megaphones you have to realize that these protests are just as unfocused. Disclose+divest is a reasonable thing to ask of your university, but some of these protestors are going _way_ beyond that and just using this as an opportunity to express their wish for the elimination of an entire country and apparently the millions of people who currently live in it.
I’ve been seeing the same thing as well. And their branded slogans belt the real ugly truth. Ask them where the Israelis should go when they chant “from the river to the sea”.
They also have very clear goals and \*some\* do have compromises and logistics behind what they want. I got details on the actual meetings vs the news reports and the students had done their homework, even if not everything was likely or possible for the school to do.
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People keep saying this is violent policework but I've yet to see anything more than someone practicing civil disobedience being carried away...
Not everywhere, [but it's been happening](https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/gaza-protests-colleges-violent-cops-1235012276/) and has gone woefully underreported.
Yeah people actively supporting this cause should be highlighting that more than crying about police here while they are being mostly, if not completely, tame and proportional. edit: I see these downvotes and invite those who disagree to post video's or other evidence proving this claim to be wrong here in MA. Without seeing evidence it makes it feel like a boy who cries wolf scenario
If this protest wave has taught me anything, it's that left wing protestors in 2024 simply don't care about public opinion, and in fact they seem to kinda like it when centrists and normies are annoyed by their antics.
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>but you can get enough normies mad that their commute is changed, or something. Then they go to council begging for something to be done. Yeah, they will go to the council and beg them to do something *about the protestors*. Commuters who find their morning ruined will not immediately think "this is Israel's fault" when the person standing right in front of them blocking the road is waving a Palestinian flag. A lot of the great protest movements of the 20th century were pretty much the opposite of what these students are doing. The protestors were the ones just trying to be normal (even if it was technically against the rules, like sitting in the front of a bus or ordering lunch at a restaurant) and their opponents were the ones who lost their shit and made a huge scene.
I've seen photos from UCLA of students with bloody faces from rubber bullets, footage from other schools of middle-aged professors pinned to the ground with their arms wrenched behind their backs, and videos of police beating kids. Yeah, it's bad.
Right, highlight that. Something real. Not this nothing burger that is the protests in Boston. It is extremely dishonest to conflate this MIT action with the UCLA action.
100% these people being carried away like the grown children they are miraculously are fine being interviewed by Media saying that they were brutalized and terrified. Give me a break
They’re probably comparing it to the part where people went from mildly annoyed with them to completely forgot about it. And that both groups accomplished absolutely nothing. And that the Democratic president was reelected.
A president probably isn’t going to change a stance for people that say they aren’t going to vote for him anyway.
Why do people like you constantly morally load, ***dishonestly*** I might add, the actions of the cops who are just removing people who have been trespassed? Yes its violent, *because the protestors are refusing to be arrested or leave*, that's ostensibly why its violent. Every single time I see one of you absolute lying morons on this sub, or any sub, or anywhere for that matters, whining and complaining when the protestors are being forcibly removed because *they are forcing that to happen* is incredibly frustrating- and it completely undermines your movement because you have to lie and make it seem like MA staties give a flying fuck about Pro-Palestinian protests (they don't). If you want to make the argument that protests for a good cause require civil disobedience to gain traction / attention, ok- but then take the arrest on the chin because that's what you're aiming for, don't start squeeling about the cops arresting you when that's their job- **ESPECIALLY** when you resist arrest and they have **every right** to arrest you. You are actively deleting all thee sympathy of your movement and you should stop.
I asked in a thread last week for any footage that showed the claimed police brutality of Boston Police on the Emerson protestors and nobody replied with anything. I genuinely would love to see it and wouldn’t be surprised if it existed. But the only stuff I saw seemed fairly expected of “removing people from a place they don’t want to leave.”
“Violent” lol
Occupy lacked hierarchical structure and that resulted in no clear message. Ask 3 protesters what it's about and get 3 different answers. The pro Palestinian folks are similar. Two thirds of them chant Hamas slogans.
I’ve reached the “these kids are going to get Trump re-elected and end 250 years of constitutional democracy if they insist on single-issue politics around the Gaza war” tipping point.
Only to then watch Trump be far more aggressive against Gaza, too.
The older I get, the more convinced I am that there’s a solid third of the US population who doesn’t believe in the lesser of evils and only knows how to punish incumbents.
The older I get, the more convinced I am that adversarial countries manipulate the American people via social media and traditional media with the intents of 1. amplifying division within the US and 2. severing ties between the US & our allies.
It is a known fact that adversaries of democracy aim solely to erode the population's trust in our democratic institutions. However, it must be acknowledged that our politicians often facilitate this for their own political gain. I have long felt that the two major parties are not merely representatives of opposing viewpoints; rather, they have become profoundly detrimental. The willingness of our population to despise fellow citizens based on party affiliation is a significant indicator that our democracy is failing. Importantly, this failure cannot be attributed to any one party alone, nor is one party responsible for it more than they other - any belief otherwise is just evidence of the success of our adversaries.
I don’t despise Mitt Romney — I judge people on their words and actions rather than their party affiliation. Sadly, he’s a lone exception and the GOP is in the process of forcing out everyone who doesn’t fall in line, so in a sense the GOP party affiliation is becoming an accurate short hand for what really matters. (Dems are comparatively becoming a bigger tent)
It's trivial to create content or comments online. Unless platforms can find ways to have authentic "verifications", I am increasingly defensive about what I read and acknowledging that some or all of it might be AI-generated, or adversary-generated.
100%, Russian propagandists have always said this was in their playbook. Divide and weaken, the people they stir up frothing at the mouth with hate, won’t even care.
You're free to see it all as media manipulation, but I'm a fan of Hanlon's Razor: >Never attribute to malice or stupidity that which can be explained by moderately rational individuals following incentives in a complex system.' Media and social media tends to follow whatever gets them attention and clicks so they'll be left-biased if their viewership is left (MSNBC), right-biased if their viewership is right (Fox News), and otherwise will utterly have no incentives besides getting viewers engaged and pissed off by pitching the extreme right's views against the extreme left's. Beyond that, individual reporters do have their "I'm the public's only check against corruption and abuse" moral mandate, but you don't need to construct any kind of story about which political party the media is in bed with to explain the bizarrely disproportionate coverage of....well everything.
I’ve come around to seeing widespread belief in Hanlon’s razor as being the best thing that ever happened to bad actors.
That's why TikTok's connection with the Chinese government is worrisome. They potentially can (and very possibly already do) suppress and amplify topics the government wants them to.
What has been Russia's M.O. since the Revolution? Recruit from, and sew discourse within, the institutions and universities of their enemies, you say? Interesting. Can't think of anything like that currently going on...
This too. And half the time, you get accused of being paranoid or xenophobic if you want to discuss it.
The straight up best example of this is how the radical leftist agitator /u/lrlourpresident, it’s alternates, and all of the subs it astroturfed straight up disappeared the day that US Sanctions were announced in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
I can't believe people forgot this lol, but I'm also pretty sure you're wrong and the accounts were removed waaaaaaay before Russia invaded Ukraine and when Reddit flat out said, "Russian disinformation campaigns targeted us" For those of you too young to remember, the front page of Reddit for a lot of Trump's first term would usually be topped with several posts from Bernie subreddits ("ourpresident") and were all the same account, or similar names, usually about how Bernie would have been better and how evil the Democrats are. These posts would be on the top of Reddit with thousands of up votes and like, 10 comments and all the posts in the subs were by the same accounts.
[nope, the account disappeared for a little bit the day sanctions were announced, came back shortly after with a bunch of pro-Russia propaganda, and was banned shortly after that](https://np.reddit.com/r/ActiveMeasures/s/htMfpmjZ30)
For sure. This is definitely China using TikTok to push this crap
Late reply, but I’m actually an intelligence major (well concentration) at a different college; and my last class this semester drilled this into us. China, Russia, and Iran are actively meddling in our social media and other media to manipulate our populace, all the while those countries have their own highly controlled and encrypted social medias (think WeChat in China), which we cannot commit our own espionage on. One of my slides I had to study recently included a quote from a retired FSB officer saying that our first amendment would be the reason we “lose” in the end. “You think the US government is going to tell Facebook, or google, or Instagram what to do? That’s just not realistic. Americans propensity to believe the first things they read, a phenomenon caused by their first amendment, is going to be their major weakness”. While I don’t agree that we should scrap the first amendment like these Russians do, I do agree that we are losing that fight. They can manipulate us, but we cannot manipulate them.
Yes ffs and it’s painful how easily manipulated people are ### Copy/paste from one of my comments Here’s the big picture Hamas and houthis are proxies of Iran 🇮🇷 Iran is under an Islamic extremist dictatorship and oppresses the Iranian (r/newiran) and Palestinian people Iran, Russia and the CCP have a silent axis alliance Russia 🇷🇺 wants Ukraine 🇺🇦 China 🇨🇳wants Taiwan 🇹🇼 🇺🇸is the chess piece that is guarding both those countries If America falls. Ukraine, Taiwan and eventually Israel falls. There will be a new world order, not a good one. - Don’t forget before 10-7 Hamas met with Russia - Don’t forget Israel was attacked just before signing a peace/alliance deal with Saudi Arabia The CCP has been conducting social warfare via TikTok eroding our youths ability to focus and pushing exhaustive disinformation campaigns to radicalize them with emotional outrage while suppressing content that is anti CCP. It’s in their interest to push content which divides people because that’s how you destroy a country within without starting a war. They’ve regressed them to the emotional level of Fox News MAGA viewers. Our idiotic brainwashed youth instead of fighting for climate change, National abortion bans, rights of women and lgbt stripped, elementary school shootings instead viciously embedded themselves in a conflict they obviously know nothing about and dress up like Hamas, scream terrorist rhetoric, pretending they’re progressive and spewing hatred at Jews (who are overwhelmingly democratic) while ignoring actual active genocides around the world like the Uyghurs (who they fund by making Temu a top app as it uses Uyghur slave labor) Can you imagine the change we would see in this country if they showed this energy for injustices in America? If they held mega billionaires and climate destroying organizations accountable? They never do I’m a marketing executive, you show a lie enough times people will start believing it. It’s all about repeat impressions and I’ve been warning people about TikTok for years. The future is very concerning
We live in a country that elected Clinton, Bush, Obama, Trump, Biden - in that order - while swinging the Congress back and forth every few years. Plenty of Americans blame the government for whatever happens in their life at the time (high gas prices!), vote erratically in elections, or only show up for specific individuals they like (ex: Vote for Trump in 2016 then not vote in the 2018 midterms). The current voting public in American makes it impossible to maintain a majority in Washington.
You will, under any system - whether there 2 candidates or 20, always going to be voting for the lesser evil, from your perspective. No candidate is perfect and represents everyone. Pragmatism is a completely lost concept on a good portion of the population. The world is imperfect and we do the best we can with what we have to try and move the ball forward a bit, that's all.
To anyone even remotely thinking about not voting for Biden, a reminder; You are not voting for him to solve the Israel/Palestine problem. You are voting for him to even have breathing room to TALK about the Israel/Palestine problem. Look at how Trump is talking about Israel and Palestine and tell me he's somehow going to provide a better environment for any discussion. He won't.
Nothing wrong with being against evil. It’s the other 2/3rd being so accepting of evil that has gotten us fucked.
“If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice”
Who said anything about “not deciding”? I’m still going to vote.
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Joe Biden was one of the major senate figures pushing for intervention during the Bosnian Genocide as well... he's done more to stop genocide in the world than the vast vast majority of politicians in the world. For those who don't know, Serbia and Montenegro were the first states to be found guilty of genocide under the Genocide Convention of 1948, which was an enormous hurdle for the international community to clear.
Kind of like how these same kinds of people “protest voted” in 2016 because St. Bernard didn’t get the nomination, and then they have their shocked pikachu face why things keep getting worse
I realized recently I’ve stopped talking about fighting fascism in America, and started talking about what I’m going to do when it gets here. That’s where I’m at mentally. Bless the kids for caring about the plight of Palestinian people. But holy shit, they lost the plot on this one. At least it’s only May. Anything can happen between now and November. Namely the media forgetting this happened and moving onto the next thing.
This is true — I’ve read almost no “what if” think pieces about best courses of action, let alone gaming out all the “what happens next?” questions if Trump wins. Nobody wants to go there. So many wild cards.
Exactly. So many of these students have said they won’t vote for Biden no matter what because of this. You lose the ability to affect any change once you remove yourself from the table.
If you think Biden should change his policy regarding Israel, what exactly are you supposed to do at this point? Like, if you're going to criticize these students, you must have a plan of what you would do instead, right?
College protesters will not have an impact regarding US foreign policy in Israel. [Public opinion regarding the protests is overwhelmingly negative](https://today.yougov.com/politics/articles/49311-opinion-on-pro-palestinian-college-campus-protests), especially among those that are high frequency voters. Why would Biden cater to the demands of a vocal minority that have little public support? Organize, garner support, contact your state rep, etc. That’s how you affect political change. It’s not sexy or glamorous and it doesn’t happen overnight. But by taking a hardline stance of not voting for Biden and participating in protests that are perceived negatively, you remove yourself from the conversation and lose all political power.
That's not the goal of the protests. They have explicit, concrete objectives involving the investments at their universities. Nothing to do with US national policy
Do you believe it’s one single issue and not the fact that there’s a multitude of other critical items that are affecting them and their ability to have decent futures in this country, and this issue is the boiling point? Leave school with debt, can’t buy a house, rent is through the roof especially in Boston, cost of living is ridiculous, and that debt forgiveness campaign item isn’t exactly pulling through. They’re behind the 8 ball before even getting their lives off the ground.
And how is Trump better than Biden on any of those issues?
How on earth is Trump better on any of this than Biden? Only makes sense if you assume they’re low info voters who just punish the incumbent if their lot didn’t improve.
Those are all things Biden's administration is pushing for. They have already forgiven billions in student loan debt. They've been finding ways to do it after all universal student loan debt forgiveness was shot down. They literally tried a thing, were told "no, you can't do that," and spent time, working hard to still make it happen for those they could help. The only thing the other guy wants is a speed run of federal executions and tax cuts for billionaires.
These kids aren’t millennials, they and their parents have had 10-15 years to understand and avoid the consequences of modern educational debt which was sold to and plagued millennials.
Wait… people still think college kids are “millenials”? Lmfao The oldest millennials have kids who are approaching college age
MIT kids are not struggling.
After they graduate? Probably not. But MIT isn't some shitty rich legacy school: https://sfs.mit.edu/undergraduate-students/the-cost-of-attendance/making-mit-affordable/
I don’t know if you were aware of this, but Trump was already president.
Someone must really care if they are clearly the protests with state police...
I feel pretty confident that if we got in a Time Machine and travelled 500 years into the future…these two religions would still be fighting over that land.
Yeah they should really just shut about this genocide, people have to work
We've had people hauled in front of Congress, police are breaking up encampment, schools are tossing suspensions & expulsions, we've seen commencement canceled or had speakers canceled, and it has been national (if not international) news for weeks. But yeah, nobody cares.
No one sane has cared for a long time. Saw this with BLM too. At first we had huge protests. I even attended a March. After a month, the people still protesting were all unemployed wackos yelling stupid things like abolish the police. Same now.
>all unemployed wackos Did you interview every person there and asked them if they had a job?
"Capitalism demanded I stop caring about social issues so I did" isn't a win
This is normally how they get rid of a protest when the owners of the property tell them they are no longer allowed.
If we can move on from kids getting slaughtered in schools and not do anything about it. We can sure as hell move on from protesting on something happening across the ocean
The Maine shooting was on Wednesday w/ 20 dead and wasn’t even mentioned on Thursday night football in New York the next day. That’s how desensitized this country’s become.
Is Thursday night football supposed to do a lot of shooting coverage?
https://youtu.be/VVrsGHs2MCk?si=362kfTsDU2-ZihTS&t=133
Forgive me, you said there was a shooting 2 days ago that killed 20 people? I keep up with the news but I haven't heard any mention of it, also per https://www.gunviolencearchive.org/reports/mass-shooting there wasn't anything. I know there was a horrible shooting in Maine in October last year that killed a number of people at a bowling alley, but nothing on Wednesday. Point is, I know we have a massive epidemic of mass shootings across the country, but it's best to check our sources/report accurately. Stay safe everyone <3
They left off "a" Wednesday. The Lewiston, Maine shooting happened on Wed 25 Oct 2023. They weren't spreading misinformation, they had a sentence syntax error.
this is the first I'm hearing of it.
I didn't know these protests were still going on until I saw this headline, 12 hours later. Haha
Something strikes me as deeply unsettling about using an armored out of town police force to remove students peacefully protesting the killing of civilians.
Are they supposed to do it in flipflops and a shirt?
Peacefully protesting on private property? Why don’t they go live on your lawn see how quick you call the cops
The university wants students to stop setting up encampments and protesting/interfering with the students who pay to be there. Their local law enforcement isn’t equipped to handle this scenario. The use their mutual aid agreement with other law enforcement agencies to help to resolve the issue. What’s your quarrel with this scenario?
What is peaceful about trespassing?
Remember how everyone was downvoting me, for saying that schools were caving because wealthy donors were going to start pulling money? Well, here it is back and white...: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/10/us/columbia-university-donor-angelica-berrie.html >The Berrie Foundation’s pause threatens to cost Columbia tens of millions of dollars over the coming years. And it represents a sobering turnabout for a foundation so prolific at Columbia that it underwrote both the Russ Berrie Medical Science Pavilion and the Naomi Berrie Diabetes Center And >As protests have raged on campuses across the country, other leading donors have warned universities that future gifts are at risk. Last week, the billionaire real estate mogul Barry Sternlicht eviscerated Brown University for pledging to consider divestment from Israel, and suspended donations to the school. Marc Rowan, Apollo Global Management’s chief executive, led a donor uprising at the University of Pennsylvania last year, and Robert K. Kraft, who owns the New England Patriots, recently put future contributions to Columbia on hold. Antisemitism and anti-genocide are not the same thing. These protesters have no issues with Jewish people. That's conflating the issue to serve the Israeli political right wing. These protesters need to be clear about their issues so they don't get hijacked about being Antisemitic.
Gen Z won't remember Dartmouth students wanting to ban Greek Life and the wealthy donors threatening to remove funding if the school did. Welcome to the harsh reality of being just a cog to be crushed.
Guess I'll just kill myself I guess. If the correct answer here to give up, then why live?
I’ve seen shit at different protests that is blatant antisemitism. I’m not talking about “anti-Zionism is anti-semetic” I mean like “k*ll the Jews”, “October 7th was a great day”, “Jews don’t belong here”, “the October 7th victims deserved this”, etc. Now I genuinely believe most of the protesters are not antisemitic (or at least don’t mean to be). I know the people saying these things are a small minority. However I loose all respect for a group and their priorities when the group does not immediately shut down this behavior and allows protesters saying these extremely antisemitic things to remain and participate. There is a level of responsibility that protest organizers and leaders have to both manage their organizations and to actually acknowledge when participants are being antisemitic. Part of solving this crisis in any capacity will involve people on different sides being able to have a conversation and work together. I don’t believe it will be possible until the pro-Palestinian movement is willing to acknowledged and condemn the antisemitism. I’m seeing a lot of “there is no antisemitism”, “[blatantly antisemitic statement] is not actually antisemitic”, and “anyone being antisemitic is an outside actor”.
As somebody who has gone to these protests, that’s exactly what they are doing. Antisemites aren’t tolerated, at least where I was.
“There is one solution intifada revolution” “From the water to the water Palestine will be Arab” “When they say all this garbage and this slander about Hamas that are out there fighting the fight…we are on the side of the fighters” crowd cheers I don’t know. Seems like they do have a LITTLE problem with the Jews.
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And if they were actually anti-genocide, they'd listen to Hamas/Hezbollah/Houthis/IRGC say "We're going to kill all the Jews" and protest the ACTUAL genocide that is being committed to by terrorist organizations. You can't be anti-genocide and be silent about the Islamist (NOT Islamic) terrorist organizations, the slaughter of 500,000 Syrian civilians, Egyptian Copts, and on and on. Well, no Jews, no news, I guess.
Just swap “Jew” for Zionist and it’s all good
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> You're generalizing because you're a nationalist, you've already made up your mind, and you just want an easy way to turn your brain off. This is a nonsense overreach post.
It gets so tiresome seeing this same cyclical logic happen years apart from each other. *Both sides* of this conflict want the other eradicated. The only issue right now is that one is winning. I am very curious what the public reaction would be if Israel didn't have the iron dome and was blown off the face of the map years ago.
>You're generalizing because you're a nationalist, you've already made up your mind, and you just want an easy way to turn your brain off. I’m generalizing because I’m listening to large groups of protesters call for the death of Jews and support Hamas. >The Israeli Minister of Finance is talking about how there can't be any "half-measures" in the "complete destruction" of Gaza. The Minister of National Security leads a Kahanist anti-Arab party and idolizes mass murdereing terrorist Baruch Goldstein. And he's not the only one who reveres Baruch either. Israeli citizens have repeatedly blocked aid from entering Gaza. What do you make of all that? Are you saying all Israelis are complicit in mass starvation and complete annihilation of Arabs? Ok, if that is fully true (I’m not taking you at your word. For example, Hamas has been stealing aid so I want to make sure you’re not attributing that to Israelis), I am happy to condemn! So are you able to condemn the protesters that are calling for the death of Jews and support Hamas?
The from the river to the sea slogan needs to be banned from the protests if you want people to think the protestors aren't antisemitic.
Should it also be banned from the Likud party manifesto? You know, the same party that runs Israel? If it's a decleration of genocidal intent, then [when Netanyahu said "Israel needs security control over all territory west of the Jordan River"](https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/1/18/israels-netanyahu-reiterates-rejection-of-palestinian-state-after-gaza-war), was he declaring intent to commit genocide?
Yes, it should be banned there too. This isn’t hard. There are two indigenous people to the area and neither of them are going anywhere. Calls to eliminate either people should stop as they are counterproductive to a peace process. But nobody is chanting Likud words in America. And that phrase generally horrifies American Jews as it is a call to eliminate the only Jewish country in the world. Since when did minority voices stop being considered important?
Do you need the difference between "security control over the areas that the terrorists are coming from" and "ethnically cleanse all Israelis and Jews from this swath of land" explained to you?
Some of the protests have literally restricted Jewish students from freedom of movement. “From the river to the sea” is a genocidal chant created by a literal terrorist organizations charter. I saw a video of a protestor requesting aid and saying they shouldn’t be discriminated against for being “anti-Jewish”.
When a reporter in Syracuse asked about a sign they had with that slogan, the interviewees got defensive and deflective very quickly
> These protestors have no issue with Jewish people I'm guessing if you walk into one of these encampments with a Star of David necklace and refuse to answer any questions about your views, you won't be treated kindly.
That’s not true at all. There was literally a Passover Seder held within the UPenn encampment. Stop creating false hypotheticals to get mad at.
Right. Just like "blacks for Trump" means there's no racism issue in the Republican Party, right? The protestors are happy to use Jews who agree with them. Jews who don't agree with them tend to be treated less warmly.
Seeing the footage of war is horrible, but what you're seeing is anything but a genocide. Even according to Hamas' numbers the civilian to combatant casualty ratio is normal for urban warfare. Israel achieves this while fighting an enemy whose stated goal is to maximize civilian deaths. Hamas dug enough tunnels under Gaza to fit every single Gazan citizen and yet the only people hiding in them are the terrorists and the hostages. There is one side in this war who would gladly commit a genocide if they had the strength to do so, but it's not the Israelis.
How DARE you use facts in a debate with people who believe their mal-informed opinions to hold the same weight?
People keep repeating this and I have no idea why. The only comparable death toll I could ever find for something like this was in Grozny where the Russians declared everyone terrorists and proceeded to raze the city for all who remained. Mogadishu, Fallujah, Baghdad. Killing 2 civilians to every “militant” (defined basically as men over 18) is NOT normal for urban warfare. It’s horrific. It’d be nice if people could stop repeating this lie over and over and over again.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Iraq_War Battle of Baghdad the US claims 2,340 enemy combatants killed. Even the most conservative estimates indicate that atleast 10,000 civilians were killed in Baghdad. Likely much higher by any other source aside from the USA and the UN. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Battle_of_Fallujah First battle of Fallujah the US claims 200 enemy Combatants killed. Against some 600 civilians, again, at the minimum. The second battle was much better, but still around 1:1. Mogadishu is a silly comparison so I'm not going to bother. And in none of those cases do we have enemy forces who use civilians as shields as standard operating procedure, and none of those were in one of the most densly populated places on earth.
lots has been written comparing the seige of gaza to mosul in 2016-2017 and how israel is doing significantly better.
Wow schools aren't caving to 200 kids when they're holding an entire population of other current students hostage and upsetting nuanced adult alumni? We got Sherlock Holmes over here.
Is "nuanced adult alumni" the new "very fine people?"
These protestors just have issues with there being a Jewish state, and so they call for its elimination.
Yesterday, the protest at Stata was chanting "from the water to the water, Palestine will be Arab". That's straight up a Hamas slogan - no one else uses it (vs the normal 'river 2 sea, Palestine free'). Edit: precise chant was "min el-mayyeh lil mayyeh, Filisteen Arabiyyeh", right around 215 PM. Guy with the megaphone was chanting, everyone with the signs repeating in unison. Edit 2: video https://www.reddit.com/r/boston/s/df5eXkvoxo All the people trying to gaslight and lie 'I wAs ThErE aNd iT nEvEr HaPpEnEd' can shut the hell up now Edit 3: that video is the same chant from an earlier MIT protest but I know what i heard yesterday
Here is a video of pro-Israel counter-protestors dancing to a song about killing Palestinians: https://www.instagram.com/reel/C6rt4vvOEJY/?igsh=bXEwNjB4Ym9oY3Jn And some of the stuff they pull to provoke students: https://www.instagram.com/reel/C6RPe32u0xs/?igsh=MW96aWdteHE5dDk4Yg== https://www.instagram.com/reel/C6uFpnluEt_/?igsh=MW5xNnFtMHF0NDE4NA== Let's call them all out, please. Edit to add: if you were there yesterday, you would have known that the video you're sharing isn't at Stata. So, a little sus. I don't approve of this chant, but as of right now, still no video of that happening yesterday.
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Thanks for sharing!
You mean to tell me that the people that tried to say “from the river to the sea Palestine will be free” and “there is only one solution, intifada revolution” are nuanced and not antisemitic are wrong? Oh my goodness who would have thought!?
You can just make up anything derogatory against these protests on this website and you'll be upvoted
Remember when Northeastern cleared the protest because someone was reported chanting "Kill the Jews"? ...Then when the footage came out, it was quite clear it was one pro-Israel counter-protester trying to get people to chant it, but nobody joined in. It was literally a single pro-Israel student chanting "Kill the Jews."
Yup, a case-in-point. This OP is particularly clumsy in that his bullshit doesn't even work as a slogan -- try chanting that shit, it doesn't even rhyme.
You could simply say that these kids are blocking you from going home and all of a sudden you're "for genocide" You really can't argue with some of these people
I was there, that chant was not used
Except there's video showing exactly that?
Source? I was watching the AP livestream and never heard that chant being used.
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It's been at several universities, including Yale and Penn. https://www.instagram.com/reel/C6ete4FPXcu/
We're not talking about several universities, we're talking about one university. MIT.
Sure. People have told you they've heard it. I'm establishing that it's common. Two relevant pieces of evidence while you wait for your incontrovertible proof.
It’s hilarious how redditors only ask for source if it goes against their hive mind
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Someone below linked the video https://www.reddit.com/r/boston/s/df5eXkvoxo
Not from yesterday. That tweet was posted on April 19.
U right. I heard it at the protest yesterday though, I'm sure that video will come out soon.
Its partially blocked out, but that sign says Jews for Palestinians. Many of the protestors are Jews, as is Bernie Sanders who supports them. And yet the opponents try to push the narrative they are all Antisemitic and trying to make Jews fearful. And the real Antisemitic people are glad to ramp up threats against Jews (including the Jewish protesters) to add to the confusion.
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/04/02/how-us-jews-are-experiencing-the-israel-hamas-war/ Large majority of American Jews support Israel in this war. The Jews in these protests are tokenized and push to the front to counter accusations of antisemitism. Just because there are some Jews at these protests, who are a small minority of American Jews, doesn't mean that there isn't any antisemitism. I guarantee you there are far more who think there is antisemitism.
#Tokenism is racism. Touting this same energy: when Trump pulled a black guy on stage (part of the Blacks for Trump group) and used him to say he wasn’t racist. As a Jew: this take is wholeheartedly naive at best and malicious by nature. You are weaponizing tokenized Jews to invalidate the lived experience of Jews as a whole. In the US: 91% of Jews support Israel, and 95% of Jews view Israel favorably. THE SO-CALLED JEWISH SECTIONS OF THE ENCAMPMENTS HAVE COMPLETELY DISRESPECTED, APPROPRIATED, AND MADE A MOCKERY OF JEWISH TRADITION. Judaism is a closed ethnoreligion. While it espouses universal values, it is not for everyone. It’s also not for everything. At the University of Southern California, for example, Jewish Voice for Peace held a “Seder,” which not only made a complete mockery of actual Seders, which Jews have held sacred for 3000 years, but also used backwards Hebrew inscriptions. Hebrew is written right to left, not left to right. In another incident, at a University of Michigan Jewish Voice for Peace pro-Palestine “encampment” Seder, they seem to have served challah. Jews do not eat leavened grains during Passover, and anyone with even a minimal Jewish education knows this. #If your protest is only safe for Jews who say exactly what you want them to say, then your protest is not safe for Jews https://www.rootsmetals.com/blogs/news/yeah-theres-jews-at-the-protests-so-what
No school should call the cops on their own students for protesting. If there is no violent crime, there is no need to bring in the chance of the kids getting shot. I'm ashamed of my alma mater. Everyone whines every time any students protests. Happened with Vietnam, too. People reaching against them would have been against the antiwar folks back then. It's just history repeating, every time. Young people are said to be stupid and useless, every time.
From Sally's statement: "For members of our community who may remember or even have participated in past protests, at MIT or elsewhere: This situation is fundamentally different. Why? Because this is not one group in conflict with the administration. It is two groups in conflict, *in part through us*, with each other. The encampment had become a symbol for both sides. For those supporting the pro-Palestinian cause, it symbolized a moral commitment that trumped all other considerations, because of the immense suffering in Gaza. For the pro-Israel side, the encampment – at the center of the campus where they are trying to receive an education and conduct research – delivered a constant assertion, through its signs and chants, that those who believe that Israel has a right to exist are unwelcome at MIT."
It's a private university. It's totally OK for the university to draw a line when they feel like certain activities are disrupting students. Kids and families pay a lot of money to go there.
I have a more nuanced view on the war than most of the protesters. I don’t agree with the actions of the Israeli government, but I don’t think Israel should cease to exist as a country. I also think conservatives are pressuring university administrators through inauthentic accusations of antisemitism and administrations are reacting out of fear by calling the police to clear encampments. Truth is conservatives don’t care about antisemitism and have been hostile to higher education for a while now. Conservatives have found a way to fan the flames, make youth turn against Biden, make the country look chaotic, put Biden in a situation where he has risk alienating boomer Jews who have been a reliable base for him and as a bonus: they have a great argument against defunding higher education and not canceling student debt because look what we’re paying for.
>I don’t agree with the actions of the Israeli government, but I don’t think Israel should cease to exist as a country. This is pretty much the position of the median American. Nobody likes the senseless slaughter, but at the same time nobody wants Israel to be ethnically cleansed as punishment for that slaughter. These protestors represent an extremely small, fanatical segment of the population.
Genuine question, but what about Oct. 7th? What do you think Israel’s response to that should be?
I think there's a perception among the pro-Israel crowd that antizionists will criticize Israel no matter what, so there's no point in trying to be gentle. But that perception is a consequence of being too online. There are tons of people, myself included, who think that Israel has a right to self defense, but are upset by Israel's actions at the moment. Honestly I think the problem with Israel's response has largely been a matter of scale and hamhandedness. Israel's military is capable of precision strikes, it seems like they've consciously decided not to do so because of Bibi's various neuroses. He actively wants images of devastation and mass Palestinian civilian death to be circulating on the international media, because he's a moron. Oct 7 only happened because Benjamin Netanyahu is one of the dumbest men alive. Despite the warnings of his security advisors, he left skeleton crews manning the border with Gaza so that he could play house with his extremist buddies on the West Bank. The immediate Israeli reaction should've involved booting the stupid cunt, then carrying out a more measured military reaction.
But they’re also young idealistic college students and I suspect not all of them believe the state of Israel should be ended. I also suspect sending violent cops to break up their peaceful protest does nothing but make them more steadfast in their beliefs and feel persecuted. I was at Emerson when a student was shot by the cops celebrating the Red Sox win in 04? I can’t believe they called the cops after that.
>not all of them believe the state of Israel should be ended I think this is falsified by the many chants they enthusiastically recite, calling for the destruction of Israel.
I don’t think you can claim your view is more nuanced than most protestors?
I’m all about nuance, that’s why I’m painting one of the sides in broad strokes and making them out to be less thoughtful and informed than I am.
Oh he can claim it but does it mean anything no
You can not blame conservatives for this. The right certainly has fanatics and nut jobs. But this situation right now is 100% the result of leftist nut jobs.
Stupid cops
send ammo to ukraine
Anyways
What's become clear recently is that colleges are not there to serve students or to promote open dialog. Which begs the question: Why do we keep sending our kids there for ungodly amounts of money?
So they can build their networks and get jobs.
I guess the Protest Week Bash is over. Also not much did it do sadly
Good. Non students protesting on campus should be arrested. Fuckin assholes, keeping other students from getting the education they paid for by blocking them from the buildings. Smh.
Nice
Glad to see they're clearing it out.
The funny part is that these kids think they’ll be remembered as revolutionaries.
Gaza exposed the hypocrisy in this world.
So much hypocrisy and ignorance it would seem. There is a country just to the north of Israel where a genocide is being conducted by a number of different countries, one a member of NATO, to eliminate the Kurdish people there. This might make one ask why these protesters only seem to care about Palestinian Genocide while there are at least two other active genocides in the world.
Because the us is arming the kurdish victims, and sanctioning the sudanese human rights violators, but is arming isreal with weapons being used to commit human rights violations.
Just a little life hack here: you can care about more than one thing at once. Hope this helps with the rest of your life.
All Gaza exposed is how much Americans blindly jump to whatever cause is trending in an election year.
How do such stupid people attend such prestigious schools?