2024 Campus Protests: Freeze Peach Under Attack (By Cops)

pvn · May 6, 2024, 5:08pm

goofy · May 6, 2024, 8:48pm

Earlier in the week, the morning after the raid, the New York Times had informed its readers that “the protest ended more peaceably than the one in 1968.” This was true, as far as it went; the 1968 showdown spanned multiple buildings and ended in an open-air police assault; more than 700 people were arrested and 100 injured.

But the Times didn’t know about the gunfire. After remarking on the relative peaceability of Monday’s events, the Times went on to mention that police were “blocking most from viewing the raid,” and that it was “unclear what had happened outside the building.” It also acknowledged “initial reports of some police violence against students just outside the building that could not immediately be verified”—with the link leading to the Columbia Spectator’s firsthand reporting that “officers threw protesters to the floor and slammed into them with metal barricades.”

The Spectator had also watched the NYPD promotional reel and noticed the drawn guns. But where the student reporters were trying to cross-check and expand their understanding of what had just happened around them, the Times was airily yet ponderously setting down its draft of history. While the police were better behaved than in 1968, the paper wrote,

the students’ tactics were the same: By escalating their protest to the point where the university was unable to function, students forced the hand of administrators, who brought in the police to arrest them.

New York Times

In fact, the tactics of the students in 1968 had included seizing multiple buildings and holding a dean hostage. To claim that the students in 2024 had “forced the hand” of administrators was to grant an untested, and pretty clearly false, premise—administrators at Northwestern and Brown this week reached agreements with demonstrators. But the Times and the people running Columbia and other universities, from coast to coast, had committed themselves to a story, even if the story might have a live bullet at the end of it.

goofy · May 6, 2024, 10:39pm

From this article…

…comes this wild quote:

Jman220 · May 6, 2024, 10:46pm

Nitpick: There were black people who fought for the confederacy, but they were slaves. https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2011/09/black-confederates/#:~:text=Blacks%20who%20shouldered%20arms%20for,not%20big%20numbers%2C%20said%20Stauffer.

The point still remains of course.

feedthabeast · May 6, 2024, 11:12pm

Guess I’m just the token Jew then. Silly me for thinking I don’t have to endorse genocide because reasons.

LFS · May 7, 2024, 2:30pm

Yeah it’s a surprise to me to learn that I, in fact, am the anti-semite. Quite a twist!

feedthabeast · May 7, 2024, 3:08pm

No one:

Mackelmore: Rapper Macklemore says ‘f— no, I'm not voting for’ Biden in new anti-Israel song

Wow thanks man! Totally need more dipshits to punish Biden by effectively voting for the guy who wants to ban Muslims and level Gaza.

goofy · May 7, 2024, 5:10pm

It’s a banger tho

goofy · May 7, 2024, 8:26pm

https://twitter.com/taliaotg/status/1787859998950789185

https://twitter.com/taliaotg/status/1787881577482944745

Arrested the student!!!

goofy · May 10, 2024, 7:56pm

The Texas Department of Public Safety arrested a University of Texas professor Wednesday, more than a week after he was accused of grabbing a DPS trooper’s bike and yelling expletives during the April 29 encampment that was staged to protest the Israel-Hamas war. He was then fired by the university this week, according to his lawyer.

Gerry Morris, the lawyer representing former professor Richard Heyman, disputed law enforcement’s characterization of Heyman’s actions, saying evidence contradicts the accusations against him.

The DPS charged Heyman, who has worked at UT for almost 18 years and is listed as a lecturer in the school of liberal arts and architecture, with interfering with public duties. The charge is a Class B misdemeanor, which can be punished with a fine of up to $2,000 and no more than 180 days in jail.

The charging document also notes that Heyman had a water bottle in his hand that he “lifted above his head” and that while his finger was in the trooper’s face, Heyman’s arm was “primed to swing the bottle.”

goofy · May 13, 2024, 6:00pm

A Xavier student and a graduate charged in connection with a campus protest are facing felony charges that may never have been used in Hamilton County before, officials said.

The pair appeared in court Monday on charges they committed a crime while wearing disguises. Witnesses said they were wearing medical face masks. They are also charged with trespassing.

The felony charge stems from a 1950s era law targeting the Ku Klux Klan. Attorney General David Yost pointed out the law in a letter to Ohio university presidents in response to the recent pro-Palestinian protests. It carries a maximum sentence of 18 months in prison.

Hamilton County Prosecutor’s Office spokesman Matthew Broo said staff at his office could find no records or recall anyone else ever being charged under this law in this county.

goofy · May 13, 2024, 10:19pm

By Osita Nwanevu:

The student left is the most reliably correct constituency in America. Over the past 60 years, it has passed every great moral test American foreign policy has forced upon the public, including the Vietnam war, the question of relations with apartheid South Africa, and the Iraq war. Student activists were at the heart of the black civil rights movement from the very beginning. To much derision and abuse, they pushed for more rights, protections and respect for women and queer people on their campuses than the wider world was long willing to provide. And over the past 20 years in particular, policymakers have arrived belatedly to stances on economic inequality, climate change, drug policy and criminal justice that putative radicals on campus took up long before them.

They have not always been right; even when right, their prescriptions for the problems they’ve identified and their means of directing attention to them have not always been prudent. But time and time and time again, the student left in America has squarely faced and expressed truths our politicians and all the eminent and eloquent voices of moderation in the press, in all of their supposed wisdom and good sense, have been unable or unwilling to see. Straining against an ancient and immortal prejudice against youth, it has made a habit of telling the American people, in tones that discomfit, what they need to hear before they are ready to hear it.

There have been real instances of antisemitism on campuses since the protests began; here and there we’ve seen real instances of malevolence and idiocy. But to believe, on the basis of anecdata, that hatred and ignorance have motivated the vast majority of students who’ve set up encampments and other pro-Palestinian protests over the last month ⁠– in their many thousands at well over 100 colleges and universities in all but four states ⁠– is to believe what can only be described as an extraordinary propaganda campaign, one pushed by critics in the press and in office who can’t seem to agree on what the protesters are like. These students, we’ve been told, are both popular and unpopular among their peers. They are both ugly and chic. They are fragile and cold-blooded, pathetically soft and remarkably violent. They hate Jews. They are Jews who hate themselves. They’ve exercised both too little message discipline and too much caution with the press at demonstrations that are both laughably chaotic and suspiciously organized. And whoever they are and whatever’s spurred them into action, the students are, clearly, in need of either a good sock to the mouth or a good lay ⁠– the better to focus their attention away from politics and on their studies, on political matters close to home rather than halfway across the world, or political matters halfway across the world more deserving of their attention, like the plight of the suffering in China, Cuba, Venezuela, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Sudan, Iran or Azerbaijan.

One of the perversities of the situation is that despite all this, we probably haven’t heard the last about our “woke universities” ⁠– as they have for more than a hundred years, the right and centrists who share their contempt for college students will, against all available evidence, continue insisting that American campuses have been ideologically captured by the very people we’ve just witnessed campus administrators go to war against. They will do all they can to obscure it, but it should be plain now that all the shallow representation most visible to pundits⁠ – the diversity and equity teams, the minorities in high positions ⁠– hasn’t changed the fact that the majority of American universities are largely beholden to donors, trustees and, increasingly, politicians, well to the right of the most progressive voices on campus.

goofy · May 16, 2024, 7:40pm

WaPo gift link: Business titans privately urged NYC mayor to use police on Columbia protesters, chats show

Wild stuff in here!

A group of billionaires and business titans working to shape U.S. public opinion of the war in Gaza privately pressed New York City’s mayor last month to send police to disperse pro-Palestinian protests at Columbia University, according to communications obtained by The Washington Post and people familiar with the group.

Business executives including Kind snack company founder Daniel Lubetzky, hedge fund manager Daniel Loeb, billionaire Len Blavatnik and real estate investor Joseph Sitt held a Zoom video call on April 26 with Mayor Eric Adams (D), about a week after the mayor first sent New York police to Columbia’s campus, a log of chat messages shows. During the call, some attendees discussed making political donations to Adams, as well as how the chat group’s members could pressure Columbia’s president and trustees to permit the mayor to send police to the campus to handle protesters, according to chat messages summarizing the conversation.

One member of the WhatsApp chat group told The Post he donated $2,100, the maximum legal limit, to Adams that month. Some members also offered to pay for private investigators to assist New York police in handling the protests, the chat log shows — an offer a member of the group reported in the chat that Adams accepted.

goofy · May 17, 2024, 6:01pm

Very good opinion piece (gift link):

In the current panic, the protesters are described as somehow both terribly fragile and such a threat to public safety that they need to be confronted by police officers in riot gear. To justify the police department’s excessive response at Columbia University, Deputy Commissioner Kaz Daughtry showed Newsmax viewers a large chain and a book with the title “Terrorism” that had been recovered from one site of protest. The former was a common bike chain Columbia sells to students and the latter was part of Oxford University Press’s lovely “Very Short Introductions” series, which covers topics from animal behavior to Rousseau and black holes.

High-profile public figures of all ideological stripes have varyingly called for the students to be kicked out of their institutions, made unemployable or sent to prison. They’ve floated implausible scenarios in which the protests turn deadly. Students brave enough to risk their financial aid and scholarships are derided as childish rather than principled. And though they are educated to participate in civic life, as soon as these students exercise their First Amendment rights, they are told that protecting private property is a more pressing public concern. It’s as though some older adults simply can’t wrap their heads around the idea that college students, who are old enough to marry, have families and risk their lives for their country, are capable of having well thought-out principles.

In my experience, the stereotypes about today’s students are often ludicrously far from reality. College students of this generation have far more knowledge about complex world events than mine or Ms. Clinton’s did, thanks to the availability of the internet and a 24/7 news cycle fire-hosed directly into their phones. Representative Lawler may be correct that some portion of that information comes from clips on TikTok, and social media can be misleading, but there’s no evidence that college students are more likely to be misled by TikTok than people Mr. Lawler’s age and older are likely to be misled by Facebook. In fact, research indicates that younger people are more savvy and skeptical about media, and more likely to triangulate among different sources to see if something is true.

They may also be more sensitive to the horrors of children being killed here and elsewhere because they grew up participating in active shooter drills and watching the aftermath of mass shootings on the news. They are less financially secure than generations prior, and less likely to believe that institutions will save them or reward them for loyalty and hard work. But they are not babies, and they are not oblivious or naïve. And their ideas and actions cannot be dismissed just because some bad actor — no mass movement is without them — does or says something stupid.

goofy · May 24, 2024, 7:04am

lmao, they finally got one of the violent counterprotesters at UCLA and you’ll never believe how:

https://twitter.com/KyungLahCNN/status/1793843875997696202

The young man sporting the white mask and a white hoodie in widely shared video clips is Edan On, a local 18-year-old high school senior, his mother confirmed to CNN, though she later said he denies being at UCLA. Video shows On joining the counterprotesters while waving a long white pole. At one point, he strikes a pro-Palestinian protester with the pole, and appears to continue to strike him even when he was down, as fellow counterprotesters piled on.

“Edan went to bully the Palestinian students in the tents at UCLA and played the song that they played to the Nukhba terrorists in prison!” his mother boasted in Hebrew on Facebook, referencing Hamas. She circled an image of him that had been broadcast on the local news.

“He is all over the news channels,” his mother wrote in a now-deleted post.

I’d say “fucked around, found out” except the CNN story identifies & names a couple other attackers who do not appear to have been arrested yet.

goofy · June 11, 2024, 8:10pm

The University of Minnesota is pausing its search for director of the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies — days after it offered the job to Israeli historian Raz Segal and two longtime board members resigned in protest.

“In the past several days, additional members of the University community have come forward to express their interest in providing perspective on the hiring. … Because of the community-facing and leadership role the director holds, it is important that these voices are heard,” the university said in a statement Monday. Interim President Jeff Ettinger has paused the selection process, the statement added, “to allow an opportunity to determine next steps.”

Segal is associate professor of Holocaust and genocide studies and endowed professor in the study of modern genocide at Stockton University in New Jersey. Among other things, the resigning board members took issue with an article called “A Textbook Case of Genocide,” which he published in Jewish Currents less than a week after Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on Israel killed 1,200 Israelis and Israel retaliated.

Read the full article to see a guy who’s written multiple books about the Holocaust get told he doesn’t know anything about anti-Semitism!

goofy · June 15, 2024, 7:01pm

jbouie highlighted this very good article in his newsletter this week:

non-paywall link

She mentions the article I posted in the poor media outlet thread here and places more context around the PEN America thing:

This was the point that I and a number of writers were making when we withdrew from the PEN World Voices Festival, after PEN America failed to call for a cease-fire in Gaza for five months—unlike PEN International, which released a statement in October—and only then after being pressured to do so by hundreds of writers. Several members of the board responded by emphasizing their commitment to free speech and openness, which they claimed we opposed. But we do not: we made our withdrawal public in a letter outlining PEN America’s abdication of its stated purpose to protect writers and culture. It had, we noted, failed to offer support to Palestinian writers and journalists at risk of being killed in Gaza and the West Bank, by contrast with the group’s robust initiatives in Ukraine and other sites of war, conflict, and oppression; and it had condemned the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement in clear violation of its own mandate to protect free speech. Free speech includes the freedom not to speak, or publish, or do public events—as when Sally Rooney chose to decline a book deal with an Israeli publisher funded by the Israeli state. It is, in fact, the boycott’s adherents whose speech most urgently needs protection, as legislators in the US, Germany, and elsewhere pass laws that put state and municipal contractors at risk of losing funding if they boycott companies affiliated with Israeli apartheid.

And more broadly on how the focus on & weaponization of language is used to excuse and deflect from real-world violence:

This focus on the speech used tο support Palestinian rights does more than obscure the context in which protesters are speaking; it also obscures the reality about which they speak. I believe in the power and importance of language. But what is happening is not primarily about language. Words are not weapons of mass destruction: when we encourage others to use language with care, we should be sure to do the same ourselves. Some metaphors are inappropriate in some contexts. The context here is a quantity of ammunition dropped on Gaza that is equivalent to more than three times that of the atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima. A high proportion of those bombs were US-made and supplied. Those bombs were not made of language, and they certainly were not metaphors.

Later in her essay, Smith gestures toward the idea that language might, after all, be totally beside the point: “The only thing that has any weight in this particular essay is the dead.” But little of the rest of the essay engages with the dead; it engages above all with language. The effect of training people’s attention on matters of discourse and representation is to avoid addressing what is principally at issue, which are material facts. The material facts in this case are: money, land, weapons, and over 37,000 dead Palestinians.

This is, fundamentally, what the student protests are about. We do not have to guess or suppose that this is the case because the students themselves have said so, emphatically, repeatedly, and at considerable risk and sometimes cost to themselves.
…
There also needs to be a permanent cease-fire and a release of all hostages, including the roughly eighty Israeli hostages thought to still be alive in Gaza and the more than nine thousand Palestinian political prisoners held in Israeli prison cells, a number that has almost doubled over the last eight months. A cease-fire, however, is not the primary demand of these students. Their universities are not capable of achieving a cease-fire, so to call for one as the condition for ending their encampments would be unrealistic. Here, as elsewhere, the students’ speech is admirably precise, focusing on the direct economic connections between their universities and what is happening in Gaza, and on what those universities could do to support, rather than harm, Palestinians.

goofy · June 22, 2024, 3:07am

…and also, this kid’s getting away with it, because George Gascon suddenly got a case of amnesia about how you prosecute crimes.

https://x.com/KyungLahCNN/status/1804200176317534579

Hired_Goons · June 22, 2024, 3:21am

hmmm….

LFS · June 22, 2024, 3:36am

Gascon is in general very progressive, and many Angelenos hate him for that. But he also has been making some very politically expedient decisions like the above lately, and this week he declined to prosecute a USC student who killed a homeless person who was breaking into cars.