Did That Have to Happen at Columbia? No. Just Look at What Happened at Brown.
slate.com
Or UC–Irvine. Neither one resorted to brutalizing its own students.

One example, from just up the Ivy-garlanded I-95, at Brown University, was announced just hours before Shafik again called in the police. Brown’s governing body agreed to vote on a proposal that would divest the school’s endowment of companies affiliated with Israel in a meeting in October. The proposal is based on a 2020 Advisory Committee on Corporation Responsibility in Investment Practices that identified and recommended divestment from “companies that facilitate the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory,” per the Brown Daily Herald.

In exchange, the university’s nonviolent student protesters agreed to vacate their encampment by 5 p.m. that afternoon.

…

Another plausible outcome from California: When a similar encampment went up a few days ago at the University of California, Irvine, it seemed likely that police might sweep the protesters away. Orange County sheriff’s deputies began to appear in riot gear near the protest.

But, rather than traffic in vague allegations of misconduct before hiding behind a belligerent mayor and an aggressive police force, like Shafik, the UC–Irvine administration took a much different tack. “UC Irvine respects the rights of any students to engage in free speech and expression including lawful protest,” the school said in a prepared statement. This, remember, is at a public school, where keeping public police forces away is more challenging than a private enclave like Columbia.

And in fact, Irvine’s mayor did get involved in the action. Not long after that, Mayor Farrah N. Khan issued a resounding statement declaring that she would not tolerate any violation of students’ free speech or right to assembly. “I am asking our law enforcement to stand down. I will not tolerate any violations to our students’ rights to peacefully assemble and protest.” She asked the deputies to leave, and they did.

Archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20240502114414/https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2024/05/columbia-student-protests-nypd-shafik-escalation.html

  • Olgratin_Magmatoe@lemmy.worldEnglish
    16·
    6 months ago

    How is there a false equivalence between Jews being locked out in the 40s and Jews being locked out today?

    You could try reading the article:

    • “The attempted comparison falls flat since the color photo doesn’t show the April 2024 protests. It was taken during a separate pro-Palestinian protest at Columbia University in October 2023. There’s no evidence the protesters in the 2023 photo were blocking access to the college campus.”

    • “The photo was taken by The Associated Press in October 2023 during a separate pro-Palestinian demonstration at the school, days after the Hamas surprise attack that spurred the latest Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The photo’s caption doesn’t mention anything about the demonstrators blocking access to Columbia’s campus – for Jewish students or anyone else. The Columbia Journalism School also debunked the false claim on X on April 26, responding to a viral X post shared by singer Sean Feucht. “In this tweet, that has 22.8k views and was reposted on Instagram, Feucht claims that protestors blocked Jewish students from entering Columbia’s campus,” the post reads. “This is FALSE. The ‘2024’ photo was taken inside the campus gates in October 2023, at the latest.””

    It’s clearly happened on multiple campuses and has been documented by more than a few pro Israel groups.

    Prove it.

    Protests are needed, these are crossing multiple lines in multiple locations and in many cases are not protests at all any longer.

    This is needed. Thousands of people are dead, and that count is only increasing. Protests that don’t disturb the status quo or force us to look at the ugly actions going on are pointless.

    There’s way more people being killed in a lot of places right now.

    This is a whataboutism.

    Have you considered what’s prompting this now?

    The thousands of dead civilians, some of which having been found in mass graves, of which half are children, and half women is what is prompting this.

    When the region was on the verge of widespread peace?

    There hasn’t been peace in the region since before WW2.

    Have you considered that this isn’t the organic Movement that you harken to the past as your examples?

    I don’t give a shit how organic it is. Killing civilians is wrong.

    I’m assuming you’ve seen the publication linking the funding for these protests together.

    Why does that matter?

    Were the students protesting against Vietnam all using tents provided by the Vietnamese? You’ve surely noticed that coincidence right?

    Surely this is a joke?

    by supporting the people who kill people

    You have fundamentally lost the plot on what the students are saying.

    The White western saviours have really established themselves as useful idiots here.

    Yeah, nothing screams “white western saviours” like telling your university to stop funding a genocide.

    Take a look at this:

    https://www.instagram.com/reel/C6ggalWOzpG/?igsh=MWl3dnBjanhjeWYyYw==

    I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to be on the side of frat boys making monkey noises to mock black people.