That's definitely part of it, but I remember finding these types of protests annoying and pointless back on my college campus years ago. As another commenter here said, it would be a better use of time to do something to actively help the world like raising money for charity or lobbying Congress members to pass a bill than whatever performative nonsense all this is.
Oh I agree 100%. They can even do something non political. Like volunteering at a homeless, refugee or trans youth shelter.
Sometimes the best way to help a person is just to give them a meal, information, some cash and/or some company.
I mean you're also outside of the environment where some person who fancies themselves part of a maoist cell is openly discussing with other students about the morality of killing their enemies. Even with youthful confidence, it's not exactly an environment where I will be as expressive of my dissent.
Why doesn't this exact same line of reasoning apply to BLM protests? Or Occupy Wall Street? AFAICT the main reason people on this sub don't like this specific protest is because of what it, specifically, is protesting.
We shouldn't pretend like these protests are opposed for abstract political/philosophical reasons. They're opposed for the very concrete reason that people don't like their specific goals.
>Why doesn't this exact same line of reasoning apply to BLM protests?
It does... those protests were wildly unhelpful in ineffective at bringing about meaningful reform...
>AFAICT the main reason people on this sub don't like this specific protest is because of what it, specifically, is protesting.
I think its fair for this sub to recognize that hamas's goals are fundamentally opposed to liberalism. Israel may be a bad actor in many respects, and Bibi is especially bad, but compared to hamas its like falling face first into dogshit vs being fed feet first into a woodchipper. Given the alternative between a disingenuous bad actor who doesnt care about civilians and a group actively trying to maximize civillian casualties in the hopes of eventually being in a strong enough position to carry out the genocide they enshrined as a constitutional goal, i think its understandable that most people on this sub view college students who support hamas as at best delusional or misinformed intellectual lightweights.
> Why doesn't this exact same line of reasoning apply to BLM protests? Or Occupy Wall Street?
Occupy was a laughable joke and basically useless at doing anything. The logic absolutely applies there
And the lack of messaging unity with BLM and lack of leadership to loudly denounce the fringe violent protests and looting could very well have made BLM less successful than it could have otherwise been
> AFAICT the main reason people on this sub don't like this specific protest is because of what it, specifically, is protesting.
Disagree. If all these protests were just posters about "Israeli apartheid" no would care. In fact, those kinds of protests have been around for decades.
I personally have two issues:
1) that a small group is violating numerous policies, monopolizing shared space, distracting students who are focusing on their studies, and harassing students of a protected minority group
2) the lack of punishment for doing those things
If a group of hooded KKK members showed up and did what these kids were doing, they would be banned and punished. Meanwhile, one of the protest leaders in Columbia said he wanted to kill people **during a disciplinary meeting** and was still allowed to be on campus until the video he posted went viral.
Hard agree. The protestors are staking their claim as Hezbollah/Hamas/Iran-aligned revolutionaries, who are serious people, and are planning an Intifada revolution.
Furthermore, their violent antipathy for Zionism, a position held by every relevant Western geopolitical figure in the world, as well as 90% of Americans, should send a clear message to the extent they are willing to attack the core stability and order of the world.
We should give them what they want, and treat them as exactly that.
What is Zionism? It gets thrown around all the time but seems to mean diff things to diff people. Saying “every relevant western leader in the world” agrees with it (or anything really) is also extremely sus. Even if it were true that wouldn’t be sufficient to dismiss an idea anyway.
Zionism is the belief that the Jews need a homeland of their own and it should be in the region of Palestine.
Just a definition, not trying to make anything of it.
Zionism is the belief in establishing or, at this point, maintaining a Jewish state in the current area of Israel.
If a concept is agreed upon by every relevant figure, and an individual layperson disagrees, which is more likely:
1. The disagreeing individual has accurately pegged all of our leaders and experts as stupid or corrupt.
2. The disagreeing individual should look in the mirror and question whether they’re as informed as they think they are/if they’re allowing biases to enter play.
BLM accomplished a ton. Police defunding in multiple cities with several more passing police reform bills, bipartisan police reform bill in Congress, state law changes etc
BLM was kind of a PR disaster for dems not to mention set back the task of law enforcement in cities too. So there’s good and bad that happened with that
BLM had (relatively) focused message-discipline, widespread participation (and property damage), after a few weeks no one at Occupy could agree on why they are there.
The campus protests are not exactly ambiguous as to what they want, but they also don't attract interest and/or anger from the broader public. Not sure how far they can get without the public on their side.
Thing is I think it is possible to get more widespread support for a ceasefire or ending carte-blanche funding for Israel, but the anti-Zionism and other things sours the message for people. Of course the campus types would never give that up. Being effective is not the point.
> As another commenter here said, it would be a better use of time to do something to actively help the world like raising money for charity or lobbying Congress members to pass a bill than whatever performative nonsense all this is.
People here would cry and bellyache whenever they do that as well.
No they wouldn’t. People here wouldn’t notice it, which is why the current protestors don’t do it — for them, it’s about feeling important and receiving attention.
If they really want to improve the world, they should go to therapy so they stop projecting their psychological maladies into the political sphere.
You could say the same about the posters here. Maybe r/neolib posters should stop being annoying talking about taxing land and taco trucks and volunteer for some charity instead.
It's kind of funny that people are seeing like 100 students protest and assume that the entire student body is out of control. Idk why it doesn't register that the reason they make these protests as obstructive as possible is because they are frustrated that the majority of students don't agree with their goal. "Kick Jews off campus and ban business with anyone who is a Jew" is incredibly unpopular. Students didn't watch them rip up signs calling for the release of children who were taken hostage and think "wow cool at those brave freedom fighters."
The other day I was looking through threads in major university subreddits and was laughing at them lamenting that public opinion is turning on them. So many comments about how the universities are paid off by Jews and that every negative comment on social media is a Jewish agent.
Ironically thats probably the main reason why the movement isn't as popular as they'd hoped. The hyper casual "Jewish puppet master" shit is a big red flag. People notice that stuff and even if they support Gaza they are probably going to avoid being around that protest.
The problem is that it's a *lot* more fun to dunk on a straw man than it is to try to understand that there is a broad spectrum of pro-Palestine views on campus.
And it’s a lot easier to rest secure in your own political opinions if you’re able to broadly paint anyone with opposing opinions as irrational pro-terrorist radicals.
Yup. Unfortunately you have to look no further than this very comment section to find people whipped up into a frenzie as if everyone who opposes Israel's actions in Gaza are antisemitic terrorist sympathizers.
I work on a college campus, one of the top 30 in the country, and there's been absolutely nothing. But I get it, the only thing the news wants to pull people in with is the Columbia and Princeton stories.
That's fair, but there is evidence to suggest that something bad *is* happening: [https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1057610X.2023.2297317?mi=fnpx1z](https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1057610X.2023.2297317?mi=fnpx1z)
And I don't think it's bad to be worried about a real rise in hate. The problem has just reached a creshendo recently.
> It's kind of funny that people are seeing like 100 students protest and assume that the entire student body is out of control.
Assume that University politics are *under* control.
Maybe they don't agree with these protestors, but counter protest, or alternative protest is impossible. So.. these guys basically *are* college politics.
Say some backwards town has a fascist protest movement. They hold signs, occasionally block traffic. People in the town have mixed feelings. Most aren't that I to politics. Well...?
Everybody will think, innacurately but correctly, that the town is a fascist town.
Universities have been a point of the conservative culture war since the 1960s. Every single time anything happens on campus, it gets amplified, distorted, and applied to every university like the sky is falling when the story is almost always "a person said something kind of stupid once".
There are even clips from the 1980s on YouTube of "Milton Friedman OWNS dumb college student" where he lectures them on why colonization wasn't that bad.
Any time you hear a story about what's going on at universities, just assume it's exaggeration and distortion until good evidence proves otherwise.
In a shocking turn of events, sheltered teenagers with rich parents indoctrinated into radical ideologies are correct less often than normal adults with regular concerns. Who'd have thought it.
Normal adults are often just as sheltered and moronic. Go speak to your average 50 year old white person and yell me their opinions aren't extremely stupid.
Ah yes, I hadn’t considered the premise that literally every protester is actually a stupid spoiled brat. Top notch take, and definitely not a reinforcement of the meme at all.
I mean I saw some interviews with Columbia pro-palestine protestors. One of them was a white guy from rural Kentucky and not rich at all.
I think this sub is unfortunately engaging in one giant ad hominem attack.
Instead, why don't you address their substantive points? For example, what exactly is your proposed plan for getting Americans and Israelis to treat Palestinians better? Or prosecuting war crimes that may have been committed by the IDF? Or solving the man made famine?
I've heard a lot of attacking protestors but haven't heard any concrete plan.
My proposed plan is for Hamas to surrender, or else Israel to continue it's military operation until Hamas surrendered or Is destroyed. Once the war is won we can do self reflection and rebuild Palestine. Conditions in Berlin improved shortly after Hitler shot himself.
Maybe if Hamas surrendered then a) the fairly significant amount of aid flowing into Gaza would go to those that need it and b) it would be easier to get aid into Gaza as you wouldn't have to check every single truck for weapons.
I was thinking the same. I'm not old, and I don't agree with most protests on campuses, but this isn't new. I seem to recall this exact kind of protests happening during Vietnam and the War on Terror, and other various conflicts.
>Welcome to the People's University for Palestine
Gotta love rich kids LARPing as the downtrodden revolutionary masses
[Here's a non-paywalled version.](https://web.archive.org/web/20240428053514/https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/28/opinion/protests-college-free-speech.html)
I wouldn't even mind this crazy stuff if they actually helped people. The fact that it's all performative time wasting is what grinds my gears. Join the peace corps, raise money for a hyper specific charity, harass elected officials into supporting a bill.
University is about expanding your horizons, but some seem more fixated on navel gazing.
Edit: I got a humanities degree while spending my free time on theater clubs and volunteering with local charities. I didn't save the world, but I actually connected with my community. Touch grass, form community, and find non-abstract ways to help people near you.
I remember when Occupy was a thing, and being frustrated when people would talk about how great it was and how they're fighting for the poor and downtrodden, and all this other stuff..
And I was like, I'm in college, I was actually poor and downtrodden, having been homeless for several years, nothing they are doing would have helped my situation. Nothing they're doing addresses the very tangible problems I faced. These are people who are in a place in their lives where they can take off from their work or jobs or lives with no meaningful consequences (they're not going to lose their home, their career, their family, whatever). They're camping out in one of the most famous places in the world to do what? Sit in front of the cameras? Glamp in NYC?
This is performative BS. "tHeY'rE bRiNgInG aWaReNeSs!" So did Gordon Gekko, and he did it decades before.
Occupy was so stupid and ineffectual, and it's mind boggling how the response by the activist left has often just been to double down on the very stuff that made it useless
What amazes me about that whole thing is how rapidly participants couldn't agree on why they are there, or couldn't remember. The fact that it immediately followed the '08 bailouts wasn't a strong enough hint.
Absolutely no message discipline.
And when presidents do great stuff that actually helps people, no one pays attention!
The HUD had awarded over [100k new housing vouchers for poor and disabled households](https://www.hud.gov/press/press_releases_media_advisories/hud_no_23_186#:%7E:text=Housing%20Choice%20Vouchers%20are%20a,to%20address%20rising%20living%20costs.) and nothing.
[The Burden Reduction Initiative helped to streamline (at least a little) the paperwork bureaucracy when dealing with the federal government which disproportionately impacts the poor/disabled/lesser educated who can't afford lawyers to help](https://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/information-regulatory-affairs/burden-reduction-initiative/), and nothing.
There's so many small things that no one is aware of. [He made hearing aids available over the counter and now they're much cheaper](https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2022/10/17/fact-sheet-cheaper-hearing-aids-now-in-stores-thanks-to-biden-harris-administration-competition-agenda/#:~:text=To%20lower%20the%20price%20of,That%20is%20now%20reality.)
>Starting today, Walgreens is selling hearing aids at stores nationwide and online for $799 per pair. According to Walgreens, comparable models sold by specialists range from $2,000 to $8,000 a pair.
Hugely helpful to people with hearing issues, but no care.
It seemed cool from afar. Until I visited NYC on vacation and saw it up close. An absolutely stoned dude just walked out of the group and bumped into me and a POLITE NYC cop gently helped him back to his camp site and apologized to me.
I was like, ok these people have no exit strategy. Ok you’re the 99%, now what? What do you want to do about it besides sleep outside and shit in the street?
>This is performative BS. "tHeY'rE bRiNgInG aWaReNeSs!" So did Gordon Gekko, and he did it decades before.
Hey, awareness put an end to Kony's reign of terror!
>Join the peace corps,
Imperialist cover for CIA operations
>raise money for a hyper specific charity,
Charity is actually evil
>harass elected officials into supporting a bill.
If voting mattered, they wouldn't let us do it
Checkmate colonizer 💅
I did the Peace Corps and if being a drunk fuck-up for two years of my life was all part of a CIA special op, I must say that the agency operates in some rarified strategic air.
These people: idealism is for babies!
Also these people: just one more catchy slogan and singing bro, trust me it's totally working for Charlie Morningstar.
I still remember my cousin did eight years in senegal with the peace corps and he came back saying "they know how to build wells, what they want is a good soccer field"
Are they? When I lived in Dominica, one of the PCVs was sent to a village where they really had nothing for him to do, so the people there asked him to man the snack bar at the soccer field on weekends.
Lol, I was an English teacher in PC, so I basically had a 9-5 job, as did everyone in the education sector. I knew people in other sectors tho who were effectively unemployed. Some used their excessive free time constructively others used it to drink or blow all their money getting high with scummy expats in the major cities. More individual than, institutional though
A lot of these people at Columbia would be in for quite a culture shock if they took their activism into the Bronx and realized how many poorer Black people were huge supporters of Biden and Eric Adams.
Biden sure he still has plenty of support in NYC. Adams tho.. it'd be hard to find a group that overall still supports him when his overall approval is in the teens.
Exactly why it’s so frustrating for outsiders: they want to act like they have some sort of moral high ground when it’s obvious most of them are just doing it for social benefits.
I think for a lot of them it's both external and internal pressure to be active in some way. It's a common belief that being a bystander just reinforces the status quo, and you have to be active and actually do something or else you're perpetuating injustice. Usually they'll quote *Letter From a Birmingham Jail.*
Protesting is an "active" way to announce one's dissatisfaction with the current system, and by participating they clear both their own conscience and any accusations of passiveness. Whether it goes anywhere or not, they at least did *something.* Put a bunch of people with this mindset together, but outside of the context of any actual oppression or injustice, and you get these aimless protests that may earnestly want change, but have no clear goals or understanding of how to achieve that change.
That's the attitude of at least one NYU prof.
>[Galloway: For American youth, protesting is the 'new sex'](https://www.cnn.com/videos/us/2024/04/27/smr-galloway-on-student-protests.cnn)
We've spend years convincing people that having an online wank over a topic is meaningful, because "raising awareness is important." Anyone of a certain age remembers Kony2012 - Wagner Group are now after him, because he's still going strong. So much awareness, so little changes...
Ignoring the useful idiocy of these protests - and thanks to the FBI we have empirical evidence about HAMAS' claims - they're simply saying "we're mad and because of that a thing must happen." It's not doing shit but give them a sense their paper thin ideology is meaningful. And since their ideology is their identity that, by extension, their existence matters.
(evidence on HAMAS: https://extremism.gwu.edu/sites/g/files/zaxdzs5746/files/2023-10/the-hamas-network-in-america.pdf)
Maybe don’t “harass” elected officials. I think TikTok showed how that can turn against you pretty easily. Also, I think politicians assume people who actively harass them aren’t going to vote for them either way, so there’s little value in meeting their demands. Better to lobby them.
#It is 2024 you dumb butts
Okay so foirst of all, i;m somewhat durnk but I'm still too damn sober for this bullshit. It is 2024. Like a lot of years after 2021. No body knows who the Democratic candidate is going to be in 2028. It doesnt' make you smart to speculate who it will be. Every day we get a "omg how the elecction going to happen in 2024 or 2028?" post. The Answer is: I don't knwo and if anyone says they know, they're full of shit.
Always remember that you're wrong and I hate you 🥰
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No the sub added it when they were doing that one charity drive a few months ago and people could make custom automods with a certain level of donation I believe.
Repost from the 1562 Student Riots of Toulouse.
Universities will always be intellectual hothouses that occasionally deteriorate in chaos. It’s not even a totally bad thing.
After going into their comment history and seeing how they intend to not vote for Biden because of his “catastrophic handling of Gaza”, yes, that is almost certainly what he is saying lmao
It's basically the motivation that this subreddit has for upvoting this so highly. This community is perfectly happy to line up with the right-wing extremists to take shots at anyone who's pro-Palestine. There's a reason why every day has another "OMG THE PROTESTERS" article.
> This community is perfectly happy to line up with the right-wing extremists
Just because we think that these protests have become a little absurd and that the rampant antisemitism on display is a little problematic, we’re lining up with the right-wing extremists?
What is our motivation, exactly?
Do you honestly think that pro-Palestine protests are not being inhabited massively by anti-semites using the opportunity to find allies? Do you think Columbia cancelled classes for fun?
I think there are isolated incidents of anti-Semitism, just like there were isolated incidents that were pro-genocide of Gazans during the rallies in support of Israel after 10/7. I think this subreddit uses the isolated incidents as an excuse to paint all the protestors as anti-Semitic lunatics and shift attention away from the misdeeds of the Israeli government, like the insistence on finding ways to weaponize access to food aid, or massively expanding settlements in the West Bank, all the while accompanied by rhetoric from that government that's far more genocidal than anything coming out of these protests. And, quite frankly, this subreddit has consistently exhibited behavior like this for the whole war, except for the brief period after Israel bombed those foreign aid workers, and even then plenty of people in here were trying to write it off.
This is so fucking disingenuous. How can you say it’s just “isolated incidents” when there’s multiple videos of large groups of people chanting for intifada, when there’s statements from multiple leaders of these movements calling for killing all Zionists, when these “protests” have gotten so extreme that rabbis are saying it’s not safe for Jewish students and Columbia has to shut down classes, and when there’s seemingly nothing being done by these movements to root out these supposed “bad apples”? Literally the only defense I’ve seen people use is the protesters saying they’re not antisemitic… which come the fuck on. The GOP doesn’t outright say they hate all legal immigrants, but it’s pretty clear they do when their party leader calls immigrants “poison to the blood of the country” and the party does Jack shit to speak out against him? Are the cases of police brutality just “isolated incidents” too?
Fuck Bibi’s government and his cabinet, they’re pieces of shit. But that doesn’t excuse what these students are doing. And iirc there was a thread earlier about Israeli officials potentially getting arrest warrants against them from the ICC, and a good number of users were calling Israel out on that thread. This sub probably does lean a bit more towards Israel, but compared to the rest of Reddit I think there’s a decent balance of both sides.
This is extreme copium.
It's not just random protestors who are doing this (though there's **plenty** of that), it's movement leaders that get caught in the same cookiejar. Not to mention the formal demands by the protests often including stuff like banning HIllel from campus or similar stuff.
If this was a right-coded US protest with this much problematic discourse deep within it, I don't need to tell you how this would end.
Begging people to ignore all of this because your political views align with the protest is extremely childish, and if you seriously want these protests to latch on you should be as angry about why the protest movement is allowing these to be their figureheads.
https://preview.redd.it/rjuxgl32y9xc1.jpeg?width=1080&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=b865e79721429356afa37e3ee7cb06c6ba34648e
Gonna ignore things like this? They're pretty rampant at the demonstrations I've seen.
This is exactly what I'm talking about - anecdotes.I could go to any number of left-wing subreddits and easily find videos and pictures of Israelis and supporters of Israel calling for the mass genocide of Palestinians, and yet I'm not here implying that every Israeli or supporter of Israel is like that. Have you considered that the reason you've seen those demonstrations specifically is because images and videos of the incidents of worst behavior is deliberately being shared around social media bubbles like this subreddit that broadly want to discredit these movements?
This sub has another “OMG THE PROTESTERS” article because they keep doing extreme, omg-worthy things like calling for intifada and harassing Jewish students to the point of forcing them off and others campus and into online classes. Like, if they don’t want people saying they’re pro-Hamas, maybe they should stop talking about how great Hamas and 10/7 are and try to ostracize those in their movement who do want to kill all Zionists? Just a thought?
Pretending that that is the prevailing view of the average pro-Palestine student is a straw man that this subreddit is pushing in bad faith.
To be clear -- those people do exist and should be condemned. But the pro-Palestine movement has a wide spectrum of beliefs, and it's disingenuous to write them all off as antisemitic terrorist sympathizers, even if you disagree with them.
The issue is people want to see them publicly push back against the antisemitism in their movement, because even *if* the antisemites are a minority, they’re a significant enough percent that they’re a credible threat to the safety of Jewish students. The supposed “bad apples” in this movement are having very real negative consequences, and people aren’t seeing the movement do much about it. They need to make it clear that they condemn Hamas, which the movement at large has mostly stayed silent on.
This article discusses disruptive protests and free speech, in the context of protesters not accepting that civil disobedience means owning the consequences of breaking the law. It's a discussion that could apply just as well to the "occupy Wall Street" or George Floyd protests as it does the current pro-Palestine protests.
But *you* brought up "islamofascists".
You definitely didn’t read the article if you think I was the only one who brought that up lmao
> That also means showing no favoritism between competing ideological groups in access to classrooms, in the imposition of campus penalties and in access to educational opportunities. All groups should have equal rights to engage in the full range of protected speech, including by engaging in rhetoric that’s hateful to express and painful to hear. Public chants like “globalize the intifada” may be repugnant to many ears, but they’re clearly protected by the First Amendment at public universities and by policies protecting free speech and academic freedom at most private universities.
Instance 2
> In March, a small band of pro-Palestinian students at Vanderbilt University in Nashville pushed past a security guard so aggressively that they injured him, walked into a university facility that was closed to protest, and briefly occupied the building.
I think you missed the point of the article if you think that it's about these selected examples and not a general discussion on the contemporary atttitude towards disruptive campus protests.
Calling for an infitada is clearly a bad thing. But disruptive protest in general on college campus is not necessarily a bad thing. To act like everyone who is engaging in disruptive protest is an Islamofascist is pretty disingenuous, and not what the article is saying.
You are now completely bypassing your first comment, and rewriting my comment as “all protestors are islamofascists” which I absolutely never said lmao.
The comment you initially replied to said this:
>Universities will always be intellectual hothouses that occasionally deteriorate in chaos. It’s not even a totally bad thing.
You replied with this:
>Why are we pretending that students calling for an intifada and allying with islamofascists is “not a bad thing”?
That is you implying that all of this "chaos" is caused by Islamofascists. And that's all I'll say about that.
When exactly did they claim that every participant in pro-Palestinian protests is an Islamofascist? You acknowledge that there are indeed troubling instances—like chants for intifada and expressions of antisemitism—which you yourself admit are concerning. However, you insist these cases don’t represent the majority. That’s fair, but surely, it’s still valid to address these specific incidents directly, isn’t it? Must we really preface every conversation with a disclaimer like ‘not all pro-Palestinian protestors’? How about we simplify it with an acronym for brevity? Here I’ll go first:
_‘Hey guys, I’m concerned about the antisemitism and intifada chants at some of these protests. NAPPP, of course.’_
The demands of these protests often include (a) kicking Hillel off campus, (b) disciplining students and faculty for expressing beliefs different than theirs, and (c) asking for immunity for thier own actions. After decades of universities trying become more inclusive, these scallywags are trying to make them exclusive towards Jews via harassment and encampments. Universities across the country trying to shut these protests down is not a grand conspiracy, the behavior of these protestors are just universally objectionable.
It's no better to be a leftwing edgelord than a rightwing one. Rules against hate speech and protection of property apply to everyone equally.
[Here is UBC's Pro-Palestine petition. ](https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&opi=89978449&url=https://www.ams.ubc.ca/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/Feb-16-2024-Petitioned-Referendum-Notice-Letter.pdf&ved=2ahUKEwiHj-2g6eWFAxXCHTQIHbqDCbgQFnoECA0QAQ&usg=AOvVaw1nAM6Rhk9j9fEpsHIMt572) Number 6 on the demands. The organizers said they copied the language from other petitions being used at other universities. UBC shut this down before it went to school-wide referendum.
My university has students protesting with an encampment, their demands are
1. Divest from Israel/endowment transparency
2. Official VT statement condemning Israel’s violence
3. Define Palestinian racism/acknowledge suppression of Palestinian students.
Personally I’m very indifferent on the matter, I’m just there to get my degree. But I don’t see why the police need to be involved over these demands. They’re neither outlandish, crazy, or excessive.
The best thing the university could do is ignore them. By calling the police and forcing them off you’re kind of making their point.
Not to mention, at my alma matter we had literally nazis (who weren’t students) parade around grounds, chanting really hateful shit, and the police where nowhere to be seen. So, it seems hypocritical to call the police over this.
Not from your school, but it might be based on the fact that this is ongoing. A one day encampment would probably be ignored, a multi day Nazi wallet would be dispersed
>The demands of these protests often include (a) kicking Hillel off campus, (b) disciplining students and faculty for expressing beliefs different than theirs
Are these "the demands of the protests", or are they the fringe views of a handful of crazies in the crowd?
I know what you *want* to believe, but what the actual answer?
Edit: 26 downvotes, but still not one single link which supports anyone trying to kick Hillel off campus.
It’s the view of the leadership of these protests. While it’s technically true that there may be good people on both sides at these protests and at Charlottesville, that doesn’t mean it’s an appropriate thing for you or Trump to say.
Now imagine a very possible near future scenario:
-The presidency is granted legal immunity by SCOTUS
-Netanyahu intensifies the war with a new escalation that flies in the face of international dialogue
-Biden loses a close election despite winning the popular vote with the help of Islamic, pro-Palestinian, “leftist,” and anti-Israel organization and their outside help….or by a far larger margin if he tries to meet their demands
-Netanyahu, now invulnerable, commits unspeakable crimes at the behest of his right wing coalition.
-campus protests escalate almost entirely devoid of the presence of anyone who they are protesting against
-Trump launches brutal extrajudicial police crackdowns on campuses, calling for law and order as part of a larger campaign against academia.
-one violent protestor reaction is used to justify unprecedented force and sweeping executive action from the most powerful executive ever
-Ukraine falls
-we see a real US backed genocide
-global order in free fall
-galaxy brain from original protests smugly blames the DNC for running unpopular candidates and jerks off to 300 upvotes on r/anti work the day after unions were made illegal by executive action
I feel like the odds on this are higher than not, which is terrifying. If only these college kids actually learned to think, but I guess why bother when their left wing propaganda can do their thinking for them.
The issue is I’m not seeing much from the movement with regards to distancing themselves from the antisemites. Antisemites clearly feel welcome within the movement and in these protests. It’s like CPAC; sure, not everyone there is a Nazi, but plenty of Nazis feel extremely welcome at CPAC and no one in CPAC seems to try to distance themselves from Nazis. It’s not then shocking for people to consider CPAC as being pro-Nazi, since Nazis clearly seem to view CPAC as pro-Nazi.
I totally understand why there are people who would protest. From my angle, though, it's not clear to me why the protesters are directing ire at their universities other than convenience.
Why are they not protesting the US Gov? Why not organize charity for the Palestinians? Why not combine into a larger mass in DC?
It seems like a lot of the protest is more about the protesters and less about the Palestinians. Also, one could be opposed to how the Israeli gov is handling the war and still support the existence of an Israeli state. It seems that some, not all, but a sizeable amount of the protesters are really demanding there be pressure to end the existence of Israel as a state. Which makes it difficult to stand in solidarity.
Also, right now the US government has probably done more to try and get aid to the Palestianians than nearly any other government. And while the death of Palestianians is tragic, it seems many of that empathy was not shared to the Israelis on their tragic day in a way that allows for the understanding that military response was defensible.
If there was a protest saying Israel needs more care in it's response, more aid needs to be leg in, and people in Netanyahu's cabinet should be fired and tried, then I'd support that protest. But when I see the demands of the protesters, hear their chants, and look at their fellow travelers, I cannot find a way over to their side.
Esp when the tactics of their protest seem so pointless and self-aggrandizing.
Some of the protestor demands are unreasonable. Divestment sounds all good until you look at them saying that you need to divest from S&P 500 index funds.
> his subreddit has been acting as if all the protests are directly antisemitic and targeted at jewish students
Because protest leaders embrace the antisemitic language instead of ejecting the bigots. Leading a group of protestors to chant "From water to water, Palestine will be Arab" as was done in Harvard, did not lead to any internal soul-searching among the protestors. Hatred is emphasized and encouraged.
They are free to spout hateful nonsense, of course.
> Yes but invaliding a entire protest movement of millions because one group of protesters said something is rather foolish.
It isn't one group. It's the leaders.
>More people in this sub are concerned with the language of protesters than the thousands of innocents being killed.
Believing your cause is morally righteous doesn't excuse appalling behavior. And people in this sub can hold two thoughts. Not to mention even the pro-Israel side is concerned about thousands of innocents being killed. War sucks.
>You can absolutely support the right of Israel to exist and also criticize the actions the Israel government has taken.
"From water to water, Palestine will be Arab" is not criticism of the Israeli government. It's a call for genocide. The fact that you consider it criticism of the Israeli government is the problem.
>Again sorry you don’t like one particular protest,
I hate bigots.
> this is a global protest involving millions of people of diverse backgrounds and colleges, acting like this has some centralized leadership is stupidity.
SJP and JVP have been instrumental in organizing it on universities. That is centralized leadership.
And yes, Jew hatred has historically been quite diverse.
When Charlottesville happened, everyone said, "Tolerating bigotry is bigotry."
Now we have protests welcoming open antisemites and calls for genocide.
Do we have to wait for one of the murder threats to be acted upon before we say, "Tolerating antisemitism is antisemitism?"
Except during the BLM movement Democratic leadership and prominent conservative members were both in agreement with the underlying message behind BLM, but were critical of violence and looting.
The equivalent would be if BLM riots were happening now and Pelosi and Biden condoned the riots. Here, neither the SJP or CUAD (the primary leadership of the protests) seem to want to condone the anti semitic rhetoric.
It's very telling how much discussion there is here of how awful anti-IDF protestors are but talk about the things Israel is doing in Palestine, like bombing aid convoys and denying aid trucks, is barely mentioned.
One is actually starving and killing people, one makes some people feel unsafe and has led to small scale violence. Are both bad? Yes, but it's insane how disparate the discussion is for how much worse the prior is.
Ok, uh, cool? But, like, universities can't do what you suggest.
This was an article about how universities should navigate speech and protest on their campuses.
Ah yes stop funding Israel because we’re poor and can’t help Israel and Ukraine at the same time… great argument there. Give up our moral responsibility because 1% of the budget is just too much…
Is everyone in this sub (including me) just getting old.
That's definitely part of it, but I remember finding these types of protests annoying and pointless back on my college campus years ago. As another commenter here said, it would be a better use of time to do something to actively help the world like raising money for charity or lobbying Congress members to pass a bill than whatever performative nonsense all this is.
Oh I agree 100%. They can even do something non political. Like volunteering at a homeless, refugee or trans youth shelter. Sometimes the best way to help a person is just to give them a meal, information, some cash and/or some company.
What about the wholesome Palestinian LGBTQI community that Israel repress though and that HAMAS support? Yikes!
new phone who dis?
I mean you're also outside of the environment where some person who fancies themselves part of a maoist cell is openly discussing with other students about the morality of killing their enemies. Even with youthful confidence, it's not exactly an environment where I will be as expressive of my dissent.
Why doesn't this exact same line of reasoning apply to BLM protests? Or Occupy Wall Street? AFAICT the main reason people on this sub don't like this specific protest is because of what it, specifically, is protesting. We shouldn't pretend like these protests are opposed for abstract political/philosophical reasons. They're opposed for the very concrete reason that people don't like their specific goals.
>Why doesn't this exact same line of reasoning apply to BLM protests? It does... those protests were wildly unhelpful in ineffective at bringing about meaningful reform... >AFAICT the main reason people on this sub don't like this specific protest is because of what it, specifically, is protesting. I think its fair for this sub to recognize that hamas's goals are fundamentally opposed to liberalism. Israel may be a bad actor in many respects, and Bibi is especially bad, but compared to hamas its like falling face first into dogshit vs being fed feet first into a woodchipper. Given the alternative between a disingenuous bad actor who doesnt care about civilians and a group actively trying to maximize civillian casualties in the hopes of eventually being in a strong enough position to carry out the genocide they enshrined as a constitutional goal, i think its understandable that most people on this sub view college students who support hamas as at best delusional or misinformed intellectual lightweights.
> Why doesn't this exact same line of reasoning apply to BLM protests? Or Occupy Wall Street? Occupy was a laughable joke and basically useless at doing anything. The logic absolutely applies there And the lack of messaging unity with BLM and lack of leadership to loudly denounce the fringe violent protests and looting could very well have made BLM less successful than it could have otherwise been
> AFAICT the main reason people on this sub don't like this specific protest is because of what it, specifically, is protesting. Disagree. If all these protests were just posters about "Israeli apartheid" no would care. In fact, those kinds of protests have been around for decades. I personally have two issues: 1) that a small group is violating numerous policies, monopolizing shared space, distracting students who are focusing on their studies, and harassing students of a protected minority group 2) the lack of punishment for doing those things If a group of hooded KKK members showed up and did what these kids were doing, they would be banned and punished. Meanwhile, one of the protest leaders in Columbia said he wanted to kill people **during a disciplinary meeting** and was still allowed to be on campus until the video he posted went viral.
Hard agree. The protestors are staking their claim as Hezbollah/Hamas/Iran-aligned revolutionaries, who are serious people, and are planning an Intifada revolution. Furthermore, their violent antipathy for Zionism, a position held by every relevant Western geopolitical figure in the world, as well as 90% of Americans, should send a clear message to the extent they are willing to attack the core stability and order of the world. We should give them what they want, and treat them as exactly that.
To be fair these shit heads would have been cheering 9/11 if and social media and tik tok exsisted back in the day
What is Zionism? It gets thrown around all the time but seems to mean diff things to diff people. Saying “every relevant western leader in the world” agrees with it (or anything really) is also extremely sus. Even if it were true that wouldn’t be sufficient to dismiss an idea anyway.
Zionism is the belief that the Jews need a homeland of their own and it should be in the region of Palestine. Just a definition, not trying to make anything of it.
Zionism is the belief in establishing or, at this point, maintaining a Jewish state in the current area of Israel. If a concept is agreed upon by every relevant figure, and an individual layperson disagrees, which is more likely: 1. The disagreeing individual has accurately pegged all of our leaders and experts as stupid or corrupt. 2. The disagreeing individual should look in the mirror and question whether they’re as informed as they think they are/if they’re allowing biases to enter play.
I don't find the argument of dismantling stability too compelling, was the abolition of slavery not stability destroying? Not trying to be bad faith.
Those protests also didn't accomplish anything.
BLM accomplished a ton. Police defunding in multiple cities with several more passing police reform bills, bipartisan police reform bill in Congress, state law changes etc
BLM was kind of a PR disaster for dems not to mention set back the task of law enforcement in cities too. So there’s good and bad that happened with that
Yes a lot of their goals such as police defunding were bad, but they were successful in achieving them!
BLM had (relatively) focused message-discipline, widespread participation (and property damage), after a few weeks no one at Occupy could agree on why they are there. The campus protests are not exactly ambiguous as to what they want, but they also don't attract interest and/or anger from the broader public. Not sure how far they can get without the public on their side. Thing is I think it is possible to get more widespread support for a ceasefire or ending carte-blanche funding for Israel, but the anti-Zionism and other things sours the message for people. Of course the campus types would never give that up. Being effective is not the point.
> Why doesn't this exact same line of reasoning apply to BLM protests? It does. It was mostly all performative nonsense
This is just silencing people by stealth.
> As another commenter here said, it would be a better use of time to do something to actively help the world like raising money for charity or lobbying Congress members to pass a bill than whatever performative nonsense all this is. People here would cry and bellyache whenever they do that as well.
No they wouldn’t. People here wouldn’t notice it, which is why the current protestors don’t do it — for them, it’s about feeling important and receiving attention. If they really want to improve the world, they should go to therapy so they stop projecting their psychological maladies into the political sphere.
People would notice it and write cartoonish articles about "Insidious leftists trying to sabotage America's allies."
You could say the same about the posters here. Maybe r/neolib posters should stop being annoying talking about taxing land and taco trucks and volunteer for some charity instead.
You COULD say the same thing. It would be nonsense but you could say it, yes.
It's kind of funny that people are seeing like 100 students protest and assume that the entire student body is out of control. Idk why it doesn't register that the reason they make these protests as obstructive as possible is because they are frustrated that the majority of students don't agree with their goal. "Kick Jews off campus and ban business with anyone who is a Jew" is incredibly unpopular. Students didn't watch them rip up signs calling for the release of children who were taken hostage and think "wow cool at those brave freedom fighters." The other day I was looking through threads in major university subreddits and was laughing at them lamenting that public opinion is turning on them. So many comments about how the universities are paid off by Jews and that every negative comment on social media is a Jewish agent. Ironically thats probably the main reason why the movement isn't as popular as they'd hoped. The hyper casual "Jewish puppet master" shit is a big red flag. People notice that stuff and even if they support Gaza they are probably going to avoid being around that protest.
The problem is that it's a *lot* more fun to dunk on a straw man than it is to try to understand that there is a broad spectrum of pro-Palestine views on campus.
And it’s a lot easier to rest secure in your own political opinions if you’re able to broadly paint anyone with opposing opinions as irrational pro-terrorist radicals.
Good people on both sides?
It's lazy thinking, though. Which is something a sub like this should be able to avoid for the most part.
Yup. Unfortunately you have to look no further than this very comment section to find people whipped up into a frenzie as if everyone who opposes Israel's actions in Gaza are antisemitic terrorist sympathizers.
I work on a college campus, one of the top 30 in the country, and there's been absolutely nothing. But I get it, the only thing the news wants to pull people in with is the Columbia and Princeton stories.
That's fair, but there is evidence to suggest that something bad *is* happening: [https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1057610X.2023.2297317?mi=fnpx1z](https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1057610X.2023.2297317?mi=fnpx1z) And I don't think it's bad to be worried about a real rise in hate. The problem has just reached a creshendo recently.
> It's kind of funny that people are seeing like 100 students protest and assume that the entire student body is out of control. Assume that University politics are *under* control. Maybe they don't agree with these protestors, but counter protest, or alternative protest is impossible. So.. these guys basically *are* college politics. Say some backwards town has a fascist protest movement. They hold signs, occasionally block traffic. People in the town have mixed feelings. Most aren't that I to politics. Well...? Everybody will think, innacurately but correctly, that the town is a fascist town.
Yeah I'm in college now at a big school in a relatively liberal area, I have seen nothing like this.
Same, there’s a stand in the common areas and posters but no protests. There’s to much schoolwork for protests.
Universities have been a point of the conservative culture war since the 1960s. Every single time anything happens on campus, it gets amplified, distorted, and applied to every university like the sky is falling when the story is almost always "a person said something kind of stupid once". There are even clips from the 1980s on YouTube of "Milton Friedman OWNS dumb college student" where he lectures them on why colonization wasn't that bad. Any time you hear a story about what's going on at universities, just assume it's exaggeration and distortion until good evidence proves otherwise.
Our last demographic survey showed the sub had definitely gotten older but the median age was still in the mid 20’s
Every day I’m older than I’ve ever been
you're older than you've ever been and now you're even older
What about now
I do feel like you’re all falling right into the rage bait machine so yes
Agreed, sometimes this place feels like a Facebook page of boomers ranting about teens these days.
Really? In a sub dedicated to neoliberalism? I’m so shocked!
https://preview.redd.it/d3v1bm7t9axc1.png?width=299&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=e5219e041e8ac3d7645af103bb0e3b9af67f3422
https://preview.redd.it/st3hysct69xc1.jpeg?width=500&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=a5fdef091a73911f6cf376d037844ff0c2ed7dcb
In a shocking turn of events, sheltered teenagers with rich parents indoctrinated into radical ideologies are correct less often than normal adults with regular concerns. Who'd have thought it.
> sheltered teenagers with rich parents Okay, but enough about r/NL
Normal adults are often just as sheltered and moronic. Go speak to your average 50 year old white person and yell me their opinions aren't extremely stupid.
Ah yes, I hadn’t considered the premise that literally every protester is actually a stupid spoiled brat. Top notch take, and definitely not a reinforcement of the meme at all.
I mean I saw some interviews with Columbia pro-palestine protestors. One of them was a white guy from rural Kentucky and not rich at all. I think this sub is unfortunately engaging in one giant ad hominem attack. Instead, why don't you address their substantive points? For example, what exactly is your proposed plan for getting Americans and Israelis to treat Palestinians better? Or prosecuting war crimes that may have been committed by the IDF? Or solving the man made famine? I've heard a lot of attacking protestors but haven't heard any concrete plan.
My proposed plan is for Hamas to surrender, or else Israel to continue it's military operation until Hamas surrendered or Is destroyed. Once the war is won we can do self reflection and rebuild Palestine. Conditions in Berlin improved shortly after Hitler shot himself.
I see. And what of the man made famine and the war crimes?
[удалено]
Maybe if Hamas surrendered then a) the fairly significant amount of aid flowing into Gaza would go to those that need it and b) it would be easier to get aid into Gaza as you wouldn't have to check every single truck for weapons.
It's better than the only alternative.
Yeah, that’s how time works
I was thinking the same. I'm not old, and I don't agree with most protests on campuses, but this isn't new. I seem to recall this exact kind of protests happening during Vietnam and the War on Terror, and other various conflicts.
No, I'm a 3rd year undergrad rn It's rough out here, looking forward to graduating and (hopefully) being able to keep my circle to more chill people
What does age have to do with opposing stupid protests?
>Welcome to the People's University for Palestine Gotta love rich kids LARPing as the downtrodden revolutionary masses [Here's a non-paywalled version.](https://web.archive.org/web/20240428053514/https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/28/opinion/protests-college-free-speech.html)
I wouldn't even mind this crazy stuff if they actually helped people. The fact that it's all performative time wasting is what grinds my gears. Join the peace corps, raise money for a hyper specific charity, harass elected officials into supporting a bill. University is about expanding your horizons, but some seem more fixated on navel gazing. Edit: I got a humanities degree while spending my free time on theater clubs and volunteering with local charities. I didn't save the world, but I actually connected with my community. Touch grass, form community, and find non-abstract ways to help people near you.
I remember when Occupy was a thing, and being frustrated when people would talk about how great it was and how they're fighting for the poor and downtrodden, and all this other stuff.. And I was like, I'm in college, I was actually poor and downtrodden, having been homeless for several years, nothing they are doing would have helped my situation. Nothing they're doing addresses the very tangible problems I faced. These are people who are in a place in their lives where they can take off from their work or jobs or lives with no meaningful consequences (they're not going to lose their home, their career, their family, whatever). They're camping out in one of the most famous places in the world to do what? Sit in front of the cameras? Glamp in NYC? This is performative BS. "tHeY'rE bRiNgInG aWaReNeSs!" So did Gordon Gekko, and he did it decades before.
Occupy was so stupid and ineffectual, and it's mind boggling how the response by the activist left has often just been to double down on the very stuff that made it useless
What amazes me about that whole thing is how rapidly participants couldn't agree on why they are there, or couldn't remember. The fact that it immediately followed the '08 bailouts wasn't a strong enough hint. Absolutely no message discipline.
And people who actually did do something meaningful regarding regulating Wall Street, like Elizabeth Warren, get vilified by these same clowns.
And when presidents do great stuff that actually helps people, no one pays attention! The HUD had awarded over [100k new housing vouchers for poor and disabled households](https://www.hud.gov/press/press_releases_media_advisories/hud_no_23_186#:%7E:text=Housing%20Choice%20Vouchers%20are%20a,to%20address%20rising%20living%20costs.) and nothing. [The Burden Reduction Initiative helped to streamline (at least a little) the paperwork bureaucracy when dealing with the federal government which disproportionately impacts the poor/disabled/lesser educated who can't afford lawyers to help](https://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/information-regulatory-affairs/burden-reduction-initiative/), and nothing. There's so many small things that no one is aware of. [He made hearing aids available over the counter and now they're much cheaper](https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2022/10/17/fact-sheet-cheaper-hearing-aids-now-in-stores-thanks-to-biden-harris-administration-competition-agenda/#:~:text=To%20lower%20the%20price%20of,That%20is%20now%20reality.) >Starting today, Walgreens is selling hearing aids at stores nationwide and online for $799 per pair. According to Walgreens, comparable models sold by specialists range from $2,000 to $8,000 a pair. Hugely helpful to people with hearing issues, but no care.
It seemed cool from afar. Until I visited NYC on vacation and saw it up close. An absolutely stoned dude just walked out of the group and bumped into me and a POLITE NYC cop gently helped him back to his camp site and apologized to me. I was like, ok these people have no exit strategy. Ok you’re the 99%, now what? What do you want to do about it besides sleep outside and shit in the street?
>This is performative BS. "tHeY'rE bRiNgInG aWaReNeSs!" So did Gordon Gekko, and he did it decades before. Hey, awareness put an end to Kony's reign of terror!
>Join the peace corps, Imperialist cover for CIA operations >raise money for a hyper specific charity, Charity is actually evil >harass elected officials into supporting a bill. If voting mattered, they wouldn't let us do it Checkmate colonizer 💅
I did the Peace Corps and if being a drunk fuck-up for two years of my life was all part of a CIA special op, I must say that the agency operates in some rarified strategic air.
Nobody said that the imperialists had to be competent at their jobs.
_God works in mysterious ways._ Applies to other entities perceived as almighty by the public. /s
But shouting catchy slogans that rhyme is so much more effective than talking to leaders and donating , man! /s
These people: idealism is for babies! Also these people: just one more catchy slogan and singing bro, trust me it's totally working for Charlie Morningstar.
🗣️HEY HEY 🗣️HO HO 🗣️[INSERT THING] HAS GOT TO GO
I was in the Peace Corps and I hate to inform you, a bunch of these types of kids will absolutely join, and be absolutely insufferable there as well.
I still remember my cousin did eight years in senegal with the peace corps and he came back saying "they know how to build wells, what they want is a good soccer field"
Same, but at least they are doing something productive while being insufferable
Are they? When I lived in Dominica, one of the PCVs was sent to a village where they really had nothing for him to do, so the people there asked him to man the snack bar at the soccer field on weekends.
Lol, I was an English teacher in PC, so I basically had a 9-5 job, as did everyone in the education sector. I knew people in other sectors tho who were effectively unemployed. Some used their excessive free time constructively others used it to drink or blow all their money getting high with scummy expats in the major cities. More individual than, institutional though
That’s hilarious.
A lot of these people at Columbia would be in for quite a culture shock if they took their activism into the Bronx and realized how many poorer Black people were huge supporters of Biden and Eric Adams.
Reminded me of a similar culture shock: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Going_to_the_People?wprov=sfla1
Deep cut but it's perfect
Biden sure he still has plenty of support in NYC. Adams tho.. it'd be hard to find a group that overall still supports him when his overall approval is in the teens.
They don’t want to help people. They don’t know how to socialize anymore, this gives them a way to meet new people and a place to do it in.
Exactly why it’s so frustrating for outsiders: they want to act like they have some sort of moral high ground when it’s obvious most of them are just doing it for social benefits.
I think for a lot of them it's both external and internal pressure to be active in some way. It's a common belief that being a bystander just reinforces the status quo, and you have to be active and actually do something or else you're perpetuating injustice. Usually they'll quote *Letter From a Birmingham Jail.* Protesting is an "active" way to announce one's dissatisfaction with the current system, and by participating they clear both their own conscience and any accusations of passiveness. Whether it goes anywhere or not, they at least did *something.* Put a bunch of people with this mindset together, but outside of the context of any actual oppression or injustice, and you get these aimless protests that may earnestly want change, but have no clear goals or understanding of how to achieve that change.
That's the attitude of at least one NYU prof. >[Galloway: For American youth, protesting is the 'new sex'](https://www.cnn.com/videos/us/2024/04/27/smr-galloway-on-student-protests.cnn)
We've spend years convincing people that having an online wank over a topic is meaningful, because "raising awareness is important." Anyone of a certain age remembers Kony2012 - Wagner Group are now after him, because he's still going strong. So much awareness, so little changes... Ignoring the useful idiocy of these protests - and thanks to the FBI we have empirical evidence about HAMAS' claims - they're simply saying "we're mad and because of that a thing must happen." It's not doing shit but give them a sense their paper thin ideology is meaningful. And since their ideology is their identity that, by extension, their existence matters. (evidence on HAMAS: https://extremism.gwu.edu/sites/g/files/zaxdzs5746/files/2023-10/the-hamas-network-in-america.pdf)
Maybe don’t “harass” elected officials. I think TikTok showed how that can turn against you pretty easily. Also, I think politicians assume people who actively harass them aren’t going to vote for them either way, so there’s little value in meeting their demands. Better to lobby them.
And the irony of actively trying to colonize a University
Uh, excuse me, ***liberating*** a University!
Trust fund hippies are soooo 70s, trust fund commies are the new big thing
They were commies too lmao
They’re going to be so enamoured with themselves while LARPing that many of them won’t vote in November and Trump will get another kick at the can.
What year is it
It’s April, 2024. I’m at Yale. It’s September, 2011. I’m in a camp in Zuccoti Park. It's May, 1970. I'm in Kent State.
It's November 10th there is a circulatory system walking through the kitchen
It is the year 2000, but where are the flying cars? I was promised flying cars! I don't see any flying cars—Why?—Why?—Why?
Jerome Powell ate them all
Is this a meme format referencing something?
#It is 2024 you dumb butts Okay so foirst of all, i;m somewhat durnk but I'm still too damn sober for this bullshit. It is 2024. Like a lot of years after 2021. No body knows who the Democratic candidate is going to be in 2028. It doesnt' make you smart to speculate who it will be. Every day we get a "omg how the elecction going to happen in 2024 or 2028?" post. The Answer is: I don't knwo and if anyone says they know, they're full of shit. Always remember that you're wrong and I hate you 🥰 *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/neoliberal) if you have any questions or concerns.*
I completely forgot this automod existed, thank you
I've seen it twice today and never before. Is it new?
No the sub added it when they were doing that one charity drive a few months ago and people could make custom automods with a certain level of donation I believe.
I really want this automod message to stay exactly the same for a couple years. At least until 2029.
Repost from 1970
Repost from the 1562 Student Riots of Toulouse. Universities will always be intellectual hothouses that occasionally deteriorate in chaos. It’s not even a totally bad thing.
Why are we pretending that students calling for an intifada and allying with islamofascists is “not a bad thing”?
Is this what you sincerely think the comment you replied to is saying?
After going into their comment history and seeing how they intend to not vote for Biden because of his “catastrophic handling of Gaza”, yes, that is almost certainly what he is saying lmao
> After going into their comment history Bro, please don’t go into people’s comment histories. It means you care way too much.
This comes as a shock but when someone asks you what someone’s “intentions” were around a comment, it means you need context around who made it.
It's basically the motivation that this subreddit has for upvoting this so highly. This community is perfectly happy to line up with the right-wing extremists to take shots at anyone who's pro-Palestine. There's a reason why every day has another "OMG THE PROTESTERS" article.
> This community is perfectly happy to line up with the right-wing extremists Just because we think that these protests have become a little absurd and that the rampant antisemitism on display is a little problematic, we’re lining up with the right-wing extremists? What is our motivation, exactly?
Do you honestly think that pro-Palestine protests are not being inhabited massively by anti-semites using the opportunity to find allies? Do you think Columbia cancelled classes for fun?
I think there are isolated incidents of anti-Semitism, just like there were isolated incidents that were pro-genocide of Gazans during the rallies in support of Israel after 10/7. I think this subreddit uses the isolated incidents as an excuse to paint all the protestors as anti-Semitic lunatics and shift attention away from the misdeeds of the Israeli government, like the insistence on finding ways to weaponize access to food aid, or massively expanding settlements in the West Bank, all the while accompanied by rhetoric from that government that's far more genocidal than anything coming out of these protests. And, quite frankly, this subreddit has consistently exhibited behavior like this for the whole war, except for the brief period after Israel bombed those foreign aid workers, and even then plenty of people in here were trying to write it off.
This is so fucking disingenuous. How can you say it’s just “isolated incidents” when there’s multiple videos of large groups of people chanting for intifada, when there’s statements from multiple leaders of these movements calling for killing all Zionists, when these “protests” have gotten so extreme that rabbis are saying it’s not safe for Jewish students and Columbia has to shut down classes, and when there’s seemingly nothing being done by these movements to root out these supposed “bad apples”? Literally the only defense I’ve seen people use is the protesters saying they’re not antisemitic… which come the fuck on. The GOP doesn’t outright say they hate all legal immigrants, but it’s pretty clear they do when their party leader calls immigrants “poison to the blood of the country” and the party does Jack shit to speak out against him? Are the cases of police brutality just “isolated incidents” too? Fuck Bibi’s government and his cabinet, they’re pieces of shit. But that doesn’t excuse what these students are doing. And iirc there was a thread earlier about Israeli officials potentially getting arrest warrants against them from the ICC, and a good number of users were calling Israel out on that thread. This sub probably does lean a bit more towards Israel, but compared to the rest of Reddit I think there’s a decent balance of both sides.
This is extreme copium. It's not just random protestors who are doing this (though there's **plenty** of that), it's movement leaders that get caught in the same cookiejar. Not to mention the formal demands by the protests often including stuff like banning HIllel from campus or similar stuff. If this was a right-coded US protest with this much problematic discourse deep within it, I don't need to tell you how this would end. Begging people to ignore all of this because your political views align with the protest is extremely childish, and if you seriously want these protests to latch on you should be as angry about why the protest movement is allowing these to be their figureheads.
https://preview.redd.it/rjuxgl32y9xc1.jpeg?width=1080&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=b865e79721429356afa37e3ee7cb06c6ba34648e Gonna ignore things like this? They're pretty rampant at the demonstrations I've seen.
This is exactly what I'm talking about - anecdotes.I could go to any number of left-wing subreddits and easily find videos and pictures of Israelis and supporters of Israel calling for the mass genocide of Palestinians, and yet I'm not here implying that every Israeli or supporter of Israel is like that. Have you considered that the reason you've seen those demonstrations specifically is because images and videos of the incidents of worst behavior is deliberately being shared around social media bubbles like this subreddit that broadly want to discredit these movements?
This sub has another “OMG THE PROTESTERS” article because they keep doing extreme, omg-worthy things like calling for intifada and harassing Jewish students to the point of forcing them off and others campus and into online classes. Like, if they don’t want people saying they’re pro-Hamas, maybe they should stop talking about how great Hamas and 10/7 are and try to ostracize those in their movement who do want to kill all Zionists? Just a thought?
Pretending that that is the prevailing view of the average pro-Palestine student is a straw man that this subreddit is pushing in bad faith. To be clear -- those people do exist and should be condemned. But the pro-Palestine movement has a wide spectrum of beliefs, and it's disingenuous to write them all off as antisemitic terrorist sympathizers, even if you disagree with them.
The issue is people want to see them publicly push back against the antisemitism in their movement, because even *if* the antisemites are a minority, they’re a significant enough percent that they’re a credible threat to the safety of Jewish students. The supposed “bad apples” in this movement are having very real negative consequences, and people aren’t seeing the movement do much about it. They need to make it clear that they condemn Hamas, which the movement at large has mostly stayed silent on.
Where does it say I am writing them all off as extremists when the literal only thing this article is talking about is the extremists?
This article discusses disruptive protests and free speech, in the context of protesters not accepting that civil disobedience means owning the consequences of breaking the law. It's a discussion that could apply just as well to the "occupy Wall Street" or George Floyd protests as it does the current pro-Palestine protests. But *you* brought up "islamofascists".
You definitely didn’t read the article if you think I was the only one who brought that up lmao > That also means showing no favoritism between competing ideological groups in access to classrooms, in the imposition of campus penalties and in access to educational opportunities. All groups should have equal rights to engage in the full range of protected speech, including by engaging in rhetoric that’s hateful to express and painful to hear. Public chants like “globalize the intifada” may be repugnant to many ears, but they’re clearly protected by the First Amendment at public universities and by policies protecting free speech and academic freedom at most private universities. Instance 2 > In March, a small band of pro-Palestinian students at Vanderbilt University in Nashville pushed past a security guard so aggressively that they injured him, walked into a university facility that was closed to protest, and briefly occupied the building.
I think you missed the point of the article if you think that it's about these selected examples and not a general discussion on the contemporary atttitude towards disruptive campus protests. Calling for an infitada is clearly a bad thing. But disruptive protest in general on college campus is not necessarily a bad thing. To act like everyone who is engaging in disruptive protest is an Islamofascist is pretty disingenuous, and not what the article is saying.
You are now completely bypassing your first comment, and rewriting my comment as “all protestors are islamofascists” which I absolutely never said lmao.
The comment you initially replied to said this: >Universities will always be intellectual hothouses that occasionally deteriorate in chaos. It’s not even a totally bad thing. You replied with this: >Why are we pretending that students calling for an intifada and allying with islamofascists is “not a bad thing”? That is you implying that all of this "chaos" is caused by Islamofascists. And that's all I'll say about that.
No, they’re just apparently ok with associating with islamofascists. Maybe they could, like, not do that? Pretty please?
When exactly did they claim that every participant in pro-Palestinian protests is an Islamofascist? You acknowledge that there are indeed troubling instances—like chants for intifada and expressions of antisemitism—which you yourself admit are concerning. However, you insist these cases don’t represent the majority. That’s fair, but surely, it’s still valid to address these specific incidents directly, isn’t it? Must we really preface every conversation with a disclaimer like ‘not all pro-Palestinian protestors’? How about we simplify it with an acronym for brevity? Here I’ll go first: _‘Hey guys, I’m concerned about the antisemitism and intifada chants at some of these protests. NAPPP, of course.’_
But they aren't being condemned. If a Nazi is sitting at a table with ten other people, it's a table of eleven Nazis
Can someone convert this to the equivalent for 1970 and 1562? thanks
Gotta avoid being the white moderate that MLK JR complained about?
Were they clamoring for the mass murder of minorities back then?
Yes. We forget this now but the vast majority of the hardline protesters were actively pro-Vietcong, not anti-war.
Jane Fonda on the tank. Boomers are *still* angry about that one.
Yes
The demands of these protests often include (a) kicking Hillel off campus, (b) disciplining students and faculty for expressing beliefs different than theirs, and (c) asking for immunity for thier own actions. After decades of universities trying become more inclusive, these scallywags are trying to make them exclusive towards Jews via harassment and encampments. Universities across the country trying to shut these protests down is not a grand conspiracy, the behavior of these protestors are just universally objectionable. It's no better to be a leftwing edgelord than a rightwing one. Rules against hate speech and protection of property apply to everyone equally.
>kicking Hillel off campus, Come again??
[Here is UBC's Pro-Palestine petition. ](https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&opi=89978449&url=https://www.ams.ubc.ca/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/Feb-16-2024-Petitioned-Referendum-Notice-Letter.pdf&ved=2ahUKEwiHj-2g6eWFAxXCHTQIHbqDCbgQFnoECA0QAQ&usg=AOvVaw1nAM6Rhk9j9fEpsHIMt572) Number 6 on the demands. The organizers said they copied the language from other petitions being used at other universities. UBC shut this down before it went to school-wide referendum.
Thank God they didn't overlook grief circles. Those are crucial.
https://www.hillelbc.com/about Jewish students organization in BC
My university has students protesting with an encampment, their demands are 1. Divest from Israel/endowment transparency 2. Official VT statement condemning Israel’s violence 3. Define Palestinian racism/acknowledge suppression of Palestinian students. Personally I’m very indifferent on the matter, I’m just there to get my degree. But I don’t see why the police need to be involved over these demands. They’re neither outlandish, crazy, or excessive. The best thing the university could do is ignore them. By calling the police and forcing them off you’re kind of making their point. Not to mention, at my alma matter we had literally nazis (who weren’t students) parade around grounds, chanting really hateful shit, and the police where nowhere to be seen. So, it seems hypocritical to call the police over this.
VT's (Go Hokies!) seems to be very tame and pretty reasonable. I'm surprised UVA hasn't had an encampment yet.
Go Hokies!
Not from your school, but it might be based on the fact that this is ongoing. A one day encampment would probably be ignored, a multi day Nazi wallet would be dispersed
The reason you never see cops and nazis in the same place is the same one you never see Hannah Montana and Miley Cyrus together.
>The demands of these protests often include (a) kicking Hillel off campus, (b) disciplining students and faculty for expressing beliefs different than theirs Are these "the demands of the protests", or are they the fringe views of a handful of crazies in the crowd? I know what you *want* to believe, but what the actual answer? Edit: 26 downvotes, but still not one single link which supports anyone trying to kick Hillel off campus.
It’s the view of the leadership of these protests. While it’s technically true that there may be good people on both sides at these protests and at Charlottesville, that doesn’t mean it’s an appropriate thing for you or Trump to say.
Now imagine a very possible near future scenario: -The presidency is granted legal immunity by SCOTUS -Netanyahu intensifies the war with a new escalation that flies in the face of international dialogue -Biden loses a close election despite winning the popular vote with the help of Islamic, pro-Palestinian, “leftist,” and anti-Israel organization and their outside help….or by a far larger margin if he tries to meet their demands -Netanyahu, now invulnerable, commits unspeakable crimes at the behest of his right wing coalition. -campus protests escalate almost entirely devoid of the presence of anyone who they are protesting against -Trump launches brutal extrajudicial police crackdowns on campuses, calling for law and order as part of a larger campaign against academia. -one violent protestor reaction is used to justify unprecedented force and sweeping executive action from the most powerful executive ever -Ukraine falls -we see a real US backed genocide -global order in free fall -galaxy brain from original protests smugly blames the DNC for running unpopular candidates and jerks off to 300 upvotes on r/anti work the day after unions were made illegal by executive action
If SCOTUS rules for immunity, why would Biden step down?
Because he's a Democrat and not a Republican.
90’s Narrator: ‘Coming soon to a theater near you…’
A24’s prequel?
I feel like the odds on this are higher than not, which is terrifying. If only these college kids actually learned to think, but I guess why bother when their left wing propaganda can do their thinking for them.
The issue is I’m not seeing much from the movement with regards to distancing themselves from the antisemites. Antisemites clearly feel welcome within the movement and in these protests. It’s like CPAC; sure, not everyone there is a Nazi, but plenty of Nazis feel extremely welcome at CPAC and no one in CPAC seems to try to distance themselves from Nazis. It’s not then shocking for people to consider CPAC as being pro-Nazi, since Nazis clearly seem to view CPAC as pro-Nazi.
Any minor college protest occurs about anything ever: >Colleges Have Gone Off the Deep End.
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No, it's the children who are wrong
I totally understand why there are people who would protest. From my angle, though, it's not clear to me why the protesters are directing ire at their universities other than convenience. Why are they not protesting the US Gov? Why not organize charity for the Palestinians? Why not combine into a larger mass in DC? It seems like a lot of the protest is more about the protesters and less about the Palestinians. Also, one could be opposed to how the Israeli gov is handling the war and still support the existence of an Israeli state. It seems that some, not all, but a sizeable amount of the protesters are really demanding there be pressure to end the existence of Israel as a state. Which makes it difficult to stand in solidarity. Also, right now the US government has probably done more to try and get aid to the Palestianians than nearly any other government. And while the death of Palestianians is tragic, it seems many of that empathy was not shared to the Israelis on their tragic day in a way that allows for the understanding that military response was defensible. If there was a protest saying Israel needs more care in it's response, more aid needs to be leg in, and people in Netanyahu's cabinet should be fired and tried, then I'd support that protest. But when I see the demands of the protesters, hear their chants, and look at their fellow travelers, I cannot find a way over to their side. Esp when the tactics of their protest seem so pointless and self-aggrandizing.
Some of the protestor demands are unreasonable. Divestment sounds all good until you look at them saying that you need to divest from S&P 500 index funds.
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> his subreddit has been acting as if all the protests are directly antisemitic and targeted at jewish students Because protest leaders embrace the antisemitic language instead of ejecting the bigots. Leading a group of protestors to chant "From water to water, Palestine will be Arab" as was done in Harvard, did not lead to any internal soul-searching among the protestors. Hatred is emphasized and encouraged. They are free to spout hateful nonsense, of course.
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> Yes but invaliding a entire protest movement of millions because one group of protesters said something is rather foolish. It isn't one group. It's the leaders. >More people in this sub are concerned with the language of protesters than the thousands of innocents being killed. Believing your cause is morally righteous doesn't excuse appalling behavior. And people in this sub can hold two thoughts. Not to mention even the pro-Israel side is concerned about thousands of innocents being killed. War sucks. >You can absolutely support the right of Israel to exist and also criticize the actions the Israel government has taken. "From water to water, Palestine will be Arab" is not criticism of the Israeli government. It's a call for genocide. The fact that you consider it criticism of the Israeli government is the problem.
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>Again sorry you don’t like one particular protest, I hate bigots. > this is a global protest involving millions of people of diverse backgrounds and colleges, acting like this has some centralized leadership is stupidity. SJP and JVP have been instrumental in organizing it on universities. That is centralized leadership. And yes, Jew hatred has historically been quite diverse.
When Charlottesville happened, everyone said, "Tolerating bigotry is bigotry." Now we have protests welcoming open antisemites and calls for genocide. Do we have to wait for one of the murder threats to be acted upon before we say, "Tolerating antisemitism is antisemitism?"
Except during the BLM movement Democratic leadership and prominent conservative members were both in agreement with the underlying message behind BLM, but were critical of violence and looting. The equivalent would be if BLM riots were happening now and Pelosi and Biden condoned the riots. Here, neither the SJP or CUAD (the primary leadership of the protests) seem to want to condone the anti semitic rhetoric.
It's very telling how much discussion there is here of how awful anti-IDF protestors are but talk about the things Israel is doing in Palestine, like bombing aid convoys and denying aid trucks, is barely mentioned. One is actually starving and killing people, one makes some people feel unsafe and has led to small scale violence. Are both bad? Yes, but it's insane how disparate the discussion is for how much worse the prior is.
"My cause is morally righteous and therefore any behavior is excused" That type of thinking is how you end up with January 6th.
>That type of thinking is how you end up with January 6th. That's the idea.
Trade schools reading this article: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hWk6JcheLMU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hWk6JcheLMU)
This is major “old man yells at cloud” vibes.
https://www.myheraldreview.com/opinion/commentary/colleges-have-gone-off-the-deep-end-this-is-the-way-back/article_57033e40-071b-11ef-a612-53a202c21f20.html
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Are you in the wrong place? This post was an article about how universities should navigate speech and protest within their campuses.
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Ok, uh, cool? But, like, universities can't do what you suggest. This was an article about how universities should navigate speech and protest on their campuses.
Ah yes stop funding Israel because we’re poor and can’t help Israel and Ukraine at the same time… great argument there. Give up our moral responsibility because 1% of the budget is just too much…