It’s not the most full-throated attack against the pro-Hamas protests at Columbia University, but even some faculty are getting tired of the chants. At the very least, they see the entire exercise coming off the hinges.
Students have established what is arguably a pro-terrorism camp. They’ve shut down campus, threatened graduation, and forced classes to be taken remotely since no one can get work done, lest they be harassed or assaulted by the pro-terrorist army. There’s no end in sight because the university president, who likened terrorism to a form of protesting, won’t allow police to bust up this camp and toss these kids into jail.
John McWhorter penned an op-ed in The New York Times, which is what you’d expect an academic to write regarding the mayhem. He’s a music humanities professor, so his classes have become all but neutralized since the chants are incessant and blaring. He noted a few things, like how Jewish people are meant to tolerate the hate hurled toward them as a sacrifice to the antiracism paradigm within intersectionality. He’s dead wrong about how antisemitism isn’t the primary driver, taking the usual ‘it’s really more about Zionism’ route, which is garbage. Most Jews are Zionists. The term is used to sanitize these rallies, hiding them from being viewed as all-out Nazi rallies. Though he beats around the bush, he at least admits that there is nothing intellectual to be gained from these pro-Hamas gatherings, and it’s veered into abuse (via NYT):
Conversations I have had with people heatedly opposed to the war in Gaza, signage and writings on social media and elsewhere and anti-Israel and generally hard-leftist comments that I have heard for decades on campuses place these confrontations within a larger battle against power structures — here in the form of what they call colonialism and genocide — and against whiteness. The idea is that Jewish students and faculty should be able to tolerate all of this because they are white.
I understand this to a point. Pro-Palestinian rallies and events, of which there have been many here over the years, are not in and of themselves hostile to Jewish students, faculty and staff members. Disagreement will not always be a juice and cookies affair. However, the relentless assault of this current protest — daily, loud, louder, into the night and using ever-angrier rhetoric — is beyond what any people should be expected to bear up under, regardless of their whiteness, privilege or power.
Social media discussion has been claiming that the protests are peaceful. They are, some of the time. It varies by location and day; generally what goes on within the campus gates is somewhat less strident than what happens just outside them. But relatively constant are the drumbeats. People will differ on how peaceful that sound can ever be, just as they will differ on the nature of antisemitism. What I do know is that even the most peaceful of protests would be treated as outrages if they were interpreted as, say, anti-Black, even if the message were coded, as in a bunch of people quietly holding up MAGA signs or wearing T-shirts saying “All lives matter.”
And besides, calling all this peaceful stretches the use of the word rather implausibly. It’s an odd kind of peace when a local rabbi urges Jewish students to go home as soon as possible, when an Israeli Arab activist is roughed up on Broadway, when the angry chanting becomes so constant that you almost start not to hear it and it starts to feel normal to see posters and clothing portraying members of Hamas as heroes. The other night I watched a dad coming from the protest with his little girl, giving a good hard few final snaps on the drum he was carrying, nodding at her in crisp salute, percussing his perspective into her little mind. This is not peaceful.
[…]
When I was at Rutgers in the mid-1980s, the protests were against investment in South Africa’s apartheid regime. There were similarities with the Columbia protests now: A large group of students established an encampment site right in front of the Rutgers student center on College Avenue, where dozens slept every night for several weeks. Among the largely white crowd, participation was a badge of civic commitment. There was chanting, along with the street theater inevitable, and perhaps even necessary, to effective protest; one guy even lay down in the middle of College Avenue to block traffic, taking a page from the Vietnam protests.
I don’t recall South Africans on campus feeling personally targeted, but the bigger difference was that though the protesters sought to make their point at high volume, over a long period and sometimes even rudely, they did not seek to all but shut down campus life.
… Columbia announced that classes would be hybrid until the end of the semester, in the interest of student safety. I presume that the protesters will continue throughout the two main days of graduation, besmirching one of the most special days of thousands of graduates’ lives in the name of calling down the “imperialist” war abroad.
Today’s protesters don’t hate Israel’s government any more than yesterday’s hated South Africa’s. But they have pursued their goals with a markedly different tenor — in part because of the single-mindedness of antiracist academic culture and in part because of the influence of iPhones and social media, which inherently encourage a more heightened degree of performance. It is part of the warp and woof of today’s protests that they are being recorded from many angles for the world to see. One speaks up.
But these changes in moral history and technology can hardly be expected to comfort Jewish students in the here and now. What began as intelligent protest has become, in its uncompromising fury and its ceaselessness, a form of abuse.
Sorry, I forgot—he’s wrong about these protests being “intelligent.” However, I assume this is as close a condemnation as we can expect from the faculty or anyone from Columbia unless they want this terrorist horde coming after them. The inmates are running the asylum, not just here but on college campuses across the country. And, Mr. McWhorter, the hatred of Jews is rather overt and explicit. There is no debate about what people mean when they carry signs with the Palestinian flag with the words “final solution” emblazoned on it. We all know what that means, sir.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member