April 24, 2024

Leave Them Kids Alone

Columbia is not in crisis, the dark sarcasm is that we are...

“…в истории было много случаев, когда ученики предавали своего учителя. Но что-то я не припомню случая, чтобы учитель предал своих учеников.” братья Стругацкие, Отягощённые злом.

I’ve tried to refrained from writing or commenting on Columbia University, because it's exhausting. There’s practically no one involved in this debacle, except the students and the faculty, who deserve anything but scorn and shame. The alleged antisemitism of the protestors is significantly overstated, reframed and weaponized; the administration, starting with the President Minouche Shafik, is incompetent and cowardly. Most of the press and public opinion, on both sides, seems to be largely misinformed and this entire mess is quickly turning into a quagmire whereas it is and should have been a nothin’burger.

Once I determined that I will write about Columbia, I quickly realized that the events have been purposely sensationalized and exploited by multiple parties in play. As I have read and research what actually took place over the last few days in New York, I came to understand that really, this is an artificial story created for outrage clicks and we all should have been better off if the time, energy and everything that has been invested in this discourse would have been funneled into many other stories of greater importance: from the military aid bill finally getting through US Congress to TikTok ban to UAW victory in Chattanooga to the start of the election interference trial in NYC to Biden’s administration banning noncompete clauses for employment to nearly 300 bodies found in mass grave in Nasser hospital.

There is a key parallel between the last story and Columbia University. In both cases access for independent reporters and journalists is restricted. In case of Gaza, we only have official Israeli propaganda and on-the-ground reporting from Palestinian journalists who are increasingly getting killed. In case of Columbia? Columbia isn’t allowing access to reporters, as is their right as a private institution, they are actually not allowing access to anyone right now. However, lack of access to journalists leads to all sorts of nonsense, including people confusing what is inside and what is outside of the university.

A significant discourse on a student protest is taking place globally on the basis of very distorted impressions!!

These kind of distortions are historically common and even more so in today’s age with the proliferation of social media and propaganda campaigns. People who don’t understand how protests work, or how campuses work, are being misled by Columbia version of the WMD story.

Is there antisemitism on the political left? Absolutely. There always has been. The frank fact of the matter is its gotten impossible to justify Netanyahu's actions from the framework of basic liberal Post World War II consensus, and it's not antisemitic to say it.

Is there antisemitism in American colleges and universities? Absolutely.

Neither of the two statements are earthshattering or breaking news.

I absolutely agree colleges and universities should respond to antisemitism, just as they should respond to Islamophobia and dehumanization of Palestinians. I would take whatever real antisemitism exists as part of the campus protests a lot more seriously if anyone expressing the concern cared in any way, shape, or form about the Islamophobia that is completely acceptable in American life.

Let’s look at what is true and what is not, which is challenging as the information space is filled with a lot of noise and as mentioned above practically no independent reporting from the campus. This is one of the highest profiled examples being used to say that Columbia is antisemitic.

Three things are true about these statements:

1. They are clearly antisemitic.

2. They were likely not made by Columbia students.

3. They were disavowed by Columbia student protesters.

The very next day, the Columbia protesters disavowing the inflammatory, antisemitic comments.

Reports don't show the diversity of Jewish voices on campus, an Orthodox rabbi urging students to leave campus receive a ton of press, but the Columbia Hillel stating the opposite went literally unnoticed as it does not fit the convenient narrative. You can't report one without the other.

Those reports with the vile antisemitic statements? Here’s a student who seems to support that these were from outsider agitators rather than the students:

Seems a fairly simple way to filter out any external to campus agitators, but not if one is driven by a hidden agenda:

Yes, there have been individuals making vile statements around campus. This is wrong and unacceptable. Columbia Students for Justice in Palestine has publicly disavowed this. To let a minority of vile voices drown out the true message of the majority of student protesters is irresponsible.

Not convinced by a random student on Twitter? Here’s an account of another Jewish student on campus. Still not convinced? How about a Peabody and Pulitzer nominated journalist?

Instead, we are flooded with absolutely insane characters like Professor Shai Davidai, who in my humble opinion should never be allowed anywhere near a classroom based on the absolutely unhinged shite he has been posting over the last couple of days.

Here he is playing the victim card and gaslighting the university administration even though his request was approved and he was offered to be provided with university security. I truly hope that Shai’s actions and statements over the last few days are an emotional outburst, rather than a premediated conniving evil plan, perhaps he is just another in the long line of useful idiots:

Mind you, there are actual Jewish students at Columbia who have said he has targeted them and they feel unsafe because of him. I don’t know whether the following is true, but even if it’s not, it definitely not helping:

Of course, statements like this, viewed by almost two and a half million people make one wonder more than is really should be necessary.

Like, I am sorry, but don't you guys have enough on your plate at the moment or are you offering to live-test Lavender on American soil??

…or it could be the widely documented reality that institutions both public and private have shown a years-long, now-amplified tendency to punish expressions of this viewpoint.

Forget facial recognition for a second. Seeing the imagery of dozens of these counterterrorism and strategic response officers lined up in front of the Columbia gates with zip ties…

… brings back memories of a late cold January evening in 2017, when I was diligently providing recommendations to my spouse and our friend who were going to the Women’s March in terms of safety, protection, etc. and specifically addressing the need to mask up and why. Columbia is not alone in this, police stormed Yale University’s campus with riot gear as hundreds of students staged a protest:

Recently, the president of Israel told American politician to stay out of internal Israeli affairs and yet…

There’s plenty more of histrionics and absolutely insane statements from the pro-Israel side but I am yet to see a single call for condemnation of such statements, much less an actual condemnation. Meanwhile, there are thousands of students who feel unsafe at the university.

I mean, let’s talk about safety of students and teachers on campus more, should we?

200 days of this in Gaza and some of you want to pretend like the problem is students protesting in America.

And it gets to quite ridiculous level: according to Fox, apparently Books not Bombs is a pro-Hamas sentiment.

Of course, those histrionics are simply an appetizer for the main course - gaslighting the entire world with the amalgamation of antisemitism, fearmongering of the left, and bullshit age-old trope of disintegration of higher education because of the left, all in service of openly fascist movement.

Clay Travis, I am sure knows very well that the site he is using to gaslight us is absolutely riddled with explicitly antisemitic (not anti-Zionist, but antisemitic) high-follower accounts who will say anything to get more clicks, while pushing their christofascist agenda. Travis is very conveniently ignoring facts in order to try to score a political point and get more clicks. He does not mention that the two most recent massacres of Jews in the U.S. were carried out by far right zealots who echoed a fascist president’s antisemitic, conspiratorial rhetoric. That very same president, since leaving office, has hosted an actual Nazi for dinner. But sure, it’s the left.

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Speaking of the left, though the sentiment is clearly not limited to that side of the isle, I am still processing the cavalier attitude expressed by so many in public, but also in private, towards Charlottesville. I was in a complete an utter shock when I saw the first comparison between Unite the Right march and the events at the Columbia University.

I thought to myself, perhaps I am missing something, perhaps I need to educate myself. Maybe I should check with people who actually were there during the neo-Nazi rally, maybe I should check with professional historians of nazism and the Holocaust. You know what? I did and I still feel the same, more so now: any attempt to compare the current events at Columbia University to Charlottesville tells me that either you are absolutely not serious about your argument or ignorant of history or simply are choosing a side.

Charlottesville, for those with short memory, was the first time rightwing news tested the waters on not condemning such acts. Trump’s “fine people on both side” commentary empowered them and I dare you to look at the statistics of right wing violence and terrorism since.

Granted, I was not there, but Kim was:

So was David:

If eye witnesses is not your thing, how about actual historians who focus on far right movements and neo-Nazis:

as well as the Holocaust:

I am sure I will lose a lot friends and acquittances after this, but if you are comparing the two, much less minimizing Unite the Right, you are normalizing LITERAL FUCKING NAZIS and I have nothing but pity for you: you are blind and serving as useful idiot to people who will ultimately see you suffer and seize to exist and that’s the most generous way I can perceive your position.

Before anyone scrolls down to starts writing a nasty comment, I want to remind you, I am yet to see ANY BLOODY CONDEMNATION for ANY openly fascist and insane statements from the pro-Israel side:

Your voices, calling for more law enforcement are identical to the voices of every right wing asshole that made sure college campuses had to host Ben Shapiro and Milo "for free speech" and now calling for the National Guard to come take care of eighteen year olds who dare speak out against Israel’s unconscionable actions.

The national discourse on higher education is horribly distorted, starting with an absolutely ridiculous premise that faculties are a hotbed of far left radicalism and that students are completely and utterly "woke." Ironically, this distorted view is not new, we keep relearning the lessons of 1960s (and I am sure that they felt the same too about the eras before them).

I am more than sure that the vast majority of faculty and students at places like Columbia are not activists. They are simply people who are there to get a degree or get paid and sometimes to have fun. The prevailing ethos at our universities today is definitely not "wokeness,” but pre-professionalism. All schools and especially the top universities, such as the Ivys, are hyperfocused on two things: revenue and branding.

This is why it's so vital to crush dissent. Universities like Columbia pretend to be centers of learning, wisdom and freedom, but the reality is Columbia has a $14 billion endowment and leaders who make seven-figures. The protests threaten that. It's a business.

This is exactly why, each time they feel threatened, arseholes like Bill Ackman immediately go to the one method they know always worked historically - threaten students’ future career prospects. Most faculty seldom if ever bring their politics into the classroom. Their views on Palestine or Trump are irrelevant to what they teach. Only a small minority of faculty bring strong political views to the classroom, usually to small, often advanced level, courses. I don’t have the links now but I remember the hysterics around the number of courses offered at Harvard that included the term “(de)colonization” in the title/subject. It was an empty brouhaha. The seemingly high number of such courses contributed to a truly insignificant percent of all courses in the curriculum.

But to these people it does not matter. That’s why the very small fraction of the faculty that does engage in political discourse in the classroom gets the lion's share of media attention. Some of it, perhaps a large part, is due to the never ending moral panic on the political right and gutless center. Ever since the universities focused on revenues and budgets over the actual education, there has been a significant decline in number of tenured roles, thus, for many members of the faculty, specifically those who are adjuncts or otherwise contingent, taking a political stance is taking the risk of putting their jobs on the line.

Back in my college days, I despised the courses where the professors tried to convert me to a particular politics. Conversion does not equal learning. University is a place where students should be exposed to ideas including ideas that might make them uncomfortable and that they might even find dangerous but they should never be converted or bullied. I’m skeptical of people who hang on every inflammatory word of 19-year-old college student but are indifferent to members of Congress calling on people to run over protestors with cars or use nuclear weapons on civilians. There is a revealing inconsistency here.

Rep. Elise Stefanik has called on Columbia University President Minouche Shafik to resign immediately and the board of trustees to appoint someone “who will protect Jewish students and enforce school policies”

Seems like Columbia’s president did all of that song and dance for Stefanik—a white supremacist and an antisemite—to save herself but this is what she got. Who would have possibly guessed that this is how groveling before people like Stefanik would turn out?

Indeed, President Shafik faced the same gaslighting gauntlet as did Claudine Gay and others just a few months ago. We were told that she remarked that terrorism "is a form of protesting." This is a lie. She explicitly said that a broad base of society *sees* terrorism as a form of protesting which she calls "really troubling." However, that is the only defense I’ll offer to President Shafik and the rest of Columbia administration.

Yes, Columbia is a private institution and technically any unauthorized sit-in or protest on campus can be considered trespassing and be a criminal charge, once you go to the extent of suspending student on the false pretenses and them call riot police on them. What tenet of academic freedom was threatened by not letting the kids keep their little shantytown up in the quad indefinitely? Nothing has nor is preventing President Shafik from walking into the encampment, sitting down, and listening for a few hours. That’s what a sincere leader would do here. The very same could and should be said about President Biden. Instead of issuing a very troubling statement and risk antagonizing even more voters that you desperately need to stage off the onslaught of fascism, why not find some time and come down and talk to this kids. I mean, it would be the most Biden thing to do in the first place!!

Mind you, this is exactly what the students wanted and ask. The Columbia Spectator editorial from April 18th is a MUST read. Rather than defuse the situation, speak with and understand the kids, administration simply “succumbed to pressure from representatives, essentially conflating pro-Palestinian campus activism with antisemitism and repeatedly condemning the words and actions of both students and faculty to appease committee members.”

Moreover, the decision to invite the NYPD on campus to arrest students may have been within President Shafik’s formal authority, but it breaks with an informal settlement that had been in place for more than a half-century. A university calling in the police to arrest its own students engaged in a peaceful encampment is completely beyond the pale, and speaks to the escalating McCarythism of this moment — on and off campus. It also sets a terrible precedent.

The last time the university called the cops on student protesters was April 1968; that episode ended so bitterly and bloodily that it yielded a norm of police noninvolvement. Since 1968, student protesters have repeatedly occupied Low Library, blockaded Hamilton Hall, held sit-ins in administrative offices, waged hunger strikes, staged walkouts, and more. Some of these protests led to disciplinary code charges. None elicited a criminal law enforcement response. Norm Breaking at Columbia by David Pozen

For context, when Occupy Harvard occurred in 2011, Drew Faust allowed the encampment to persist for six weeks, at which point the group voluntarily disbanded. The decision to call in the NYPD here should be seen as extreme and unnecessary. It is long overdue for universities to proactively announce: you are entitled to peacefully protest in ways that do not disturb the rights of others. You may not block access to any part of university grounds and any student violating these policies will be, at minimum, suspended after a confirmation of violation through an independent investigation, if found in breach of policies, student will not sit for finals and may not get their degree.

In the end, this entire debacle is the fascists successfully playing their cynical game of exploiting fears over antisemitism in order to advance their reactionary crusade – and mainstream institutions and millions of people keep willfully playing along. The most vile characteristic of the rightwing antisemitism besides so many seemingly intelligent and smart people, especially of Jewish descent, constantly falling for it?

A distinguishing feature of rightwing antisemitism is its centrality to the white Christian ethno-religious project. On the Religious Right, Christian Zionism is fueling the support for Israel – and an end-times theology that desires a world in which Jews are eliminated. The reactionary political project is beholden to a white Christian nationalism that is fundamentally opposed to multireligious, multiracial pluralism. Rightwingers like the idea of a nation with a clearly defined ethno-religious identity, which they see in Israel. But here is the catch: In this worldview, Israel is necessarily where the Jews belong. In “real” (read: white Christian) America, on the other hand, Jews can only be conceptualized as outsiders. Their right to be here is always conditional… Both dominant ideological strands on the Right, Jews in Israel are good – but Jews elsewhere are dangerous, rootless “globalists” standing in the way of God’s plans or undermining the strength and unity of the white Christian ethnostate. The Republican Speaker of the House is a Christian supremacist; Trump, the party’s standard bearer, is the leader of a fascistic movement and the providential leader of a rightwing base that has rapidly descended into more and more aggressive forms of conspiracism.

Against this background, the way institutional leaders like Columbia’s president are pretending these Congressional hearings are actually about fighting antisemitism and bending over backwards to appease the Republican inquisitors is not only bizarre, but dangerous. These hearings are part of the eternal reactionary crusade against the college campus as a place of subversive leftwing indoctrination. Higher education has always been one of the institutions on which rightwing resentment has focused most intensely. Moreover, the fears over antisemitism are being leveraged to legitimize the reactionary mobilization against egalitarian democracy more broadly – the “counterrevolution” against the sinister forces of globalism and “wokeism” people like Christopher Rufo dream about. Across the “West,” far-right movements and parties are following this same playbook, gleefully exploiting the anger and fear of Jews for political gain. Marine LePen, for instance, leader of the National Rally in France, was quick to announce her support for Israel. The key takeaway is that the most dangerous, most violent forms Islamophobia and antisemitism are fueled by similar ideologies, they are coming from the same people. Helping them advance their cause would be a disaster. Under no circumstances is “Let’s help the party of Trump, QAnon, Christian supremacism, and ‘Great replacement’ theory exploit the situation and further their antiliberal project” a plausible answer to the question of what must be done in response to rising antisemitism.

Thomas Zimmer: We Are Falling Apart

Congratulations, we just gave the fascists exactly what they wanted (I'm assuming Nick Fuentes wasn't available and Richard Spencer didn't feel like getting punched in the face again).

I often have a love/hate relationship with Sarah Kendzior’s takes, her writing is absolutely amazing and brings back memories of Twain and Faulkner, but I digress. Sarah is absolutely correct here:

This recognition of humanity and humility is what makes the faculty at Columbia, that walked out to support and protect their students yesterday, the true and only heroes in this story. These folks know that the young kids sitting down or dancing in the quad more than likely have nothing to do with vile antisemitism. These kids see pain and suffering and. the ethnic cleansing and just as their parents and grandparents before them, they want their voices to be heard, want their future to be brighter and better. And it's not like the position taken by Columbia students is an outrageous or a fringe one. Majority of American public is in agreement with the the stated positions of the protestors.

These professors are not picking political sides, they see children, technically in their care, facing riot police and the world armed with fascist mis- and dis-information and they did the only thing that any teacher should do - stand up and protect your students.

Maybe, just maybe there is still hope for us after all.

Maybe.

I still have hope.