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.
