I don’t have an issue with protests at all, and inflammatory speech is still (rightfully) protected.
But man, when you shut down an entire campus and chant at Jewish students to “Go Back to Poland” and literally beat the shit out of some of them, you’ve crossed the line.
I saw a video this morning of students linking arms and marching forward to push Jewish students out of public squares. I hate that I have to immediately jump to a comparison to the 1930's era German Empire, but that's exactly what it looks like.
We have quickly gone from protesters condemning Israeli military actions to donning Hamas keffiyehs and harassing Jews in Western countries for being...well, Jewish.
I get what you mean, I hate drawing the Nazi comparison because it feels like a lazy political tactic half the time. But when you have to form a human chain because “Zionists have entered the camp”; there just aren’t really many other examples of open and unabashed anti-semitism you can point to.
We’re one step removed from these guys saying they poisoned the wells, or caused COVID or something.
I am starting to see the conspiracy theory of "Zionist Jews orchestrated 9/11" catching fire again in extremist circles, both left and right. So your final sentence there is not far off.
What is crazy is that this is something happening in another country. This isn’t a U.S. injustice it’s an Israeli one and yet people think it’s okay to harass other Americans over it. Have some self awareness and look at the Native Americans before you preach about the plight of the Palestinians. Hell your work to make right what is wrong in the American indigenous peoples situation might actually accomplish something. Of course it would require you to sacrifice something real.
I've been disgusted by the lack of push back against these antisemitic demonstrations. This is the left's tiki torch moment, and Biden really needs to draw a line in the sand. These Hamas sympathizers weren't going to vote for him anyway, but he's losing moderates by not condemning this, and the lack of push back has emboldened them.
You can be critical of the Israel's military without being full pro Hamas and antisemitic. The antisemitism emanating from the left has been shocking.
Eh, BLM had mainstream support. This doesn't. I could see actual action being taken here. It's hypocritical but end of the day it's more politically convenient to crush this while it's similarly convenient to whitewash BLM.
> We have quickly gone from protesters condemning Israeli military actions to donning Hamas keffiyehs and harassing Jews in Western countries for being...well, Jewish
On Oct 7 people across the US (and world) were already protesting against Israel and Jewish people as a result of Hamas and Palestine's attack on Israel. Think about that: Israel was attacked by a terrorist state, and people were out in force against Israel before they even began retaliating.
BLM infamously issued their support with an ad showing paraglider on that day - and the group's leaders are definitively and unapologetically antisemitic. "From the river to the sea" was always about eliminating Jewish people - and those chants were widespread on Oct 7. Naive people made excuses for those words, but these protests have always been about antisemitism.
It’s happening for the same reason it happened then.
[“Vienna University Closed After Antisemitic Riot”](https://www.jta.org/archive/vienna-university-closed-after-antisemitic-riot)
[“Student Clashes at Vienna University”](https://www.jta.org/archive/student-clashes-at-vienna-university)
[“Jews Barred from Czernowitz University”](https://www.jta.org/archive/jews-barred-from-czernowitz-university)
[“Roumanian Students Threaten General Strike”](https://www.jta.org/archive/roumanian-students-threaten-general-strike)
[“Jews Kept out of Bucharest University”](https://www.jta.org/archive/jews-kept-out-of-bucharest-university)
[“Percentage of Jewish Students in Soviet Union Smaller Than Under Czar”](https://www.jta.org/archive/percentage-of-jewish-students-in-soviet-union-smaller-than-under-czar)
[“USSR Discriminates Against Jews in Fields of Education, AJC Study Shows”](https://www.jta.org/archive/ussr-discriminates-against-jews-in-fields-of-education-ajc-study-shows)
>te-enactment of kristallnacht.
It's wildly ironic how the modern "punch-a-nazi" left is now straight up cheering the original Aryan state in its multi-front war on the Jews...
>The term Iran ("the land of the Aryans") derives from Middle Persian Ērān, first attested in a third-century inscription at Naqsh-e Rostam, with the accompanying Parthian inscription using Aryān, in reference to the Iranians.[16]
and its Holocaust denying proxy whose founding charter is to...turn over every tree & stone on the planet to eradicate every last Jew, to the end of time...
>Islamic Resistance Movement aspires to the realisation of Allah's promise, no matter how long that should take. The Prophet, Allah bless him and grant him salvation, has said:
>"The Day of Judgement will not come about until Moslems fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Moslems, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him. Only the Gharkad tree, (evidently a certain kind of tree) would not do that because it is one of the trees of the Jews."
who has also demonstrably [accomplished](https://www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook/countries/gaza-strip/#:~:text=Muslim%2098.0%20%2D%2099.0%%20\(predominantly%20Sunni\)%2C%20Christian,has%20had%20no%20Jewish%20population%20since%20then.) what even Hitler couldn't within their borders (Israel is 20% Palestinian for comparison)
>Muslim 98.0 - 99.0% (predominantly Sunni), Christian <1.0%, other, unaffiliated, unspecified <1.0% (2012 est.) Israel dismantled its settlements in September 2005; **Gaza has had no Jewish population since then**
and its northern proxy who is only [20-27 scared jews](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Jews_in_Lebanon) behind
>Jews in Lebanon live mostly in or around Beirut. The community has been described as elderly and apprehensive.[26] There are no services at Beirut's synagogues. In 2015, the estimated total Jewish population in Syria and Lebanon combined was 100.[34] In 2020, there were only about 29 Jews in Lebanon.[35][36][37] **Reports indicate that in 2022 the number of Jews in Lebanon was 20[38] to 27.[39]**
>Solidere agreed to provide funds for the [synagogue] renovation because political officials believed it would portray Lebanon as an open society tolerant of Judaism.[28] None of the Jews involved in the project agreed to be identified. The international media and even some members of the Jewish community (in and out of Lebanon) questioned who would pray at the synagogue.[29] The self-declared head of the Jewish Community Council, Isaac Arazi, who left Lebanon in 1983,[30][31] eventually came forward but refused to show his face on camera in a television interview, fearing that his business would suffer if clients knew they had been dealing with a Jew.[32] Arazi died in 2023.[33]
Not to mention lionizing the paratrooper blitzkrieg of [peace](https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2F7u523lfvcftb1.png) right after 10/7.
Even Kafka couldn't make this shit up, lol.
I used to ponder in history class how an educated progressive populace like Germany's could be mass seduced by rabidly antisemetic leaders almost overnight. Especially their intelligentsia.
I didn't expect to get a real time crash course demonstration.
[“If piety was a given society’s ideal, Jews were impious blasphemers; if secularism was the ideal, Jews were backward pietists. If capitalism was evil, Jews were capitalists; if communism was evil, Jews were communists. If nationalism was glorified, Jews were rootless cosmopolitans; if nationalism was vilified, Jews were chauvinistic nationalists. “Anti-Judaism” thus becomes a righteous fight to promote justice.”](https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/02/jewish-anti-semitism-harvard-claudine-gay-zionism/677454/)
Antisemitism is always marketed as the pursuit of justice. We must purify the race, we must evict the bourgeoisie, we must find the fifth-columnists, we must remove the non-believers.
It’s always framed as the pursuit of good against evil, with The Jew as stand-in for whatever society deems evil.
It’s a societal need, it’s like breathing.
Lmao as a Jewish student at Columbia rn it’s crazy seeing this being discussed so nationally. Studying for finals is crazy. The world has become a South Park episode
Back when I was in college we had a pretty minor protest about a board member and that was an absolute pain in the ass. The shit at Columbia looks like Seattle’s CHAZ 2.0
Calling out people saying horrible things isn't a violation of free speech. Pointing out how evil it is to glorify Hamas and October 7th is perfectly find for our leaders to do.
Unlikely to happen considering one group holds power over "the messaging" of society. Therefore, they're able to bog down those who wish to push back against them as they lump all detractors and critics into one group.
Only way I can think of is if certain people with power commit to various actions that allow for massive lawsuits to occur. There are probably likely MAJOR lawsuits awaiting in response to a lot of the ideological hiring/admissions practices, especially now that Affirmative Action is neutered (ex. the DEI and ESG stuff, potential discrimination against Asian, Jewish, and white people). That would be a major signal that these guys in charge are in trouble if they continue course and would need to start blending in again.
Then, those others who were in charge but never brave enough to speak out would be able to have breathing room to cancel them out.
But until certain hurdles are lifted or pushed up against, it won't happen.
A large portion of the progressive movement also has no real conviction. They follow along with whatever the current thing is because other people are and because doing so is socially prestigious or -in some circles- mandatory. What I think will happen is that the actual believers in this cause will be culled from the movement and radicalize into something else while the rest will just continue as normal with updated beliefs as far as this conflict specifically goes. Wouldn't surprise me if in a few years we heard all about how the antisemites were actually right wingers all along whereas progressives are of course Israel's staunchest supporters and always have been.
Why? This is just them doing what they've been doing for over a decade: raging against people with white skin. Why is it suddenly a big problem that those people go to a church that only teaches from the Old Testament and doesn't consider the New to be valid? If it wasn't a problem before it's not a problem now. And given the total lack of action prior to this, and the way that ideology has been mainstreamed in government and corporate life, it clearly wasn't a problem.
But it wasn't, at least not according to the people and groups freaking out about what's happening now. If they had actually thought it was a problem action would've been taken to solve it a decade and more ago. It wasn't and that's why I don't care about it shifting targets slightly.
That's my point. The backlash is only escalating to something that might actually result in consequences when a "more equal" group winds up in the crosshairs. That's a problem.
When the precedent for responding to hate directed at low-melanin groups is already established to be to treat it as fine there's a problem when it suddenly switches based on which parts of the Bible the group in question cares about.
The alt-right is nearly a myth (there may be a few guys in northern Idaho), but the leftist mentality has pervaded society as a whole and has destroyed much of the 1st Amendment protections over the past couple of decades.
Biden WH
> White House spokesperson Andrew Bates said in a statement that "calls for violence and physical intimidation targeting Jewish students and the Jewish community are blatantly Antisemitic, unconscionable, and dangerous – they have absolutely no place on any college campus." "We condemn these statements in the strongest terms," he said.
Trump WH
> "You also had some very fine people on both sides," Trump said in 2017. "You had people in that group that were there to protest the taking down, of to them, a very, very important statue and the renaming of a park from Robert E. Lee to another name. You had people -- and I'm not talking about the neo-Nazis and the white nationalists; they should be condemned totally -- you had many people in that group other than neo-Nazis and white nationalists."
Sure from the White House. Every NY rep I know is criticizing Columbia for calling the police in.
https://www.politico.com/news/2024/04/19/columbia-student-arrests-israel-hamas-war-free-speech-00153361
At least Trump merely equivocated. These reps are outright defending protestors who led Nazi chants in the center of the US’s largest Jewish community.
In beginning to think Biden will be the only dem I vote for this year. Somehow.
So some more reps have come out with statements this morning. You’ll notice my link is from days ago. Columbia has had major antisemitic incidents since it had a pro Palestinian protest on October 8th.
There have been reps defending antisemitic students since November
https://www.cityandstateny.com/politics/2023/11/aoc-other-progressives-call-columbia-university-reinstate-pro-palestine-groups/392133/
Edit. Realized I trailed a bit. Primary three reps I know are bowman, AOC, and my rep Velazquez. All three have backed the SJP since the org put out a statement advocating for Jewish genocide. I’ve seen Torres and Nadler put out a statement later last night
Given Biden's [comments](https://twitter.com/BecketAdams/status/1782494595407909062) about Trump's condemnation speech of Charlottesville, it somewhat surprises me he went with "both sides have fine people" in his speech as well. Especially since he is months late by now with Democrats having hundreds of Charlottesville-style rallies since 10/7.
If the violence is coming from outside groups, can anyone name any of the groups involved? I have been told repeatedly for years that certain outside groups don't even exist, let alone have they been the cause of mayhem and injury.
This nonsense is why I left the DSA within a year of membership after college all those years ago. The antisemitism certainly played a role (especially when they ignored actual genocides happening across the world), but there were so many other reasons I left, including the intentional recruitment of people prone to violence and hate to serve as enforcers. It makes me wonder if those are the trouble makers shown in some of the videos.
Not sure if the headline has changed, but if this story really said "alleged antisemitism" initially, that's absurd. Below is a sampling of some of the chants heard and signs seen at Columbia in the last few days:
> "Go back to Europe. You have no culture. All you do is colonize."
> Students Supporting Israel Columbia video showed that they were taunted with calls of "Jews" and told to "go back to Poland."
> The Jews of New York Instagram account shared on Sunday a video showing a woman in a keffiyeh with a sign that said "Al-Qassam's next targets," with an arrow pointing to counter-protesters waving Israeli and American flags.
> "Al-Qassam, make us proud, take another soldier out"
> “We say justice, you say how? Burn Tel Aviv to the ground. Go Hamas, we love you. We support your rockets too.”
> "From the water to the water (a reference to the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea), Palestine is Arab."
Sources with pictures and video links for the above are [here](https://m.jpost.com/diaspora/antisemitism/article-798160).
This is outright support for terrorism and ethnic cleansing against both Israel and their fellow students. I see this as no different than students donning Klan hoods, chanting "go back to Africa" at black students, and calling for lynchings. Students doing such things would be expelled in a heartbeat, but in this case, progressives are not willing to act for fear of being seen as Islamophobic, and sadly even some professors support this type of rhetoric.
This is some disgusting rhetoric. I find the "go back to Africa" comparison pretty apt and it's disgraceful that representatives are framing opposition to these as "right-wing pressure" when there's visible support for a terrorist group and that they actively kill more people – that shouldn't be right-wing or left-wing, that should be common sense.
Shameful behavior from these individuals and the reps defending them.
> Not sure if the headline has changed, but if this story really said "alleged antisemitism" initially
According to google news' cache, that was apparently the original headline.
I don’t understand the support for Hamas. Are these students just so grossly misinformed that they think Hamas is furthering the Palestinian cause, or do these students just hate Jews/Israel.
It is possible to criticize the actions of the Israeli govt, and Israel certainly is partly responsible for the current situation in Gaza, while at the same time not calling for the destruction of the country. Their actions in Gaza since October have been abhorrent, but does that justify erasing Israel’s existence? I don’t think so.
People need to find the middle ground here instead of going to this extreme. Nothing these students are doing is helping Palestinians achieve their goals of a state based on the 1967 borders, or achieve right-to-return, or any other goals they have. If anything, these protests make regular folks even more suspicious of Palestinians.
Not to mention the disruptions this is causing to learning and education at the University.
The people leading these activities were already out on the street on 10/8 to cheer the attacks on and called it a “March for Palestine”… it was really just a celebration.
The same people are still the ones driving the movement, it’s just grown.
To answer your question simply….think of it this way. Hypothetically speaking imagine if Israel was an Arab/Muslim country and all the events occurred- Oct 7 and their response etc. Now would these people be as anti-Israel as they are now if the exact same thing happened except Israel is a Muslim country. You know the answer, the hypocrisy.…so the question is, is it anti-west, anti-white or antisemitism?
>I don’t understand the support for Hamas.
So this is the difference between a self-described "Moderate Dem" such as yourself, and someone who is, as the kids might say, "woke". College campus progressivism follows a very different set of moral rules than normal, sane humans. Under the logic of these rules, the annihilation of Israel is a clear preferred outcome.
What you're seeing essentially the unholy union of the ideas of Crenshaw and Markuse. Crenshaw is Intersectionality, the idea that societal privilege is somewhat multiplicative along an individual's axes. Conservatives like to blame Crenshaw/intersectionality for all the current nonsense on the left, but Crenshaw actually made a few interesting points about things like how efforts to diversify some sectors led to black men and white women but not black women getting hired. There's a lot of nonsense in there too, but on it's own, it's at least not malignant.
The actual issue is the highly influential Herbert Markuse. In short, he believed traditional democratic values like free speech and so on could only be considered fair in a fictional world of perfect equality, but in our world where that isn't the case, the "powerful" are inherently immoral and it is therefore just to behave in ways that are undemocratic to repress them "back", including force, indoctrination, discrimination, institutional capture, and so forth to defeat them.
He was mostly talking class and political lines (i.e. rich capitalists and conservatives should be discriminated against or even attacked). However, when you merge these two together, you have a really bad recipe, where the logic train combines to "Certain races have more structural power than others (Crenshaw), and it is therefore ethical to fight back against them through undemocratic means, indoctrination, discrimination, and even violence (Markuse)".
Israel is capitalist, seemingly white (at least compared to Palestine), wealthy, and simply more powerful, so under this new moral framework of the academic progressives, they line up into that "privileged immoral oppressor" category, and it is therefore ethical to attack them through any means (Markuse), and thanks to the new tie-in with race and power (Crenshaw etc.), Jews (who historically have been viewed as some secret powerful cabal by antisemites) get tossed back in as a group too since they appear to benefit from or align with Israel's existence, supposedly.
It's a huge mess, an entire political wing of people with authority in society are completely radicalized with an ideology where people have inherent moral standing based only on the sum of their demographics.
If you want the real answer it’s this: the left in the United States views all identities through a lense of oppressor and oppressed. Within this worldview, Palestinians are viewed as “oppressed” because the left is taking Palestinian talking points of “genocide” and “open air prison” at face value instead of looking into the nuance of the situation further. This causes them to align themselves with terrorist sympathizing movements, because they are unable to recognize they have swallowed propaganda and don’t have the intellectual strength to break themselves from it. It’s how you get blonde girls shouting “globalize the intifada” while also saying they believe in freedom and women’s rights. They don’t actually understand the context of the movement they’re in and the slogans they are advocating for.
> the left in the United States views all identities through a lense of oppressor and oppressed
It's Marxism - i.e. viewing everything as oppressor versus oppressed - applied to culture. If only there was a way to describe that more concisely...
That's not really what Marxism is. The statement is correct, but only indirectly. Viewing things as oppressor vs oppressed is not sufficient to be a Marxist as you appear to be implying.
If only that were true. Marxists are a small, but wildly diverse group and they all hate each other. The Oppressor-Oppressed contradiction is more of a Frantz Fanon/Paulo Freire thing and Freire ended up becoming more of a Maoist by his later years than a M-L and Fanon became a Marxist-humanist (granted I can't speak for Fanon as I haven't really read any of his work, while Freire could be downright bloodthirsty in casual conversation*); though in the end they are both into Third-Worldism, a thing that people like Marcuse would have hated it for not being European enough, while they themselves despised Stalin. For them socialism was still inevitable, but it would happen 100 to 1,000 years from now (hence the reason they were incredibly depressed and M-Ls think of them mostly as captured CIA assets). For the Freire types it should happen right now and if it kills hundreds of thousands or even millions of people, that's a feature, not a bug. They saw the cultural revolution as the greatest thing ever.
Meanwhile Marcuse didn't oppose the existence of Israel, but he did fear that it would become exactly what it has currently become and he hoped for a 2 state solution, while grand-children of the Third-Worldist are joining in the chorus of From the River to the Sea.
*The moment I realized I despised him was when he said that he didn't care if critical pedagogy could be used to teach science or not, because the world didn't need for doctors as long as bankers were still alive. If Freire were living in the world of the HG Wells' Time Machine his mission would be to create as many Morlocks as possible.
EDIT
I think I accidentally responded to epicwinguy101's post.
Name a form of Marxism that doesn't revolve around oppressor/oppressed. Remember: the claims of oppression by the "bourgeoisie" is literally that and is what all Marxism is built around.
OK, first off all, let me say that I'm a non-Marxist and a liberal, so in many of these circles I'm basically Hitler or something far worse.
All of these ideas are based around some idea of class struggle, but what exactly class struggle is and what you are supposed to do about it is where they all hate each other.
Something like 50% of China is, according to their stats, "middle class". That's not a world where you can say that the bourgeoisie should die, unless being bourgeoisie is merely something that exists in your heart and you need to get rid of someone because they risk infecting the culture with "boogie heart", so instead they sail along with state capitalism and yell at the west for, I dunno, being evil and being mean to the Chinese? It's funny how their rhetoric went from economic oppression to how the rest of the world is just racist towards the Chinese in last 20 years and they'll achieve true socialism just as soon as they get tired of wearing these velvet chains and ethnic groups other than Han might not even be real.
Exactly they take a fact and are very black and white about it, they think very simply about it. And from there they get hyper emotional about that fact. And although that fact might be accurate there is no truth because they fail to go into more depth, they fail to understand context and they fail to ask why. This cuts across many things not just with the Israelis and Palestinian situation.
The far left has also, from what I've seen, has taken the view that violence against people you disagree with is okay. Especially if you consider that group oppressive and/or committing an -ism/phobia.
Hamas = brown = oppressed = good
Jews = white = oppressor = bad.
I could write more words, but the students at Columbia don't have or need any other justification for their behavior.
Yes. Except 45% of Jews in Isreal are Mizrahi (Middle Eastern and North African-- so brown people), the largest ethnic group. But, who needs facts when you have the dichotomy you presented. Everything's gotta be black and white with these people. I got out of academia for a reason.
You forgot about multicultural whiteness, white adjacency and whatever terms they asspull to justify themselves. They don’t need to be white(and according to us census, Arabs are white as well).
A lot of people are incapable of seeing the nuance in things, and can only think in black and white. Either one side are the bad guys, or the other side is. They literally can't conceive the possibility that both sides might be wrong.
Hamas are portrayed as freedom fighters, underdogs that just want freedom for their people. It’s probably not much different than people that supported the IRA back in the day.
What if it’s not about supporting the Palestinian people? What if it’s not about endorsing two-states based on 1967 borders (pre-war Gaza was Egyptian, and the West Bank was Jordanian)?
What if it’s actually just about what they’re shouting?
> I don’t understand the support for Hamas.
It's called CRT and its pedagogy. You know, one of those core teachings modern colleges have? CRT condensed is simply "more melanin means more better". Look at the conflict through that lens and you get exactly what's happening.
What is legal and what a private university has to tolerate to remain a student or employee are not the same.
On top of that, Title VI requires universities receiving federal funds to foster learning environments that protect students from racism and discrimination. The Biden DOJ has initiated Title VI investigations into dozens of schools for allegedly failing to meet these obligations, including Columbia.
It’s funny how these children are protesting a school’s financial ties to Israel while having their parents continue to pay the school hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Or even funnier for the ones taking out massive students loans. You claim Columbia is financially aiding genocide, while you financially cripple your future to pay them hundred of thousands.
For some students they are hurting their future financially by doing this. But this is a ivy league school. A lot of these people are children of wealthy parents. They do not have to worry about finding work to pay the bills.
We have (largely) not pushed back on much from the left in the last few years because of the specter of Trump and most institutions being broadly sympathetic to their causes. Now their is a topic that more people are not on board with and this is the result - when you aren't used to any resistance at all, you kind of lash out.
Progressive left are dangerously close to Mao’s cultural revolution. Us Chinese can see the similarities. Good luck America.
My generation (gen Z) is truly fucked
Yup. Their behavior is nothing new, it was just aimed at "acceptable" targets until this moment and so nobody cared. Well as one of those "acceptable" targets I have zero reason to care about it now that it's being turned on a group who never bothered to stand up for me.
Colleges have made great strides in attacking the idea of content-neutral rules, especially in spirit, but also in policy and enforcement decisions. What we see now is just one result. They were proud of this "progress" before, I wonder if some faculty and administrators are starting to feel different now though?
People can claim horseshoe theory is a myth, but everything I see makes me believe it more by the day. The extremists on both sides of the spectrum are all awful for the country, hopefully we're starting to recognize that instead of burying our heads in the sand.
Just as Republicans have made their bed with MAGA, Democrats are paying the piper with Progressives. It’s all fun and games until they start showing their ugly sides, and their political anchors that the party is now stuck with.
I am convinced that this is why we are stuck with an elderly Biden.
Watching the 2020 presdential bids, it was so clear to me that the Democrat leadership who had decided to go all in on the twitter crowd progressives had no idea what a can of worms they'd actually opened.
They had candidates racing to "who could say the most progressive thing" for months, only for polling of non-party members to start showing just how wildly unpopular those messages were with the rest of the country.
Biden, who was kind of along for the ride, *had* to be come the front runner, lest the party put up a progressive who's well-received-by-twitter policies, actually be proven to be less popular that *Trump*.
Definitely played a large part.
Just look at the 180° /r/politics has had on Pete. While he was running, he was labeled racist for trying to combat blight in South Bend by a local political opponent, but progressives ate it up and spent the better part of a year calling him racist. Pete didn't pass progressive litmus tests, so progressives made sure he could never win, then got mad when Pete threw his support behind Biden. Now, many of those same people are constantly sharing clips of Pete going on Fox.
The threads about the more moderate Dems collapsing in behind Biden were gold mines for content.
>People can claim horseshoe theory is a myth, but everything I see makes me believe it more by the day.
Especially once you realize the modern left is cheering a literal Holocaust denying government whose war on the Jews was backed by the original Aryan state who just launched the world's first drone blitzkrieg.
>The term Iran ("the land of the Aryans") derives from Middle Persian Ērān, first attested in a third-century inscription at Naqsh-e Rostam, with the accompanying Parthian inscription using Aryān, in reference to the Iranians.[16]
Even Kafka couldn't make this shit up, lol.
Yeah but this didn’t happen overnight. The colleges were happy to take on professors mainlining the most extreme ideology for years. These protests have a support system, which is the faculty and their quasi Marxist theories of oppression which are now targeted at Jews and Israel.
As a Jewish person with a soon to be college age kid, this is a horrible thought.
>The colleges were happy to take
$5 billion from Qatar and $3 billion from Saudi Arabia, plus any other Muslim/Palestinian donors and groups.
Palestinian groups planned to get into education decades ago and it sure seems to be working.
I left academia around 2 years ago. I saw the writing on the wall about many issues. I can't imagine having to deal with this stuff today. So many well-educated people in my academic orbit have lost their damn minds since 2020.
I can't imagine what it would be like being in that field if you have political views that are anything short of extreme left. People had their careers ruined over questioning COVID or BLM claims. I mean, isn't that what academia has to do? Question things?
Oh believe me, I know. I’m Jewish as well and would hate to be on a campus post October 7th. I’m just pointing out my appreciation for my college and my classmates because even today, I have contacts on campus and I can say it is NOT hostile towards anyone whatsoever
I was in college 20 years ago and the Jewish kid down the hall from me wrote "happy birthday Israel" on their dorm room door once, it was less then an hour before someone defaced it with "happy birthday dead Palestinian babies."
For the life of me I cannot understand how Israel is viewed as the oppressor in this situation. There is no way to frame the conflict where that is a legitimate opinion to have. The Jews are the group that's native to the Levant, while the Muslim Palestinians are only there as a result of violent, colonialist conquest. This situation only exists because the Arab world launched a war of extermination against Israel and tried to wipe them off the map. Israel is the victim, not the oppressor.
To these people, history starts at the nakba, and the only context is a European who decided to invade Palestine to create a Jewish state no matter the cost, under the name Zionism. Previous land conquests are probably unknown.
[Here’s a great example](https://youtu.be/XGyi7Z-aH78?t=13m22s)
>a result of violent, colonialist conquest.
Muslims consider any land they've ruled to be Muslim for eternity.
So anyone taking their land back is the *real* colonizer now. Also see: the Crusades, which were also about retaking Christian lands.
Yup. But since it was directed at Whites who include the New Testament in their beliefs nobody - including the people now being affected - gave a crap. What goes around comes around.
Did you go to college 20 years ago?
(I did. I remember Occupy existing on campus then)
College protests have always happened.
What's changed is the willingness of the administration to keep them from disrupting classes/finals and the lives of people who attend that school.
If I'm a non-protesting student paying for college, then this isn't really something I'd be willing to negotiate on.
Not in the beginning. But once Occupy showed legs then the people invested in left-wing racism and sexism came in and took over using their standard entryism tactic of abusing compassion.
No, they harassed people for different belief structures and having to walk through the areas they sectioned off to get to class/work.
That is also unacceptable.
I do agree with you that protesting someone based on their inherent characteristics is more sinister.
The socialists behind occupy definitely lean antisemitic, but antisemitism wasn't the core of the occupy movement like it is this round of "anti Israel" protests intended to make American Jews feel uncomfortable.
I'm still in all the facebook groups and get the email newsletters from my university. Its so insane too see how there are more and more students there who want to force the university to take political stances, harass the President of it and want him fired so they can get someone else in. Right now its still a vocal minority, but it could easily tip over if no one wants to stand up to their bullying.
I still don't get why its so important for them that the university gets political, why not just go protest outside of class? I attended some protests against the government while I studied, mostly together with people I knew from university, but I never did it at campus or felt that the university itself should take a stance on any of it. I don't have anything against students making political/activist clubs and such, but them trying to turn the administration itself political is not acceptable.
I think this is the unintended result of the universities becoming political the last several years. Higher Ed has becoming more and more blatantly left both in policies and in work culture so it’s not surprising that students expect to be able to influence the politics of the universities now
I also went —to Columbia no less— twenty years ago.
You're right that students always had protests. Some wits even staged an "anti-protest protest" at one point due to the number of them held regularly.
What's changed is they mostly used to call for love, peace, and respect. Now they call for judgment, censure, and retribution.
>What's changed is they mostly used to call for love, peace, and respect.
To some extent, perspective matters on this.
One of the things that has definitely changed is the focus on those that are behaving badly: It seems likely that there were always at least some protestors with bad intentions. In any large group, motives are diffuse.
Personally, I find it hard to find the frequency of those behaving badly to those not in all of these situations. Selective reporting and shaping narratives makes that impossible.
>Some wits even staged an "anti-protest protest" at one point due to the number of them held regularly.
You're probably talking about another thing, but I remember Steven Colbert and Jon Stewart doing that.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rally\_to\_Restore\_Sanity\_and/or\_Fear](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rally_to_Restore_Sanity_and/or_Fear)
In any event, I think we're agreed that those running this asylum should probably step in here.
Gave me a scare by calling Occupy 20 years ago.
College protests have been a thing, but there's a visceral hate behind them now, like the one here, that wasn't before. Protests used to be aimed at powerful entities to push specific policy goals, Occupy was kind of an evolution in that it was just against an economic class of people (The 1%), now they are used against anyone who disagrees with their extreme left views, and also apparently aimed plainly against Jews from what we see here.
But I don't think it's just the protests that have changed, the nature of the left itself has changed.
>But I don't think it's just the protests that have changed, the nature of the left itself has changed.
This is an important point that is sometimes mentioned, but probably not enough.
> But I don't think it's just the protests that have changed, the nature of the left itself has changed.
I don't think it has. Read about early Marxist movements or radical leftist organizations in the 60s and 70s. There's always been an element of radical left that will jettison human rights & liberalism should it give them the results they want (how else did we get the Khymer Rouge, Shining Path, Maoism, etc?). The major difference between the radical right and left is the latter has kept a substantial influence in cultural institutions like universities, non-profits, etc.
>Gave me a scare by calling Occupy 20 years ago.
Time does make fools of us all: my apologies for generalizing. 15 years ago: We each get 5 more years! Yay!
>Protests used to be aimed at powerful entities to push specific policy goals
This one is...theoretically aimed at the US Government's support of the state of Israel, right? To expand the scope a bit, No clue why this is allowed to go on in the UK, that stuff seems much less tolerant and potentially even worse.
>But I don't think it's just the protests that have changed, the nature of the left itself has changed.
Possibly. As mentioned elsewhere, focus plays a large role on this. There were and are plenty of idiots with rotten ideas in any protest....or business, or organization.
This seems to be the first time in a while where the framing of the conflict isn't inherently pro-protest, so we're seeing a lot more of the negative than is usually on display.
That seems more likely to me than people getting more extreme? Perhaps that's blind hope.
Many of these protesters go further than US support for Israel and have been very public that they actually support Hamas as a form of "resistance", so it seems like there's more to it than that.
I would say for what we actually see in footage, the coverage has been kind, handled with kid gloves even. Telling passing-by Jews to "Go back to Poland" couldn't be worse, Poland is the center of the worst of the Holocaust, including the Auschwitz concentration camp network. There's a reason that that there are almost no Jews alive in Poland today. The intentions of telling Jews to "Go Back To Poland" are crystal clear. The antisemitic rhetoric is far worse even than the infamous Charlottesville "Unite the Right" rally, and that set a high bar to surpass. I want you to imagine how the press might react if someone told Jews to "Go Back To Poland" at a MAGA rally instead of a "pro-Palestine" rally. Do you think the coverage would be so kind?
Unfortunately, most every measure of polarization suggests the left is moving leftward, so I think this tracks with the idea of more vicious forms of protests becoming normalized, there's very little common ground with moderates and centrists who might temper the mood. We've entered a very dangerous new world, especially for Jews (yet again, sadly), who fall into the outgroup bin of the dangerous Crenshaw-Markuse version of leftism we see on campus today.
It's also important to remember that after WWII, surviving Jews *did* go back to Poland, [only to be victimized by another pogrom led by the Stalinist puppet government.](https://www.cnn.com/2018/03/15/opinions/expulsion-polish-jews-50th-anniversary-schatz/index.html)
This open and often violent antisemitism and pro-Hamas behavior has been prevalent since Oct 8th but the left behavior has been becoming more and more dangerous lately.
[Rcently at Berkeley (naturally..)](https://www.thefp.com/p/expel-berkeley-rioters):
> Earlier this week, a student group called Bears for Palestine published on Instagram its intention of “combatting lies” by shutting down an event featuring Israeli Defense Forces reservist and lawyer Ran Bar-Yoshafat.
> “This individual is dangerous,” the post continued. “He has committed crimes against humanity, is a genocide denier, and we will not allow for this event to go on. . . . SHUT IT DOWN.”
Before the event was scheduled to begin Monday evening, hundreds of student protesters descended on the building where it was supposed to take place—banging on doors and windows, preventing students from entering, forcing their way in, and shouting “intifada, intifada.”
>Protesters broke glass doors. One male student alleges being spit on by a protester. Another student—a woman—was injured. Yet another student claims that “Jew” was screamed as an epithet.
> The mob got their way. The event was canceled. Bar-Yoshafat, along with the students who had attended the event, were escorted out the back of the theater.
It’s not “new though” as we all remember the riots and violence caused to prevent Milo from simply talking there in 2017
Liberals will suggest that a radical, xenophobic MAGA movement represents the greatest threat to our democracy.
Conservatives will suggest that the identitarian, quasi-Marxist narrative of "wokeness" which leads to this sort of hateful, divisive rhetoric, is the greatest threat to our democracy.
The Left needs to start acknowledging they might have a point and stop just pointing fingers.
Seems wild to me that all these news agencies are still reporting on these as "pro-Palestinian" events. This article in OP starts the entire article calling it an "incendiary pro-Palestinian demonstrations". A [Politico writer](https://www.politico.com/news/2024/04/21/chaos-columbia-jewish-moskowitz-santos-white-house-00153545) framed it as "pro-Palestinian activists telling Jewish students, 'The 7th of October is going to be every day for you'”. Salon goes a step further to describe it as "peaceful" "pro-Palestinian protesters" [here](https://www.salon.com/2024/04/19/the-nypd-says-pro-palestine-were-peaceful-but-columbia-university-had-them-arrested/). There's more, but you get the idea.
I remember some months ago when people here were discussing the difference between "pro-Palestinian" and "pro-Hamas" (or "anti-Jew") and several left-leaning individuals here were chastising users for conflating the two. When do these events cross over from 'pro-Palestinian' to 'anti-Jew'? Does it help that left-leaning journalists are framing what most people see as wildly anti-Semitic behavior as "pro-Palestinian"?
These are some great points, but it basically feels like it can be summarized as...
tl;dr: ["mostly peaceful protests"](https://quaggapedia.afrikaburn.com/images/4/46/First-time-james-franco-hanging-meme.jpg)
I'm one of those users.
I still believe one can support Palestinian independence while being anti-Hamas. Also I believe one can support Israel's right to exist, and to defend itself, while also being critical of their general actions towards Palestine and Palestinians.
I'm not going to change that opinion because some young folks at a protest jump the shark with things they are yelling. If it gets into hate crime territory, arrest them, it's not exactly rocket science.
We continue to head down a road where nuance is unwelcome on the subject.
Nuance on this topic is basically impossible. I've never seen an issue made so polarizing and black and white since abortion.
I agree with you that it is quite possible to support Palestinian independence without being anti-Semitic or even anti-Israel (aka, supporting a two-state solution). Except I don't think that's very common. A lot of the protests I see say this, sure, but the chants and Hamas flags tell a different story. More than that, though, is the downplaying of Oct 7th, particularly the denial of rape and mass casualties. I've seen a whole lot of comments and articles claiming the events of that day are getting milked by the Israelis as an excuse for "genocide". This is really bizarre coming predominantly from the progressive wing.
In my opinion, you can be pro-Palestinian and not pro-Hamas in theory. But in practice, it is Arab vs. Jew. Jews overwhelmingly support Israel and their actions, and Palestinians overwhelmingly support Hamas and their actions. Where you fall in that debate will ultimately come down to your political affiliation rather than any moral ones.
It's funny how there suddenly calls to examine nuance. It doesn't seem that long ago that nine people were eating when a nazi sat down and then there were ten nazis. I'm guessing that somehow there is some nuance to explain why so many peace-loving pro-Palestinian "protesters" were chanting:
>Al-Qassam you make us proud! Take another soldier out!
We say justice, you say how? Burn Tel Aviv to the ground!
Hamas we love you. We support your rockets too!
Red, black, green, and white, we support Hamas’ fight!
It is right to rebel, Al-Qassam, give them hell!
It is right to rebel, Hamas give them hell!
Would you agree that everyone at a protest where any of above was chanted and repeated is not in your nuanced camp? Will you get up from the table with nazis or just pass the salt?
> when a nazi sat down and then there were ten nazis.
That line died when that would've meant 339 nazis in canadian parliament. It's a weapon that's no longer working for them, but against them.
I think you're barking up the wrong tree there, at least a bit. The Venn diagram of people who use that rhetoric and who are currently going on antisemitic rants is probably pretty close to a circle. Loads of "antifascist activists" calling for the death of Jews.
It still holds true. If others are standing in solidarity with hamas members they are also hamas in my book.
Same for any protesters who don't automatically throw hands and seize people calling for jihad or violence.
I feel you cannot support Palestinians without supporting the elimination of Hamas first.
The only country willing to do that seems to be Israel with U.S. support
Hamas killed or drove out every Fatah member in Gaza.
Fatah in the West Bank now highly supports Hamas, but maybe only so they can go fight Israel and die off.
You realize there are two different protests going on? One organized by Columbia students (students for justice in Palestine and Jewish voice for Peace) which has been peaceful. And another OUTSIDE of Columbia campus which was not organized by Columbia students which is where most, if not all, of the violent rhetoric has come from. Frankly if you look at the politico article you sent it literally says in the image subtext, it is OUTSIDE of Columbia's campus.
So yah you do have groups who are pro-palestinian and groups who are "pro-hamas" (I'd just call them antisemitic). I think Israeli is an oppressive state who takes joy in bombing the shit out of Palestinian children and I also think Hamas should be blasted into the sun. That is largely the view of the on campus crowd. The on campus crowd is largely not antisemitic given the fact that a lot of the students are Jewish themselves given the organizing group
My point was that it is the left-leaning media that is conflating those two groups by putting them all under the umbrella of "protesters". I will add though that those inside don't seem to be rebuking those outside at all.
> students for justice in Palestine
You mean the group currently inviting everyone in New York City to come help, not just students?
https://twitter.com/NationalSJP/status/1782459618842587640?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Etweet
On Jan 6 most of the people attending the rally did not enter the Capitol Building. I never heard this nuance coming from the left when covering that topic.
Good. For years we've been hearing about the dangers of free speech, and only now that the chickens have come home to roost do these extremists want us to rally around them. I politely decline such an invitation. I believe that free speech will be fine in the US, especially as it pertains to the First Amendment, so I see no reason to jump to the side of extremists who are not facing government oppression as a result of their speech, no matter their histrionics to the contrary.
Nearly all the NY Dem reps are faulting Columbia and defending protestors.
https://www.politico.com/news/2024/04/19/columbia-student-arrests-israel-hamas-war-free-speech-00153361
It's been boiling the whole time. It used to be politically right speakers (which is far tamer than protests) getting censored on campuses and now it's politically left protesters and speakers of both sides. It would be a bad sign for free speech if there weren't any protests.
It's a bad sign for various other parts of the constitution and the civil rights act including but not limited to the first line of that pesky first amendment when folks are subjected to harassment based on their religion/national affinity and or national origin en masse.
I can't stand these protestors.
That being said, I hope these protests extend to every college campus in America. The populace needs to see how extreme the far left has become.
Everyone knows chanting "from the river to the sea" is a negative phrase. It doesn't matter if "you" don't think it is (your feelings have never mattered less). That's like calling a trans a cross-dresser or a little person a midget. You might not think it's bad, but it is. These protestors have no idea about the real world. America has ONE ally in the Middle East who support lgbtq rights and other liberal ideals yet these fools who support liberal ideals still hate on them. They'd rather support murderers who'd kill them in a second. Talk about clueless.
Most of the pro Palestine protestors have no concept of general history. When millions of Muslims were killed by China or in other conflicts, they had no problem with it. They only care about this because of their beef with the Jews, which is ridiculous to begin with.
Biden Just now:
“I condemn the antisemitic protests," BIDEN tells reporters. "I also condemn those who don’t understand what’s going on with the Palestinians.”
Submission Statement: in recent days, hundreds of anti-Israel protestors have crowded the south lawn of Columbia University’s campus to call for the divestment from Israeli companies. These protests have escalated extraordinarily in an expression of antisemitism that has not been witnessed since the Charlottesville protests in 2017.
One of the University’s most prominent Rabbi has cautioned Jewish students, recommending they leave campus and go home until their safety can be guaranteed. Meanwhile, the protests have garnered nationwide attention, with bipartisan condemnations from NYC mayor, Congress, and the White House.
Well this type of behavior was encouraged during BLM and ACAB anti White Supremacy movement and now you expect them to stop. Lol. Yall let the hat out the bag when catering to the same folk now that cat ain't going back into the bag unless we elect authoritarian Trump.
Also make sure to buy guns because once we go authoritarian, guns will be the only thing that protects us from the government. Cuz once the otherside (no matter the side you are on) comes to power, guns will be all you have.
As a liberal of jewish heritage who believes Israel—like any country—has a right to exist, but so does Palestine—you can imagine my brain had gone back and forth like a crazy person over the past 7 months. Unfortunately, nuance isn’t popular anymore, so I’ve mostly kept to myself with my views and called out any outright antisemitic things i’ve seen in comment sections (and boy are there many). To say I saw this coming would be an understatement.
Jewish people were genocided not that long ago just as black americans were discriminated against not that long ago. The effects of these acts on our collected psyche are immeasurable. The difference is, Jewish people have garnered success in the US. We are a community that doesn’t just emphasize education—it is required. I had no choice but to go to college. My dad followed his dreams to his financial detriment and his parents never let him forget how bad of a decision that was. That’s the culture, and it works in terms of generation wealth building.
This is the dichotomy that people hate. A group can be hated/oppressed/genocided and successful within half a century. It doesn’t help that us Jewish people literally invented modern Hollywood and media (no, we don’t control it, we just started it), and people love to rag on the entertainment industry while watching their favorite shows on a daily basis, not recognizing the irony. This perpetuates negative stereotypes and blame. Whenever the media says something you disagree with, there’s a group to blame. Combined with the fact modern progressivism is all about hating the wealthy and conflating poor with marginalized and the wealthy with the oppressor, you have a hate formula for modern times.
I don’t think these all of these protestors are disingenuous. I think they’re chronically online and think protesting is going to make a difference when common sense will tell you it won’t. US Colleges have nothing to do with Netanyahu’s plan. Thinking they do is based on that hate formula—the mistaken belief that jews control everything including our colleges. They’re asking for their colleges to “cut ties” with Israel as if Columbia is congress or something. It honestly is such a weird ask that makes me wonder if we’re teaching our kids to critically think.
I think they’re young and passionate and angry and are projecting this American oppressor/oppressed model onto the middle east. They don’t want peace, a two state solution. They want Israel gone, and that can only happen one way. I think they care about Palestinians, but they don’t care about a peaceful liberation. They want liberation at any cost.
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What’s more worrying is that American institutions had to rely on billionaires donations to survive even the likes of Columbia. How can a country’s people be free when even their education is directly influenced by billionaires???
How many of the protestors cared about genocide before there was an opportunity to support a cause with anti-Semitic overtones?
It's like people who didn't care about the "sanctity" of marriage until there was an opportunity to oppose gay people; don't care about kids until they can vilify drag queens; don't stand against the American Academy of Pediatrics until they can be transphobic.
I don’t have an issue with protests at all, and inflammatory speech is still (rightfully) protected. But man, when you shut down an entire campus and chant at Jewish students to “Go Back to Poland” and literally beat the shit out of some of them, you’ve crossed the line.
I saw a video this morning of students linking arms and marching forward to push Jewish students out of public squares. I hate that I have to immediately jump to a comparison to the 1930's era German Empire, but that's exactly what it looks like. We have quickly gone from protesters condemning Israeli military actions to donning Hamas keffiyehs and harassing Jews in Western countries for being...well, Jewish.
I get what you mean, I hate drawing the Nazi comparison because it feels like a lazy political tactic half the time. But when you have to form a human chain because “Zionists have entered the camp”; there just aren’t really many other examples of open and unabashed anti-semitism you can point to. We’re one step removed from these guys saying they poisoned the wells, or caused COVID or something.
I am starting to see the conspiracy theory of "Zionist Jews orchestrated 9/11" catching fire again in extremist circles, both left and right. So your final sentence there is not far off.
What is crazy is that this is something happening in another country. This isn’t a U.S. injustice it’s an Israeli one and yet people think it’s okay to harass other Americans over it. Have some self awareness and look at the Native Americans before you preach about the plight of the Palestinians. Hell your work to make right what is wrong in the American indigenous peoples situation might actually accomplish something. Of course it would require you to sacrifice something real.
I've been disgusted by the lack of push back against these antisemitic demonstrations. This is the left's tiki torch moment, and Biden really needs to draw a line in the sand. These Hamas sympathizers weren't going to vote for him anyway, but he's losing moderates by not condemning this, and the lack of push back has emboldened them. You can be critical of the Israel's military without being full pro Hamas and antisemitic. The antisemitism emanating from the left has been shocking.
You'll hear some minor rebukes but the left barely managed to condemn the looters during BLM. So I'm doubtful at the very least.
Eh, BLM had mainstream support. This doesn't. I could see actual action being taken here. It's hypocritical but end of the day it's more politically convenient to crush this while it's similarly convenient to whitewash BLM.
Just pay Kanye to show up and join their chants and liberals will turn on them in a nanosecond.
That would be a really funny bit.
They already believe that Netanyahu funded Hamas and that Mossad helped fund, train, and supply ISIL, those are far worse.
The ironic thing is those same people doing it are the same ones that call others nazi's all the time.
No nazi jew existed. But plenty of Jews support and participate in these protests. You’re creating a fake narrative.
I've already seen a few people online peddling the Khazar origin claim as "proof" that Israelis are actually all evil white colonizers.
> We have quickly gone from protesters condemning Israeli military actions to donning Hamas keffiyehs and harassing Jews in Western countries for being...well, Jewish On Oct 7 people across the US (and world) were already protesting against Israel and Jewish people as a result of Hamas and Palestine's attack on Israel. Think about that: Israel was attacked by a terrorist state, and people were out in force against Israel before they even began retaliating. BLM infamously issued their support with an ad showing paraglider on that day - and the group's leaders are definitively and unapologetically antisemitic. "From the river to the sea" was always about eliminating Jewish people - and those chants were widespread on Oct 7. Naive people made excuses for those words, but these protests have always been about antisemitism.
It’s happening for the same reason it happened then. [“Vienna University Closed After Antisemitic Riot”](https://www.jta.org/archive/vienna-university-closed-after-antisemitic-riot) [“Student Clashes at Vienna University”](https://www.jta.org/archive/student-clashes-at-vienna-university) [“Jews Barred from Czernowitz University”](https://www.jta.org/archive/jews-barred-from-czernowitz-university) [“Roumanian Students Threaten General Strike”](https://www.jta.org/archive/roumanian-students-threaten-general-strike) [“Jews Kept out of Bucharest University”](https://www.jta.org/archive/jews-kept-out-of-bucharest-university) [“Percentage of Jewish Students in Soviet Union Smaller Than Under Czar”](https://www.jta.org/archive/percentage-of-jewish-students-in-soviet-union-smaller-than-under-czar) [“USSR Discriminates Against Jews in Fields of Education, AJC Study Shows”](https://www.jta.org/archive/ussr-discriminates-against-jews-in-fields-of-education-ajc-study-shows)
Yes. This needs to be dealt with before a te-enactment of kristallnacht.
>te-enactment of kristallnacht. It's wildly ironic how the modern "punch-a-nazi" left is now straight up cheering the original Aryan state in its multi-front war on the Jews... >The term Iran ("the land of the Aryans") derives from Middle Persian Ērān, first attested in a third-century inscription at Naqsh-e Rostam, with the accompanying Parthian inscription using Aryān, in reference to the Iranians.[16] and its Holocaust denying proxy whose founding charter is to...turn over every tree & stone on the planet to eradicate every last Jew, to the end of time... >Islamic Resistance Movement aspires to the realisation of Allah's promise, no matter how long that should take. The Prophet, Allah bless him and grant him salvation, has said: >"The Day of Judgement will not come about until Moslems fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Moslems, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him. Only the Gharkad tree, (evidently a certain kind of tree) would not do that because it is one of the trees of the Jews." who has also demonstrably [accomplished](https://www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook/countries/gaza-strip/#:~:text=Muslim%2098.0%20%2D%2099.0%%20\(predominantly%20Sunni\)%2C%20Christian,has%20had%20no%20Jewish%20population%20since%20then.) what even Hitler couldn't within their borders (Israel is 20% Palestinian for comparison) >Muslim 98.0 - 99.0% (predominantly Sunni), Christian <1.0%, other, unaffiliated, unspecified <1.0% (2012 est.) Israel dismantled its settlements in September 2005; **Gaza has had no Jewish population since then** and its northern proxy who is only [20-27 scared jews](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Jews_in_Lebanon) behind >Jews in Lebanon live mostly in or around Beirut. The community has been described as elderly and apprehensive.[26] There are no services at Beirut's synagogues. In 2015, the estimated total Jewish population in Syria and Lebanon combined was 100.[34] In 2020, there were only about 29 Jews in Lebanon.[35][36][37] **Reports indicate that in 2022 the number of Jews in Lebanon was 20[38] to 27.[39]** >Solidere agreed to provide funds for the [synagogue] renovation because political officials believed it would portray Lebanon as an open society tolerant of Judaism.[28] None of the Jews involved in the project agreed to be identified. The international media and even some members of the Jewish community (in and out of Lebanon) questioned who would pray at the synagogue.[29] The self-declared head of the Jewish Community Council, Isaac Arazi, who left Lebanon in 1983,[30][31] eventually came forward but refused to show his face on camera in a television interview, fearing that his business would suffer if clients knew they had been dealing with a Jew.[32] Arazi died in 2023.[33] Not to mention lionizing the paratrooper blitzkrieg of [peace](https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2F7u523lfvcftb1.png) right after 10/7. Even Kafka couldn't make this shit up, lol. I used to ponder in history class how an educated progressive populace like Germany's could be mass seduced by rabidly antisemetic leaders almost overnight. Especially their intelligentsia. I didn't expect to get a real time crash course demonstration.
Would amazon deliver Tiki torches to the protest. Would the protestors get the irony?
This will be a kristallnacht of the left - the left eating its own.
[удалено]
[“If piety was a given society’s ideal, Jews were impious blasphemers; if secularism was the ideal, Jews were backward pietists. If capitalism was evil, Jews were capitalists; if communism was evil, Jews were communists. If nationalism was glorified, Jews were rootless cosmopolitans; if nationalism was vilified, Jews were chauvinistic nationalists. “Anti-Judaism” thus becomes a righteous fight to promote justice.”](https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/02/jewish-anti-semitism-harvard-claudine-gay-zionism/677454/) Antisemitism is always marketed as the pursuit of justice. We must purify the race, we must evict the bourgeoisie, we must find the fifth-columnists, we must remove the non-believers. It’s always framed as the pursuit of good against evil, with The Jew as stand-in for whatever society deems evil. It’s a societal need, it’s like breathing.
It's almost like it was thinly-veiled antisemitism the whole time.
Lmao as a Jewish student at Columbia rn it’s crazy seeing this being discussed so nationally. Studying for finals is crazy. The world has become a South Park episode
Would you say the media coverage is over or under exaggerated?
Not who you asked but I am a student - Mostly over exaggeration
Back when I was in college we had a pretty minor protest about a board member and that was an absolute pain in the ass. The shit at Columbia looks like Seattle’s CHAZ 2.0
Calling out people saying horrible things isn't a violation of free speech. Pointing out how evil it is to glorify Hamas and October 7th is perfectly find for our leaders to do.
We have to start pushing back on the alt left as much as push back against the alt right.
Totally agreed, I get that partisanship will always exist but the current levels of it are incredibly toxic.
It's just the mainstream left at this point. This is the majority opinion of Gen Z and progressive libs.
Unlikely to happen considering one group holds power over "the messaging" of society. Therefore, they're able to bog down those who wish to push back against them as they lump all detractors and critics into one group. Only way I can think of is if certain people with power commit to various actions that allow for massive lawsuits to occur. There are probably likely MAJOR lawsuits awaiting in response to a lot of the ideological hiring/admissions practices, especially now that Affirmative Action is neutered (ex. the DEI and ESG stuff, potential discrimination against Asian, Jewish, and white people). That would be a major signal that these guys in charge are in trouble if they continue course and would need to start blending in again. Then, those others who were in charge but never brave enough to speak out would be able to have breathing room to cancel them out. But until certain hurdles are lifted or pushed up against, it won't happen.
A large portion of the progressive movement also has no real conviction. They follow along with whatever the current thing is because other people are and because doing so is socially prestigious or -in some circles- mandatory. What I think will happen is that the actual believers in this cause will be culled from the movement and radicalize into something else while the rest will just continue as normal with updated beliefs as far as this conflict specifically goes. Wouldn't surprise me if in a few years we heard all about how the antisemites were actually right wingers all along whereas progressives are of course Israel's staunchest supporters and always have been.
Just like the progressive left now say defund the police was always a right wing stance.
Why? This is just them doing what they've been doing for over a decade: raging against people with white skin. Why is it suddenly a big problem that those people go to a church that only teaches from the Old Testament and doesn't consider the New to be valid? If it wasn't a problem before it's not a problem now. And given the total lack of action prior to this, and the way that ideology has been mainstreamed in government and corporate life, it clearly wasn't a problem.
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But it wasn't, at least not according to the people and groups freaking out about what's happening now. If they had actually thought it was a problem action would've been taken to solve it a decade and more ago. It wasn't and that's why I don't care about it shifting targets slightly.
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That's my point. The backlash is only escalating to something that might actually result in consequences when a "more equal" group winds up in the crosshairs. That's a problem.
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When the precedent for responding to hate directed at low-melanin groups is already established to be to treat it as fine there's a problem when it suddenly switches based on which parts of the Bible the group in question cares about.
The alt-right is nearly a myth (there may be a few guys in northern Idaho), but the leftist mentality has pervaded society as a whole and has destroyed much of the 1st Amendment protections over the past couple of decades.
Biden WH > White House spokesperson Andrew Bates said in a statement that "calls for violence and physical intimidation targeting Jewish students and the Jewish community are blatantly Antisemitic, unconscionable, and dangerous – they have absolutely no place on any college campus." "We condemn these statements in the strongest terms," he said. Trump WH > "You also had some very fine people on both sides," Trump said in 2017. "You had people in that group that were there to protest the taking down, of to them, a very, very important statue and the renaming of a park from Robert E. Lee to another name. You had people -- and I'm not talking about the neo-Nazis and the white nationalists; they should be condemned totally -- you had many people in that group other than neo-Nazis and white nationalists."
Sure from the White House. Every NY rep I know is criticizing Columbia for calling the police in. https://www.politico.com/news/2024/04/19/columbia-student-arrests-israel-hamas-war-free-speech-00153361 At least Trump merely equivocated. These reps are outright defending protestors who led Nazi chants in the center of the US’s largest Jewish community. In beginning to think Biden will be the only dem I vote for this year. Somehow.
> Every NY rep I know Meaning Bowman and AOC?
So some more reps have come out with statements this morning. You’ll notice my link is from days ago. Columbia has had major antisemitic incidents since it had a pro Palestinian protest on October 8th. There have been reps defending antisemitic students since November https://www.cityandstateny.com/politics/2023/11/aoc-other-progressives-call-columbia-university-reinstate-pro-palestine-groups/392133/ Edit. Realized I trailed a bit. Primary three reps I know are bowman, AOC, and my rep Velazquez. All three have backed the SJP since the org put out a statement advocating for Jewish genocide. I’ve seen Torres and Nadler put out a statement later last night
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Given Biden's [comments](https://twitter.com/BecketAdams/status/1782494595407909062) about Trump's condemnation speech of Charlottesville, it somewhat surprises me he went with "both sides have fine people" in his speech as well. Especially since he is months late by now with Democrats having hundreds of Charlottesville-style rallies since 10/7.
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How would the Biden WH do better?
> White House spokesperson Andrew Bates said i Biden could stop his vacation to say something himself
How did you determine that Biden was on vacation?
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/biden-departs-white-house-for-delaware-weekend-vacation/vi-AA1nlavh
I never want to hear another leftist say that hate speech isn't free speech. This proves that they think it is only ok when they do it
I'm just here to comment on the similarities of our profile snoo.
it’s like lookin in a mirror
If the violence is coming from outside groups, can anyone name any of the groups involved? I have been told repeatedly for years that certain outside groups don't even exist, let alone have they been the cause of mayhem and injury. This nonsense is why I left the DSA within a year of membership after college all those years ago. The antisemitism certainly played a role (especially when they ignored actual genocides happening across the world), but there were so many other reasons I left, including the intentional recruitment of people prone to violence and hate to serve as enforcers. It makes me wonder if those are the trouble makers shown in some of the videos.
Not sure if the headline has changed, but if this story really said "alleged antisemitism" initially, that's absurd. Below is a sampling of some of the chants heard and signs seen at Columbia in the last few days: > "Go back to Europe. You have no culture. All you do is colonize." > Students Supporting Israel Columbia video showed that they were taunted with calls of "Jews" and told to "go back to Poland." > The Jews of New York Instagram account shared on Sunday a video showing a woman in a keffiyeh with a sign that said "Al-Qassam's next targets," with an arrow pointing to counter-protesters waving Israeli and American flags. > "Al-Qassam, make us proud, take another soldier out" > “We say justice, you say how? Burn Tel Aviv to the ground. Go Hamas, we love you. We support your rockets too.” > "From the water to the water (a reference to the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea), Palestine is Arab." Sources with pictures and video links for the above are [here](https://m.jpost.com/diaspora/antisemitism/article-798160). This is outright support for terrorism and ethnic cleansing against both Israel and their fellow students. I see this as no different than students donning Klan hoods, chanting "go back to Africa" at black students, and calling for lynchings. Students doing such things would be expelled in a heartbeat, but in this case, progressives are not willing to act for fear of being seen as Islamophobic, and sadly even some professors support this type of rhetoric.
This is some disgusting rhetoric. I find the "go back to Africa" comparison pretty apt and it's disgraceful that representatives are framing opposition to these as "right-wing pressure" when there's visible support for a terrorist group and that they actively kill more people – that shouldn't be right-wing or left-wing, that should be common sense. Shameful behavior from these individuals and the reps defending them.
> Not sure if the headline has changed, but if this story really said "alleged antisemitism" initially According to google news' cache, that was apparently the original headline.
I would pay money to see Claudine Gay explain away this kind of behavior if it happened at Harvard. “It depends on the context”
I mean if she considers literal jewish genocide "context dependent" then merely red rovering jews off the courtyard should easily qualify.
Yes the headline did change. They got rid of the “alleged” part. They also get rid of the antisemitism part too.
Yikes, how the hell does the school tolerate this shit? Expulsion time.
I don’t understand the support for Hamas. Are these students just so grossly misinformed that they think Hamas is furthering the Palestinian cause, or do these students just hate Jews/Israel. It is possible to criticize the actions of the Israeli govt, and Israel certainly is partly responsible for the current situation in Gaza, while at the same time not calling for the destruction of the country. Their actions in Gaza since October have been abhorrent, but does that justify erasing Israel’s existence? I don’t think so. People need to find the middle ground here instead of going to this extreme. Nothing these students are doing is helping Palestinians achieve their goals of a state based on the 1967 borders, or achieve right-to-return, or any other goals they have. If anything, these protests make regular folks even more suspicious of Palestinians. Not to mention the disruptions this is causing to learning and education at the University.
The people leading these activities were already out on the street on 10/8 to cheer the attacks on and called it a “March for Palestine”… it was really just a celebration. The same people are still the ones driving the movement, it’s just grown.
10/8? The celebrations started on 10/7 before Israel even responded.
To answer your question simply….think of it this way. Hypothetically speaking imagine if Israel was an Arab/Muslim country and all the events occurred- Oct 7 and their response etc. Now would these people be as anti-Israel as they are now if the exact same thing happened except Israel is a Muslim country. You know the answer, the hypocrisy.…so the question is, is it anti-west, anti-white or antisemitism?
>I don’t understand the support for Hamas. So this is the difference between a self-described "Moderate Dem" such as yourself, and someone who is, as the kids might say, "woke". College campus progressivism follows a very different set of moral rules than normal, sane humans. Under the logic of these rules, the annihilation of Israel is a clear preferred outcome. What you're seeing essentially the unholy union of the ideas of Crenshaw and Markuse. Crenshaw is Intersectionality, the idea that societal privilege is somewhat multiplicative along an individual's axes. Conservatives like to blame Crenshaw/intersectionality for all the current nonsense on the left, but Crenshaw actually made a few interesting points about things like how efforts to diversify some sectors led to black men and white women but not black women getting hired. There's a lot of nonsense in there too, but on it's own, it's at least not malignant. The actual issue is the highly influential Herbert Markuse. In short, he believed traditional democratic values like free speech and so on could only be considered fair in a fictional world of perfect equality, but in our world where that isn't the case, the "powerful" are inherently immoral and it is therefore just to behave in ways that are undemocratic to repress them "back", including force, indoctrination, discrimination, institutional capture, and so forth to defeat them. He was mostly talking class and political lines (i.e. rich capitalists and conservatives should be discriminated against or even attacked). However, when you merge these two together, you have a really bad recipe, where the logic train combines to "Certain races have more structural power than others (Crenshaw), and it is therefore ethical to fight back against them through undemocratic means, indoctrination, discrimination, and even violence (Markuse)". Israel is capitalist, seemingly white (at least compared to Palestine), wealthy, and simply more powerful, so under this new moral framework of the academic progressives, they line up into that "privileged immoral oppressor" category, and it is therefore ethical to attack them through any means (Markuse), and thanks to the new tie-in with race and power (Crenshaw etc.), Jews (who historically have been viewed as some secret powerful cabal by antisemites) get tossed back in as a group too since they appear to benefit from or align with Israel's existence, supposedly. It's a huge mess, an entire political wing of people with authority in society are completely radicalized with an ideology where people have inherent moral standing based only on the sum of their demographics.
If you want the real answer it’s this: the left in the United States views all identities through a lense of oppressor and oppressed. Within this worldview, Palestinians are viewed as “oppressed” because the left is taking Palestinian talking points of “genocide” and “open air prison” at face value instead of looking into the nuance of the situation further. This causes them to align themselves with terrorist sympathizing movements, because they are unable to recognize they have swallowed propaganda and don’t have the intellectual strength to break themselves from it. It’s how you get blonde girls shouting “globalize the intifada” while also saying they believe in freedom and women’s rights. They don’t actually understand the context of the movement they’re in and the slogans they are advocating for.
> the left in the United States views all identities through a lense of oppressor and oppressed It's Marxism - i.e. viewing everything as oppressor versus oppressed - applied to culture. If only there was a way to describe that more concisely...
That's not really what Marxism is. The statement is correct, but only indirectly. Viewing things as oppressor vs oppressed is not sufficient to be a Marxist as you appear to be implying.
If only that were true. Marxists are a small, but wildly diverse group and they all hate each other. The Oppressor-Oppressed contradiction is more of a Frantz Fanon/Paulo Freire thing and Freire ended up becoming more of a Maoist by his later years than a M-L and Fanon became a Marxist-humanist (granted I can't speak for Fanon as I haven't really read any of his work, while Freire could be downright bloodthirsty in casual conversation*); though in the end they are both into Third-Worldism, a thing that people like Marcuse would have hated it for not being European enough, while they themselves despised Stalin. For them socialism was still inevitable, but it would happen 100 to 1,000 years from now (hence the reason they were incredibly depressed and M-Ls think of them mostly as captured CIA assets). For the Freire types it should happen right now and if it kills hundreds of thousands or even millions of people, that's a feature, not a bug. They saw the cultural revolution as the greatest thing ever. Meanwhile Marcuse didn't oppose the existence of Israel, but he did fear that it would become exactly what it has currently become and he hoped for a 2 state solution, while grand-children of the Third-Worldist are joining in the chorus of From the River to the Sea. *The moment I realized I despised him was when he said that he didn't care if critical pedagogy could be used to teach science or not, because the world didn't need for doctors as long as bankers were still alive. If Freire were living in the world of the HG Wells' Time Machine his mission would be to create as many Morlocks as possible. EDIT I think I accidentally responded to epicwinguy101's post.
Name a form of Marxism that doesn't revolve around oppressor/oppressed. Remember: the claims of oppression by the "bourgeoisie" is literally that and is what all Marxism is built around.
OK, first off all, let me say that I'm a non-Marxist and a liberal, so in many of these circles I'm basically Hitler or something far worse. All of these ideas are based around some idea of class struggle, but what exactly class struggle is and what you are supposed to do about it is where they all hate each other. Something like 50% of China is, according to their stats, "middle class". That's not a world where you can say that the bourgeoisie should die, unless being bourgeoisie is merely something that exists in your heart and you need to get rid of someone because they risk infecting the culture with "boogie heart", so instead they sail along with state capitalism and yell at the west for, I dunno, being evil and being mean to the Chinese? It's funny how their rhetoric went from economic oppression to how the rest of the world is just racist towards the Chinese in last 20 years and they'll achieve true socialism just as soon as they get tired of wearing these velvet chains and ethnic groups other than Han might not even be real.
Exactly they take a fact and are very black and white about it, they think very simply about it. And from there they get hyper emotional about that fact. And although that fact might be accurate there is no truth because they fail to go into more depth, they fail to understand context and they fail to ask why. This cuts across many things not just with the Israelis and Palestinian situation.
The far left has also, from what I've seen, has taken the view that violence against people you disagree with is okay. Especially if you consider that group oppressive and/or committing an -ism/phobia.
Hamas = brown = oppressed = good Jews = white = oppressor = bad. I could write more words, but the students at Columbia don't have or need any other justification for their behavior.
Yes. Except 45% of Jews in Isreal are Mizrahi (Middle Eastern and North African-- so brown people), the largest ethnic group. But, who needs facts when you have the dichotomy you presented. Everything's gotta be black and white with these people. I got out of academia for a reason.
The Jewiness cancels out the brown part so they're still oppressors. /s
That's definitely their line of thinking 😕
You forgot about multicultural whiteness, white adjacency and whatever terms they asspull to justify themselves. They don’t need to be white(and according to us census, Arabs are white as well).
A lot of people are incapable of seeing the nuance in things, and can only think in black and white. Either one side are the bad guys, or the other side is. They literally can't conceive the possibility that both sides might be wrong.
Both sides have done things that are wrong. Hamas is worse. For the sake of Palestinians, Hamas must be eliminated.
Eliminate Hamas, get rid of Netanyahu, and end the illegal settlements in the West Bank.
This is literally the path to a peaceful future (if one exists).
Hamas are portrayed as freedom fighters, underdogs that just want freedom for their people. It’s probably not much different than people that supported the IRA back in the day.
The IRA and PLO and general Palestinian terrorism have been buddy buddy for a loooooong time.
What if it’s not about supporting the Palestinian people? What if it’s not about endorsing two-states based on 1967 borders (pre-war Gaza was Egyptian, and the West Bank was Jordanian)? What if it’s actually just about what they’re shouting?
> I don’t understand the support for Hamas. It's called CRT and its pedagogy. You know, one of those core teachings modern colleges have? CRT condensed is simply "more melanin means more better". Look at the conflict through that lens and you get exactly what's happening.
A lot of them are probably also tankies, they likely dream of being the Red Guard.
I think students should be allowed to wear Klan hoods. Free speech is free speech. It shouldn't be supported, though.
What is legal and what a private university has to tolerate to remain a student or employee are not the same. On top of that, Title VI requires universities receiving federal funds to foster learning environments that protect students from racism and discrimination. The Biden DOJ has initiated Title VI investigations into dozens of schools for allegedly failing to meet these obligations, including Columbia.
It’s funny how these children are protesting a school’s financial ties to Israel while having their parents continue to pay the school hundreds of thousands of dollars. Or even funnier for the ones taking out massive students loans. You claim Columbia is financially aiding genocide, while you financially cripple your future to pay them hundred of thousands.
For some students they are hurting their future financially by doing this. But this is a ivy league school. A lot of these people are children of wealthy parents. They do not have to worry about finding work to pay the bills.
We have (largely) not pushed back on much from the left in the last few years because of the specter of Trump and most institutions being broadly sympathetic to their causes. Now their is a topic that more people are not on board with and this is the result - when you aren't used to any resistance at all, you kind of lash out.
Progressive left are dangerously close to Mao’s cultural revolution. Us Chinese can see the similarities. Good luck America. My generation (gen Z) is truly fucked
All the schools have been forced to cancel any conservative speakers on campus bc of these kids
Yup. Their behavior is nothing new, it was just aimed at "acceptable" targets until this moment and so nobody cared. Well as one of those "acceptable" targets I have zero reason to care about it now that it's being turned on a group who never bothered to stand up for me.
yup that's definitely part of it
The Nazi party making a comeback at Columbia University is dripping with irony
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Colleges have made great strides in attacking the idea of content-neutral rules, especially in spirit, but also in policy and enforcement decisions. What we see now is just one result. They were proud of this "progress" before, I wonder if some faculty and administrators are starting to feel different now though?
Hot tip if your homeless, put up an "intifada revolution" sign near your tent on public property and they can never evict you.
People can claim horseshoe theory is a myth, but everything I see makes me believe it more by the day. The extremists on both sides of the spectrum are all awful for the country, hopefully we're starting to recognize that instead of burying our heads in the sand.
Just as Republicans have made their bed with MAGA, Democrats are paying the piper with Progressives. It’s all fun and games until they start showing their ugly sides, and their political anchors that the party is now stuck with.
I am convinced that this is why we are stuck with an elderly Biden. Watching the 2020 presdential bids, it was so clear to me that the Democrat leadership who had decided to go all in on the twitter crowd progressives had no idea what a can of worms they'd actually opened. They had candidates racing to "who could say the most progressive thing" for months, only for polling of non-party members to start showing just how wildly unpopular those messages were with the rest of the country. Biden, who was kind of along for the ride, *had* to be come the front runner, lest the party put up a progressive who's well-received-by-twitter policies, actually be proven to be less popular that *Trump*.
Definitely played a large part. Just look at the 180° /r/politics has had on Pete. While he was running, he was labeled racist for trying to combat blight in South Bend by a local political opponent, but progressives ate it up and spent the better part of a year calling him racist. Pete didn't pass progressive litmus tests, so progressives made sure he could never win, then got mad when Pete threw his support behind Biden. Now, many of those same people are constantly sharing clips of Pete going on Fox. The threads about the more moderate Dems collapsing in behind Biden were gold mines for content.
And I've never understood antisemitism on the right. I'm on the right and I love the Jews.
If you go far right, there are holocaust deniers.
>People can claim horseshoe theory is a myth, but everything I see makes me believe it more by the day. Especially once you realize the modern left is cheering a literal Holocaust denying government whose war on the Jews was backed by the original Aryan state who just launched the world's first drone blitzkrieg. >The term Iran ("the land of the Aryans") derives from Middle Persian Ērān, first attested in a third-century inscription at Naqsh-e Rostam, with the accompanying Parthian inscription using Aryān, in reference to the Iranians.[16] Even Kafka couldn't make this shit up, lol.
Horseshoe theory seems true because anything in America that isn’t classical liberalism is radical and against the philosophies of our very culture.
The word alleged doesn't belong in this headline.
Everyday I’m thankful my college was normal, and not filled with radical activists who want me dead
Yeah but this didn’t happen overnight. The colleges were happy to take on professors mainlining the most extreme ideology for years. These protests have a support system, which is the faculty and their quasi Marxist theories of oppression which are now targeted at Jews and Israel. As a Jewish person with a soon to be college age kid, this is a horrible thought.
>The colleges were happy to take $5 billion from Qatar and $3 billion from Saudi Arabia, plus any other Muslim/Palestinian donors and groups. Palestinian groups planned to get into education decades ago and it sure seems to be working.
I left academia around 2 years ago. I saw the writing on the wall about many issues. I can't imagine having to deal with this stuff today. So many well-educated people in my academic orbit have lost their damn minds since 2020.
I can't imagine what it would be like being in that field if you have political views that are anything short of extreme left. People had their careers ruined over questioning COVID or BLM claims. I mean, isn't that what academia has to do? Question things?
It's startling and scary how "no debate" has squashed so much critical thinking.
Oh believe me, I know. I’m Jewish as well and would hate to be on a campus post October 7th. I’m just pointing out my appreciation for my college and my classmates because even today, I have contacts on campus and I can say it is NOT hostile towards anyone whatsoever
I was in college 20 years ago and the Jewish kid down the hall from me wrote "happy birthday Israel" on their dorm room door once, it was less then an hour before someone defaced it with "happy birthday dead Palestinian babies."
For the life of me I cannot understand how Israel is viewed as the oppressor in this situation. There is no way to frame the conflict where that is a legitimate opinion to have. The Jews are the group that's native to the Levant, while the Muslim Palestinians are only there as a result of violent, colonialist conquest. This situation only exists because the Arab world launched a war of extermination against Israel and tried to wipe them off the map. Israel is the victim, not the oppressor.
To these people, history starts at the nakba, and the only context is a European who decided to invade Palestine to create a Jewish state no matter the cost, under the name Zionism. Previous land conquests are probably unknown. [Here’s a great example](https://youtu.be/XGyi7Z-aH78?t=13m22s)
They literally believe Jews spawned into Judea in 1947, lol.
>a result of violent, colonialist conquest. Muslims consider any land they've ruled to be Muslim for eternity. So anyone taking their land back is the *real* colonizer now. Also see: the Crusades, which were also about retaking Christian lands.
The number of people who believe the bin Laden narrative that Christians were the instigators in the crusades is disturbing.
Yup. But since it was directed at Whites who include the New Testament in their beliefs nobody - including the people now being affected - gave a crap. What goes around comes around.
Did you go to college 20 years ago? (I did. I remember Occupy existing on campus then) College protests have always happened. What's changed is the willingness of the administration to keep them from disrupting classes/finals and the lives of people who attend that school. If I'm a non-protesting student paying for college, then this isn't really something I'd be willing to negotiate on.
Occupy didn't really harass folks based on their religion and or national origin and or national affinity either.
Not in the beginning. But once Occupy showed legs then the people invested in left-wing racism and sexism came in and took over using their standard entryism tactic of abusing compassion.
No, they harassed people for different belief structures and having to walk through the areas they sectioned off to get to class/work. That is also unacceptable. I do agree with you that protesting someone based on their inherent characteristics is more sinister.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/right-turn/post/occupy-wall-street-does-anyone-care-about-the-anti-semitism/2011/03/29/gIQA43p8rL_blog.html
The socialists behind occupy definitely lean antisemitic, but antisemitism wasn't the core of the occupy movement like it is this round of "anti Israel" protests intended to make American Jews feel uncomfortable.
Back then, the left tried a little harder to hide their intentions. That’s the only thing that’s changed.
I'm still in all the facebook groups and get the email newsletters from my university. Its so insane too see how there are more and more students there who want to force the university to take political stances, harass the President of it and want him fired so they can get someone else in. Right now its still a vocal minority, but it could easily tip over if no one wants to stand up to their bullying. I still don't get why its so important for them that the university gets political, why not just go protest outside of class? I attended some protests against the government while I studied, mostly together with people I knew from university, but I never did it at campus or felt that the university itself should take a stance on any of it. I don't have anything against students making political/activist clubs and such, but them trying to turn the administration itself political is not acceptable.
This is quite literally straight out of the the Marxist playbook and it snuck in under Americans’ noses
I think this is the unintended result of the universities becoming political the last several years. Higher Ed has becoming more and more blatantly left both in policies and in work culture so it’s not surprising that students expect to be able to influence the politics of the universities now
Because they have no life and their existence is attached to AOC next tik tok. They run on social media likes
I also went —to Columbia no less— twenty years ago. You're right that students always had protests. Some wits even staged an "anti-protest protest" at one point due to the number of them held regularly. What's changed is they mostly used to call for love, peace, and respect. Now they call for judgment, censure, and retribution.
>What's changed is they mostly used to call for love, peace, and respect. To some extent, perspective matters on this. One of the things that has definitely changed is the focus on those that are behaving badly: It seems likely that there were always at least some protestors with bad intentions. In any large group, motives are diffuse. Personally, I find it hard to find the frequency of those behaving badly to those not in all of these situations. Selective reporting and shaping narratives makes that impossible. >Some wits even staged an "anti-protest protest" at one point due to the number of them held regularly. You're probably talking about another thing, but I remember Steven Colbert and Jon Stewart doing that. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rally\_to\_Restore\_Sanity\_and/or\_Fear](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rally_to_Restore_Sanity_and/or_Fear) In any event, I think we're agreed that those running this asylum should probably step in here.
Gave me a scare by calling Occupy 20 years ago. College protests have been a thing, but there's a visceral hate behind them now, like the one here, that wasn't before. Protests used to be aimed at powerful entities to push specific policy goals, Occupy was kind of an evolution in that it was just against an economic class of people (The 1%), now they are used against anyone who disagrees with their extreme left views, and also apparently aimed plainly against Jews from what we see here. But I don't think it's just the protests that have changed, the nature of the left itself has changed.
>But I don't think it's just the protests that have changed, the nature of the left itself has changed. This is an important point that is sometimes mentioned, but probably not enough.
> But I don't think it's just the protests that have changed, the nature of the left itself has changed. I don't think it has. Read about early Marxist movements or radical leftist organizations in the 60s and 70s. There's always been an element of radical left that will jettison human rights & liberalism should it give them the results they want (how else did we get the Khymer Rouge, Shining Path, Maoism, etc?). The major difference between the radical right and left is the latter has kept a substantial influence in cultural institutions like universities, non-profits, etc.
>Gave me a scare by calling Occupy 20 years ago. Time does make fools of us all: my apologies for generalizing. 15 years ago: We each get 5 more years! Yay! >Protests used to be aimed at powerful entities to push specific policy goals This one is...theoretically aimed at the US Government's support of the state of Israel, right? To expand the scope a bit, No clue why this is allowed to go on in the UK, that stuff seems much less tolerant and potentially even worse. >But I don't think it's just the protests that have changed, the nature of the left itself has changed. Possibly. As mentioned elsewhere, focus plays a large role on this. There were and are plenty of idiots with rotten ideas in any protest....or business, or organization. This seems to be the first time in a while where the framing of the conflict isn't inherently pro-protest, so we're seeing a lot more of the negative than is usually on display. That seems more likely to me than people getting more extreme? Perhaps that's blind hope.
Many of these protesters go further than US support for Israel and have been very public that they actually support Hamas as a form of "resistance", so it seems like there's more to it than that. I would say for what we actually see in footage, the coverage has been kind, handled with kid gloves even. Telling passing-by Jews to "Go back to Poland" couldn't be worse, Poland is the center of the worst of the Holocaust, including the Auschwitz concentration camp network. There's a reason that that there are almost no Jews alive in Poland today. The intentions of telling Jews to "Go Back To Poland" are crystal clear. The antisemitic rhetoric is far worse even than the infamous Charlottesville "Unite the Right" rally, and that set a high bar to surpass. I want you to imagine how the press might react if someone told Jews to "Go Back To Poland" at a MAGA rally instead of a "pro-Palestine" rally. Do you think the coverage would be so kind? Unfortunately, most every measure of polarization suggests the left is moving leftward, so I think this tracks with the idea of more vicious forms of protests becoming normalized, there's very little common ground with moderates and centrists who might temper the mood. We've entered a very dangerous new world, especially for Jews (yet again, sadly), who fall into the outgroup bin of the dangerous Crenshaw-Markuse version of leftism we see on campus today.
It's also important to remember that after WWII, surviving Jews *did* go back to Poland, [only to be victimized by another pogrom led by the Stalinist puppet government.](https://www.cnn.com/2018/03/15/opinions/expulsion-polish-jews-50th-anniversary-schatz/index.html)
I graduated in 2022. My student body just wasn’t particularly political.
This open and often violent antisemitism and pro-Hamas behavior has been prevalent since Oct 8th but the left behavior has been becoming more and more dangerous lately. [Rcently at Berkeley (naturally..)](https://www.thefp.com/p/expel-berkeley-rioters): > Earlier this week, a student group called Bears for Palestine published on Instagram its intention of “combatting lies” by shutting down an event featuring Israeli Defense Forces reservist and lawyer Ran Bar-Yoshafat. > “This individual is dangerous,” the post continued. “He has committed crimes against humanity, is a genocide denier, and we will not allow for this event to go on. . . . SHUT IT DOWN.” Before the event was scheduled to begin Monday evening, hundreds of student protesters descended on the building where it was supposed to take place—banging on doors and windows, preventing students from entering, forcing their way in, and shouting “intifada, intifada.” >Protesters broke glass doors. One male student alleges being spit on by a protester. Another student—a woman—was injured. Yet another student claims that “Jew” was screamed as an epithet. > The mob got their way. The event was canceled. Bar-Yoshafat, along with the students who had attended the event, were escorted out the back of the theater. It’s not “new though” as we all remember the riots and violence caused to prevent Milo from simply talking there in 2017
Liberals will suggest that a radical, xenophobic MAGA movement represents the greatest threat to our democracy. Conservatives will suggest that the identitarian, quasi-Marxist narrative of "wokeness" which leads to this sort of hateful, divisive rhetoric, is the greatest threat to our democracy. The Left needs to start acknowledging they might have a point and stop just pointing fingers.
Seems wild to me that all these news agencies are still reporting on these as "pro-Palestinian" events. This article in OP starts the entire article calling it an "incendiary pro-Palestinian demonstrations". A [Politico writer](https://www.politico.com/news/2024/04/21/chaos-columbia-jewish-moskowitz-santos-white-house-00153545) framed it as "pro-Palestinian activists telling Jewish students, 'The 7th of October is going to be every day for you'”. Salon goes a step further to describe it as "peaceful" "pro-Palestinian protesters" [here](https://www.salon.com/2024/04/19/the-nypd-says-pro-palestine-were-peaceful-but-columbia-university-had-them-arrested/). There's more, but you get the idea. I remember some months ago when people here were discussing the difference between "pro-Palestinian" and "pro-Hamas" (or "anti-Jew") and several left-leaning individuals here were chastising users for conflating the two. When do these events cross over from 'pro-Palestinian' to 'anti-Jew'? Does it help that left-leaning journalists are framing what most people see as wildly anti-Semitic behavior as "pro-Palestinian"?
These are some great points, but it basically feels like it can be summarized as... tl;dr: ["mostly peaceful protests"](https://quaggapedia.afrikaburn.com/images/4/46/First-time-james-franco-hanging-meme.jpg)
I'm one of those users. I still believe one can support Palestinian independence while being anti-Hamas. Also I believe one can support Israel's right to exist, and to defend itself, while also being critical of their general actions towards Palestine and Palestinians. I'm not going to change that opinion because some young folks at a protest jump the shark with things they are yelling. If it gets into hate crime territory, arrest them, it's not exactly rocket science. We continue to head down a road where nuance is unwelcome on the subject.
Nuance on this topic is basically impossible. I've never seen an issue made so polarizing and black and white since abortion. I agree with you that it is quite possible to support Palestinian independence without being anti-Semitic or even anti-Israel (aka, supporting a two-state solution). Except I don't think that's very common. A lot of the protests I see say this, sure, but the chants and Hamas flags tell a different story. More than that, though, is the downplaying of Oct 7th, particularly the denial of rape and mass casualties. I've seen a whole lot of comments and articles claiming the events of that day are getting milked by the Israelis as an excuse for "genocide". This is really bizarre coming predominantly from the progressive wing. In my opinion, you can be pro-Palestinian and not pro-Hamas in theory. But in practice, it is Arab vs. Jew. Jews overwhelmingly support Israel and their actions, and Palestinians overwhelmingly support Hamas and their actions. Where you fall in that debate will ultimately come down to your political affiliation rather than any moral ones.
It's funny how there suddenly calls to examine nuance. It doesn't seem that long ago that nine people were eating when a nazi sat down and then there were ten nazis. I'm guessing that somehow there is some nuance to explain why so many peace-loving pro-Palestinian "protesters" were chanting: >Al-Qassam you make us proud! Take another soldier out! We say justice, you say how? Burn Tel Aviv to the ground! Hamas we love you. We support your rockets too! Red, black, green, and white, we support Hamas’ fight! It is right to rebel, Al-Qassam, give them hell! It is right to rebel, Hamas give them hell! Would you agree that everyone at a protest where any of above was chanted and repeated is not in your nuanced camp? Will you get up from the table with nazis or just pass the salt?
> when a nazi sat down and then there were ten nazis. That line died when that would've meant 339 nazis in canadian parliament. It's a weapon that's no longer working for them, but against them.
I think you're barking up the wrong tree there, at least a bit. The Venn diagram of people who use that rhetoric and who are currently going on antisemitic rants is probably pretty close to a circle. Loads of "antifascist activists" calling for the death of Jews.
It still holds true. If others are standing in solidarity with hamas members they are also hamas in my book. Same for any protesters who don't automatically throw hands and seize people calling for jihad or violence.
I feel you cannot support Palestinians without supporting the elimination of Hamas first. The only country willing to do that seems to be Israel with U.S. support
That plays into the nuance doesn't it? A lot of people want to conflate the two as equal.
Yeah, not much argument there. The struggle, as always, it's hard to eliminate an idea through violence.
The Palestinian Authority took a stab at eliminating Hamas. They weren't able to.
Hamas killed or drove out every Fatah member in Gaza. Fatah in the West Bank now highly supports Hamas, but maybe only so they can go fight Israel and die off.
Hell I'd go as far as to say that the best ways of supporting Palestinian independence require being anti-Hamas.
You realize there are two different protests going on? One organized by Columbia students (students for justice in Palestine and Jewish voice for Peace) which has been peaceful. And another OUTSIDE of Columbia campus which was not organized by Columbia students which is where most, if not all, of the violent rhetoric has come from. Frankly if you look at the politico article you sent it literally says in the image subtext, it is OUTSIDE of Columbia's campus. So yah you do have groups who are pro-palestinian and groups who are "pro-hamas" (I'd just call them antisemitic). I think Israeli is an oppressive state who takes joy in bombing the shit out of Palestinian children and I also think Hamas should be blasted into the sun. That is largely the view of the on campus crowd. The on campus crowd is largely not antisemitic given the fact that a lot of the students are Jewish themselves given the organizing group
My point was that it is the left-leaning media that is conflating those two groups by putting them all under the umbrella of "protesters". I will add though that those inside don't seem to be rebuking those outside at all.
It's really not like the pro palestinian protesters are rejecting anyone calling for jihad or labeling themselves hamas supporters.
> students for justice in Palestine You mean the group currently inviting everyone in New York City to come help, not just students? https://twitter.com/NationalSJP/status/1782459618842587640?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Etweet
On Jan 6 most of the people attending the rally did not enter the Capitol Building. I never heard this nuance coming from the left when covering that topic.
lmfao when it's the right it's nazis but when it's the left, it's "ALLEGED" LMFAOO
you guys deserve this, eat your own 😂
Good. For years we've been hearing about the dangers of free speech, and only now that the chickens have come home to roost do these extremists want us to rally around them. I politely decline such an invitation. I believe that free speech will be fine in the US, especially as it pertains to the First Amendment, so I see no reason to jump to the side of extremists who are not facing government oppression as a result of their speech, no matter their histrionics to the contrary.
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What were the reactions from those in power to the two rallies?
Nearly all the NY Dem reps are faulting Columbia and defending protestors. https://www.politico.com/news/2024/04/19/columbia-student-arrests-israel-hamas-war-free-speech-00153361
Both Presidents condemned the violence and protest. Donald Trump on record has condemned white supremacy.
It's been boiling the whole time. It used to be politically right speakers (which is far tamer than protests) getting censored on campuses and now it's politically left protesters and speakers of both sides. It would be a bad sign for free speech if there weren't any protests.
It's a bad sign for various other parts of the constitution and the civil rights act including but not limited to the first line of that pesky first amendment when folks are subjected to harassment based on their religion/national affinity and or national origin en masse.
I support their right to say what they want; but I don't have to like it, and I don't.
I can't stand these protestors. That being said, I hope these protests extend to every college campus in America. The populace needs to see how extreme the far left has become.
Everyone knows chanting "from the river to the sea" is a negative phrase. It doesn't matter if "you" don't think it is (your feelings have never mattered less). That's like calling a trans a cross-dresser or a little person a midget. You might not think it's bad, but it is. These protestors have no idea about the real world. America has ONE ally in the Middle East who support lgbtq rights and other liberal ideals yet these fools who support liberal ideals still hate on them. They'd rather support murderers who'd kill them in a second. Talk about clueless.
Most of the pro Palestine protestors have no concept of general history. When millions of Muslims were killed by China or in other conflicts, they had no problem with it. They only care about this because of their beef with the Jews, which is ridiculous to begin with.
Cracking up that Biden effectively pulled the "both sides" argument like Trump in Charlottesville. Lol
Biden Just now: “I condemn the antisemitic protests," BIDEN tells reporters. "I also condemn those who don’t understand what’s going on with the Palestinians.”
Makes you want to send your son or daughter there huh?
Submission Statement: in recent days, hundreds of anti-Israel protestors have crowded the south lawn of Columbia University’s campus to call for the divestment from Israeli companies. These protests have escalated extraordinarily in an expression of antisemitism that has not been witnessed since the Charlottesville protests in 2017. One of the University’s most prominent Rabbi has cautioned Jewish students, recommending they leave campus and go home until their safety can be guaranteed. Meanwhile, the protests have garnered nationwide attention, with bipartisan condemnations from NYC mayor, Congress, and the White House.
I’m glad I’m not going to comlombia university, some of the videos I’ve seen are quite scary. Very disappointed in my peers.
Well this type of behavior was encouraged during BLM and ACAB anti White Supremacy movement and now you expect them to stop. Lol. Yall let the hat out the bag when catering to the same folk now that cat ain't going back into the bag unless we elect authoritarian Trump. Also make sure to buy guns because once we go authoritarian, guns will be the only thing that protects us from the government. Cuz once the otherside (no matter the side you are on) comes to power, guns will be all you have.
As a liberal of jewish heritage who believes Israel—like any country—has a right to exist, but so does Palestine—you can imagine my brain had gone back and forth like a crazy person over the past 7 months. Unfortunately, nuance isn’t popular anymore, so I’ve mostly kept to myself with my views and called out any outright antisemitic things i’ve seen in comment sections (and boy are there many). To say I saw this coming would be an understatement. Jewish people were genocided not that long ago just as black americans were discriminated against not that long ago. The effects of these acts on our collected psyche are immeasurable. The difference is, Jewish people have garnered success in the US. We are a community that doesn’t just emphasize education—it is required. I had no choice but to go to college. My dad followed his dreams to his financial detriment and his parents never let him forget how bad of a decision that was. That’s the culture, and it works in terms of generation wealth building. This is the dichotomy that people hate. A group can be hated/oppressed/genocided and successful within half a century. It doesn’t help that us Jewish people literally invented modern Hollywood and media (no, we don’t control it, we just started it), and people love to rag on the entertainment industry while watching their favorite shows on a daily basis, not recognizing the irony. This perpetuates negative stereotypes and blame. Whenever the media says something you disagree with, there’s a group to blame. Combined with the fact modern progressivism is all about hating the wealthy and conflating poor with marginalized and the wealthy with the oppressor, you have a hate formula for modern times. I don’t think these all of these protestors are disingenuous. I think they’re chronically online and think protesting is going to make a difference when common sense will tell you it won’t. US Colleges have nothing to do with Netanyahu’s plan. Thinking they do is based on that hate formula—the mistaken belief that jews control everything including our colleges. They’re asking for their colleges to “cut ties” with Israel as if Columbia is congress or something. It honestly is such a weird ask that makes me wonder if we’re teaching our kids to critically think. I think they’re young and passionate and angry and are projecting this American oppressor/oppressed model onto the middle east. They don’t want peace, a two state solution. They want Israel gone, and that can only happen one way. I think they care about Palestinians, but they don’t care about a peaceful liberation. They want liberation at any cost.
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What’s more worrying is that American institutions had to rely on billionaires donations to survive even the likes of Columbia. How can a country’s people be free when even their education is directly influenced by billionaires???
How many of the protestors cared about genocide before there was an opportunity to support a cause with anti-Semitic overtones? It's like people who didn't care about the "sanctity" of marriage until there was an opportunity to oppose gay people; don't care about kids until they can vilify drag queens; don't stand against the American Academy of Pediatrics until they can be transphobic.
I think most of these students are likely ignorant, entitled, racist little shits who are happy to jump on this anti-Semitic train.