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In between working on some longer articles, I wanted to put together an overview of a few big developments from the past two weeks. But there’s been a lot going on, so it’ll take me a couple parts to do it. Today, I’ll start with the pro-Palestinian campus protests and the subsequent clampdown.
The one big fact we have to keep in mind about these protests is that many of the people turning out now to complain about a “genocide” supposedly being committed against the Palestinians were the same people cheering the indiscriminate rape and murder of Israelis (and others) by Hamas on October 7, well before any Israeli counterattack. For a refresher, see my observations from last October about this outpouring of support for terrorism and what it says about the priorities of the far left.
So don’t take too seriously their “humanitarian” concerns, which pointedly do not extend to Israeli civilians.
“Imperialism, Capitalism—Things Like That”
Moreover, a lot of the protests and protesters were what you might call the usual suspects, who care little about the Palestinians per se and view this as an excuse to promote a wider leftist cause.
When New York City police broke up protest encampments at Columbia University and the City College of New York, for example, they found that about half of the people they arrested were what we used to call “outside agitators” with no connection to either university. Some of these are your basic professional protestors and the kind of washed-up old lefties who used to shove copies of The Daily Worker into my hands outside the Hyde Park Co-Op in the 1980s.
The NYPD directed attention to 68-year-old Sami Al-Arian, an accused terrorist deported to Turkey in 2015, who posted a picture of his wife in the tent encampment at Columbia….
Another activist, 63-year-old Lisa Fithian, is one of the people that police say has been escalating student protests. For decades she has been pictured in protests all over the country.
Even among the students, you find a lot of evidence that the Palestinians have been absorbed into the Omnicause, a term that has been going around to describe the left’s tendency to subsume every particular grievance into one single, vague, free-floating sense of grievance against the modern world.
