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PaperclipPerfector  12d ago (text post)   25210 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 22, 2024

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Students from various campuses have occupied the Columbia University campus in New York City in protest of Israel. There reports and videos circulating of protestors harassing Jewish students on or near campus grounds. The NYPD has deployed officers to surround the campus and has established filtration checkpoints to prevent outside agitators from entering campus. Various Columbia alumni have expressed concern with Columbia’s handling of the situation. All classes are now online at least for today. Similar protests are happening at Yale and various other campuses across the country.

Edit: Congressman Josh Hawley has called on President Joe Biden to deploy the National Guard to Columbia and other universities to protect Jewish students on campus.

Edit: NYU has ordered their encampment to disperse and the NYPD is moving in to clear the demonstrators.

Edit: I’m seeing footage of NYU professors being marched out of the campus in zip ties. Cal Poly Humbolt students have barricaded themselves inside a campus building with furniture.

Edit: University of Texas, Austin student protestors are being dispersed by police. And possibly vanned. Protests now seem to be nationwide.

Edit: Mass arrests beginning at USC protests.

Edit: Tasers and rubber bullets being deployed against protestors at Emory University in Georgia.

Edit: There appear to be police snipers monitoring protests at Ohio State University.

It looks like riot police may be going in to physically remove the protestors from the Columbia campus, with the National Guard to possibly be activated if the Riot Police is unable to clear the campus.

In other news, the forced TikTok divestment was passed along with the huge aid package to Israel, on the heels of the Jewish lobby pushing for the bill in order to censor criticism of Israel.

So we have:

  • Mass arrests of protestors against Israel, unlike the treatment we saw with the BLM protests.
  • Huge handouts to Israel in rare bipartisan consensus.
  • Forcing a divestment of TikTok because the Jewish lobby claims it is too anti-Israel.

All within the past week. This is what real power looks like by the way.

It would be remiss not to say that the national mood around leftist riots has shifted considerably since 2020.

It would be remiss to say that, the behind the scenes political machinations shows this is not at all whatsoever about the national mood of leftist protests in general, it is specifically about the fact that the establishment does not support these protests whereas they unanimously supported anti-White demonstrations.

Look at the lengths Nemat Shafik went to in order to try to appease them:

Dr. Shafik, an international finance expert with few prior connections to Columbia, has conceded the university was unprepared for the outpouring that followed Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack. She had been ceremonially inaugurated just days before. But as the protests escalated, and the presidents of Harvard University and the University of Pennsylvania lost their jobs after botching their own appearances before Congress in December, she slowly began clamping down.

In the fall, the university suspended two student groups, Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace, whose rolling protests repeatedly violated its policies. This month, it suspended students who it said had been involved in an event called “Resistance 101,” where speakers openly praised Hamas.

By the time she was called to testify before the Republican-led House Committee on Education and the Work Force this month, it looked as though Dr. Shafik might avoid the fate of the other Ivy League presidents targeted by Congress.

Columbia spent months preparing for the hearing. Shailagh Murray, a former adviser to President Barack Obama who oversees the university’s public affairs office, recruited a large team of lawyers, old political hands and antisemitism experts to prep Dr. Shafik. It included Dana Remus, President Biden’s former White House counsel; Risa Heller, a crisis communications guru; former Republican congressional aides; and Philippe Reines, a longtime aide to Hillary Clinton.

Many team members gathered in the Washington offices of the law firm, Covington & Burling, beginning the Saturday before the hearing for mock testimony.

Dr. Shafik was determined not to make the same mistakes as her Ivy League counterparts, according to the people familiar with her preparation. Where their testimony came off as haughty and convoluted, she wanted to project humility and competence.

The university handed the committee thousands of pages of documents, including sensitive records that almost never become public. They showed that Columbia had suspended more than 15 students and removed five professors from the classroom, including at least three facing accusations that they had made Jewish students feel unsafe.

Though her testimony on the disciplinary cases made supporters of academic freedom furious, the approach appeared to work inside the hearing room. Dr. Shafik defended free speech rights, but said universities “cannot and should not tolerate abuse of this privilege.”

Grudging Republicans largely accepted the answers.

This has nothing to do at all with national mood over leftist protests in general.

It's funny, Shafik is still probably not going to survive this despite the fact she's obviously trying to play ball, meaning that all 3 of the only non-Jewish Ivy presidents are going to be kicked to the curb in only the past six months.

The real question (one of them, anyway) is how differently things will play out at UToronto and other universities in the UK and Canada. If Pro-Palestine protestors can make/hold some gains there, that would be geopolitically meaningful if it serves to provide a contrast to the US.

Princeton and Brown both have gentile presidents (their names are Christian and Christina, respectively).

Christina Paxson converted to Judaism (her husband is Jewish).

Eisgruber is Jewish and identifies as a "nontheist Jew".

Greg Abbott, by the way, just called for all students engaging in protests against Israel to be expelled:

Arrests being made right now & will continue until the crowd disperses.

These protesters belong in jail.

Antisemitism will not be tolerated in Texas. Period.

Students joining in hate-filled, antisemitic protests at any public college or university in Texas should be expelled.

There's just no way to ignore the elephant in the room at this point.

How strange that two Jews named after Christ should run Ivy League universities. I stand corrected, though I think both are pretty noncentral examples of Jewish Americans, especially when Eisgruber had no knowledge of his Jewish identity until well into middle age and Paxton has no Jewish ethnic identity at all. On another note, do you really think Abbott is getting rid of pro-Palestine protesters as a favor to Jewish donors? That seems unlikely. Almost all of the protesters (and I’d wager that, certainly in Texas, they’re disproportionately Jewish compared to the population average) are enemies of the GOP and American conservatism regardless of their views on Israel, so this seems more like something that provides a useful pretext than something driven by Jewish policy preferences.

In New York City, especially at Columbia University, things are different; the UWS (and NYC really) is the capital of the Jewish world and Columbia has long been and perhaps remains the most Jewish Ivy, it’s fair to say that neither Hochul nor Adams want to annoy the state’s Jews in an important year for the party.

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