RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2024/05/20/the-disgrace-and-fall-of-the-american-elite-campus/

Anti-Israel/pro-Hamas campus protests have engulfed hundreds of college campuses. But the more coastal, blue-state, and supposedly elite the campus was, the more furious the violence that sometimes followed these demonstrations.

Even rowdier and more vicious street analogs shut down key bridges, freeways, and religious services. Protestors often defaced hallowed American monuments, national cemeteries, and iconic buildings. Visa-holders were among the worst perpetrators, adding ingratitude to their criminality.

The vast majority wore masks, not to protect from infection but to hide their identities. It is received wisdom, however, that those who wear masks do so for obvious reasons: so authorities cannot identify and punish those who commit crimes (e.g. the Klan, antifa, bank robbers, criminal gangs), or so that anonymity can help incite mob furor, given that participants feel that their vehemence increases once it cannot be traced.

More mundanely, why don’t the students simply identify themselves, insist they want their “resistance” to be known, and then hope their arrests will be proof of their courage to galvanize like-minded people to join them?

Why? One, because the students are sunshine and careerist revolutionaries. They see no inconsistency between shouting “Death to Israel,” “Global Intifada,” or “River to the Sea” one day and then the next, applying for a top spot at Goldman Sachs, a tony university, or a federal bureaucracy. Jacobin professors protest like it is 1793, but when politely arrested, they collapse into fetal positions and scream hysterically that consequences cannot follow their illegality, given they are privileged, superior intellects and moralists, with titles and degrees no less.

Two, the protestors, deep down, know they are aligning with the murderers and rapists of October 7 and that their chants are Hitlerian. And so few wish for their performance-art antics to become part of their public personas.

Demonstrators claimed they were peacefully acting on behalf of Palestine rather than virulently pro-Hamas, anti-Semitic, and anti-Israel. But their own bloodthirsty words proved the contrary—to the anguish of embarrassed campus administrators. The latter finally concluded that the overt venom was a bit too much and certainly injurious to their own administrative careers, campus fund-raising, and alumni support.

Note that there was a long hiatus between the slaughter and hostage-taking of October 7 and the entry of the Israeli Defense Forces into Gaza to destroy Hamas. Nonetheless, campuses caught fire immediately after the slaughter. A professor at Cornell characterized the Hamas mass murders as “exhilarating.” Efforts immediately followed to harass and embarrass Jewish students, not to protest the IDF in Gaza.

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2024/07/who-are-the-anti-israel-campus-protesters/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=top-of-nav&utm_content=hero-module

Antisemitism, Marxism, and ignorance were all on display at Columbia

New York City — The first thing anyone walking the perimeter of the erstwhile Columbia University “Gaza Solidarity Encampment” could see was a sign — “WELCOME TO THE PEOPLE’S UNIVERSITY FOR PALESTINE” — that hung on the fence surrounding the school’s South Lawn. On the other side of the quad, at the entrance to the encampment — and behind a legion of self-identified Columbia faculty blocking reporters from accessing the occupied zone — were two billboards, one advertising a list of the protesters’ demands and the other laying out the encampment’s “community guidelines.”

“We will remain until Columbia concedes [sic] to our demands,” the sign read. The encampment organizers demanded that the university divest itself from “corporations that profit from Israeli apartheid, genocide, and occupation in Palestine.” They insisted that the university provide “complete transparency for all of Columbia’s financial investments.” They would not leave, they wrote, until the university provided “amnesty for all students and faculty disciplined or fired in the movement for Palestinian liberation.” Next to the list of demands stood the encampment’s Ten Commandments.

Occupiers are to be “grounded” in solidarity with Palestinians, mindful of their environmental impact (they do, after all, “recognize our role as visitors, and for many of us, colonizers, on this land”), and respectful of physical and emotional boundaries. Members of the encampment should not engage with media or use drugs and alcohol, the guidelines note, but, if mistakes are made, occupiers must “grant ourselves and others grace” and approach “conflict with the goal of addressing and repairing.”

At the bottom of the list were a request to contact leaders of Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD), the group in charge, to suggest additional guidelines and a reminder to “free Palestine!”

Those two signs and the scene that formed around them demonstrated in real time the strange contradictions of the current campus-protest movement. On the list of guidelines were the therapy-tinged recommendations of being “grounded” and “granting ourselves and others grace”; the rhetoric of decolonization in describing the land as having been stolen from a Native American tribe; and the presumed heroic self-reliance and antiestablishment, sticking-it-to-the-man attitude of “We keep us safe.” The catalogue of demands — not requests, not exhortations — betrayed a sense of entitlement seemingly at odds with the protesters’ self-conception of earnest advocacy for their cause. The wall of professors preventing members of the press — including National Review — from entering served as evidence of the institutional power that the ideologues possess despite their every effort to claim otherwise. And right there, behind the infantry line of the professoriate, shrieking at reporters attempting to enter, in a voice that would later become instantly recognizable, was Khymani James.