@JoshuaHolland If there were a critical mass of Jews supporting those protests, there wouldn't be constant stories of JVP getting elementary things wrong, most recently posting a photo of a large protest sign at USC with Hebrew letters written left-to-right. In fact, left-wing Jews who hate Netanyahu consistently point out the anti-Semitism of the international Palestine movement and branches including SJP and JVP; often it's people who spent most of 2023 protesting against Bibi in Israel.
@JoshuaHolland So the Jewish students who say they feel threatened are lying? Or do they not count? I honestly don't get your reasoning here, and why you keep dismissing the genuine fears that students are expressing. You don't have to abandon your sympathy to Palestinians, or even to student protesters, to acknowledge that kids are expressing fear. Show some humanity.
@richard_merren First, I don't take anything that an administration that's handled these protests terribly from the beginning says.
And I think it's worth noting that while they justify their heavy-handed response by saying that Jewish students and faculty feeling threatened, they called in the NYPD to arrest a bunch of Jewish student protesters and are currently directly threatening to expel them. I'm sure those students feel threatened too!
@JoshuaHolland Trump held a seder, too. He has "blacks for Trump" at his rallies. Antigay churches frequently feature "reformed" gays. But I am not arguing that the camps are based on Antisemitism I assume the Jews in them are sincere in their beliefs. But to say that there is not real stuff happening that some Jewish students can reasonably be afraid of is naive or dishonest. It is like criticizing women who are afraid to walk alone at night because there are others who do it every day.
@richard_merren@JoshuaHolland That may be true, but the bottom line is that there are laws to protect you from harm, but there is no law to protect you from fear.
So long as the protesters are peaceful and not causing harm, the other party has no claim, no matter how scared they are.
The authorities can protect you from actual harm, but they should not be protecting you from words. You have your own words for exactly that purpose. You just have to be brave enough to overcome the fear to use them.
@JoshuaHolland I have followed you for years, and your odd intransigence on this issue is just bizarre. You have repeatedly offered up excuses that keep turning out to be terribly wrong. (There's no violent speech or violence l, that guy is not really a leader and he said he was sorry.) I am sure you'll be happy to hear that I will not follow you any more and I will stop replying to you. I can't imagine what line you have that has not yet been crossed at Columbia, but it has gone far past mine.
@richard_merren@JoshuaHolland The two on-the-ground descriptions I've heard of the protest camps by Jews--one student and one journalist--have said, actually no, the protests have been really careful about not doing anything antisemitic. That's not to say it hasn't happened, but it is to say that a) if we report on the instances of antisemitism and don't report on how stringent most groups have been to not allow that shit, then we're misrepresenting the situation.
@richard_merren@JoshuaHolland And b) "feeling threatened" isn't it the same as being in danger. The student experience I read--and I wish I had a link for you!--described exactly how he "felt threatened" by a protest chant until he realized it wasn't actually about him. It was about Israel's actions, and he as Jewish person ≠ Israel's government or military.
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