April 23, 2024

OH, COLUMBIA: Columbia Professors Declare Solidarity With Student Protesters and Call for Shafik’s Resignation. “A group of Columbia University professors held a rally Monday to express solidarity with the anti-Semitic students suspended for holding unauthorized protests on campus and to lambaste university president Minouche Shafik for cracking down on them.”

Related:

Posted at 8:00 am by Glenn Reynolds

IT’S AN ORGANIZED CAMPAIGN BY PEOPLE WHO HATE AMERICA. THAT’S NOT ME TALKING, THAT’S THEM.

Related: Why are tent cities springing up at elite colleges?

It’s an organized campaign by people who hate America.

Posted at 7:34 am by Glenn Reynolds

DISPATCHES FROM AMERICA’S MARXIST ENCLAVES: I Used To Run Columbia’s Pro-Israel Group. This Anti-Semitism Is Nothing New.

The quad where I so fondly remember spending my days as an undergraduate is now home to a university-sanctioned encampment of hate, sequestering Columbia’s Jewish community into their dorm rooms — and even leaving campus entirely — in fear of their physical safety. New York Mayor Eric Adams’ offers to activate the NYPD to dispel the pro-Palestinian mob have fallen on deaf ears with university administrators, including President Minouche Shafik. Unfortunately, this unfolding chaos is just a new chapter of anti-Semitism that has long been embedded in the culture at Columbia and other elite universities nationwide.

As an American Jew, I was proud to serve as president of Columbia’s largest pro-Israel group, then known as LionPAC, during my junior year in 2010-2011. My tenure involved routinely responding to a variety of protests against the Jewish state. Mock “apartheid walls” and cardboard cutouts of Israeli tanks were erected on Low Steps. Holocaust deniers, hosted by Students for Justice in Palestine, spoke freely under the infinite confines of “academic freedom”. And students simply trying to walk to class were subjected to “die ins” on College Walk, where anti-Israel activists donning fake IDF uniforms and machine guns would pretend to slaughter Palestinians, who would lay lifeless on the ground for minutes on end. These charades were no surprise at a university that hosted one of the world’s most prolific Holocaust deniers, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and tenured Professor Joseph Massad, who called Hamas’ October 7th slaughter of innocent Israeli Jews a “stunning” and “astonishing” display of “Palestinian resistance”.

In other words, today’s protests are a natural manifestation of Columbia’s seemingly limitless tolerance for anti-Semitism.

The intimidation starts at the top: “In my experience, Columbia’s pro-Israel faculty have always eschewed public activism out of fear of professional exile or termination.”

Posted at 7:33 am by Stephen Green

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Outspoken Jewish professor barred from Columbia campus — but administration turns blind eye to even bigger tent city springing up.

Related:

Posted at 7:30 am by Glenn Reynolds

SOME PEOPLE ARE TERRIBLE AT WRITING THEIR GIVE SEND GO PLEAS:  Please Help Us With Medical Expenses.

Partly because they’re incredibly uncomfortable in asking.  I’ve known this couple for I think 14 years now. Ever since I’ve known them, they’ve wanted children, but because the wife was medically sterilized against her will while still a minor, they had to save and work for this goal. Because of how long it took, it’s not likely to do well and the initial attempt left them flat broke. They need help to pay expenses already incurred and perhaps to rescue something from the previous debacle by managing at least one child.

I know — trust me I know — we’re all tapped out and pinched beyond all reason in this fourth year of Bidenomics.  But these are real people, and for reasons they didn’t choose or create, their dream of being parents is almost unobtainable. Not quite, but almost.

If you can, please help. If you can’t, would you consider sharing the link and praying for them and that they get to have a family?  Thank you.

Posted at 7:00 am by Sarah Hoyt

HOW’S THAT WHOLE “EMERGING DEMOCRATIC MAJORITY” THEORY WORKING OUT FOR YA? Chinese-Americans Are Pushing San Francisco Toward the Political Center: Many are turning against the left over issues like anti-Asian crime and education policy. “Members of the Chinese community, who make up one-fifth of this city of 810,000 and a slightly smaller percentage of registered voters, say they have been particularly incensed by incidents of anti-Asian violence, school policies they believe have emphasized equity over merit, and street homelessness. Many are also upset that property crime has long been higher in San Francisco than most other major cities, though it has dropped this year. Chinese-Americans were among the most emphatic backers of ballot measures passed last month mandating drug screening for public welfare recipients and expanding police powers, as well as the 2022 recall of the three school board members and the district attorney, Chesa Boudin.”

When the Democrats were talking about helping the working class and promoting education, the theory had some basis. Now that the party has been taken over by the woke wing — which basically favors the forced enshittification of every aspect of American life — it’s not selling as well. Turns out, people who came here for a better life don’t much want things made worse.

Posted at 7:00 am by Glenn Reynolds

April 22, 2024

VERY FINE PEOPLE ON BOTH SIDES, WORRIED ABOUT MICHIGAN IN NOVEMBER EDITION:

And from Joe’s boss:

As Joel Pollack tweets, “Only Obama could turn Passover into an occasion for solidarity with the Gazans who attacked Israel on Oct. 7. The missing word from this post, by the way, is ‘freedom.’ Never an important concept for Obama. But it’s the heart of the Passover holiday. He never got it.”

UPDATE: Seth Mandel on the United States of Charlottesville:

“From the river to the sea, Palestine is Arab” is a direct application of the popular academic theory of the day, “decolonization.” The idea of Jewish self-determination in Israel being a settler-colonialist project might be a flat-earth level of historical crankery, but it is all the rage—and I do mean rage—in the classrooms of our esteemed institutions of higher learning. Teaching young minds that Jews must be supplanted from their homes because they represent a race that belongs elsewhere has a long history of inspiring those students to carry out what they’ve been taught. It is no surprise that Jews at Columbia over the weekend were told to “go back to Poland.” The racial ideology at the heart of decolonization theory demands nothing less. As a now-infamous Twitter/X post, amplified by a writer and editor at the Washington Post among others, asked in celebration of Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre and sexual torture spree: “What did y’all think decolonization meant? vibes? papers? essays? losers.”

And that helps us understand the look of absolute despondency on Columbia President Minouche Shafik’s face throughout her congressional hearing this week. She, and many of her peers at other institutions, are facing two problems. The first is the violence and harassment targeting visibly Jewish students. Contrary to various media figures’ attempts to spin recent events, this is absolutely taking place on campus and these violations absolutely are being committed by students. They are also, however, taking place outside of campus as part of the same demonstrations a few feet away. It’s not either/or. The campus-organized protests are spreading and so is the violence they incite.

If Shafik is ever dismissed by Columbia, she definitely has a job waiting for her at Reuters, where they believe “one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.” Similarly, Shafik sees terrorism as “a form of protesting:”

 

Posted at 10:35 pm by Ed Driscoll