The players include several perfect archetypes, and the situation is a classic one: Anti-Israel students engage in “street theater,” mimicking brutal, oppressive Israel Defense Forces soldiers. The victims, pro-Israel students, are traumatized and believe themselves unable to stand up for themselves.
http://www.jewishpress.com/news/cockroach-curses-and-jew-hunting-in-california-colleges/2013/05/10/
Hyper-politicized college student programs dealing with the Middle East these days often end up as actual or virtual shoving matches between two ideological camps: those that support Israel and those that denounce her. Questions about ideology — is Israel defending itself from terrorists or murdering innocent children — morph into questions about whether the Israel’s campus advocates, or Israel’s campus enemies, were the ones to curse, hit, shove, or obstruct, or the ones to lie about some or all of the above.
We saw this recently at Brooklyn College, where four Jewish pro-Israel students were booted from a speech sponsored by a public university on the demand of a single twenty-something advocate for economic and political warfare against Israel. That (non) Student for Justice in Palestine organizer had been given control of the event, the room where it took place, and the university’s entire security apparatus.
Alone among a raft of public security and university faculty and administration, this one man claimed the Jewish students had been disruptive and had to be, and were, removed. The claims of allegedly aggressive Jews attempting to stifle debate and bar academic freedom become merged with claims of aggressive Israeli soldiers impeding innocents at Middle East checkpoints.
That story only fell apart, and the university was only forced to abandon its initial blame of the pro-Israel students — and to agree that they’d done nothing wrong — after a tape of the event surfaced that made it impossible to believe the version put out by the anti-Israel partisans. Only then did a university “investigation” follow, which concluded the Jewish students had been wrongfully ejected from the public event, which was a publicly funded call for the boycott of Israeli products. Your tax dollars at work.
Another story is now unfolding in California, where another public attack on Israel precipitated contradictory accounts of improper conduct by Israel’s advocates and enemies.