Ah sheet. I wish I could have been there.
BTW, these protestors are trying to persuade our government to stop supporting this crazy war and building a larger following they aren't succeeding.
What I Saw at Columbia’s Demonstration
The protesters wear masks, avoid eye contact, and seem uninterested in engagement or progress.
By Peggy Noonan, WSJ
May 2, 2024
Some thoughts on the Columbia protests, beginning with some bottom lines.
Success for the protesters would have required the encampments and demonstrations to continue through the semester, possibly into the summer. Instead, they have been stopped. Someone won and someone lost, and the demonstrators and their backers didn’t win.
Law-enforcement agencies should stop making vague references to “outside agitators” and funding lines and tell us what they know. That would help us understand what happened on campuses the past few weeks, and help forestall a rerun. Also: just clear the air.
The demonstrations, which sometimes became riots, clarified some things, maybe for the first time in generations. America is a country of First Amendment rights, whether the students love our Constitution or not. It is a nation that supports the right to gather and protest. It respects the right to yell and write and put out the truth as you see it. It understands and accepts peaceful demonstrations. But it doesn’t respect breaking our laws. It doesn’t support violence as a tool or tactic and will move against it.
It isn’t bad to re-establish these baseline principles.
Here is where a lot of minds rightly go when we think of the words “student demonstration”: Young people like to be part of something big and passionate. They want to be part of history. “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, / But to be young was very heaven!” They want to care. It’s romantic to be a revolutionary and pleasurable to claim fierce commitments. It’s good to show you’re a force in the world, that you’ll march for the right and moral thing. Critical thinking isn’t your strong suit, emotion is. All this is part of it, certainly for the nice kids, and there are always nice kids.
However. A characteristic of these demonstrators was also a primary tactic: the covering of their faces, the hiding of their identities. This struck me as sinister. They see themselves as replicating the 1968 antiwar protests, but those protesters didn’t hide who they were, they didn’t wear masks. Students the past two weeks did, to make observers feel menaced—some big, faceless force is enraged, occupying, and marching toward you.
I was told when I went to the Columbia campus on Tuesday that the demonstrators wish not to be identified by school authorities and subject to discipline; that, as technological sophisticates, they wish to avoid facial-recognition software; that they wish not to limit their future prospects, including employment opportunities. All or some of that could be true, but I also think they do it to confer an air of menace, and because they are cowardly. They won’t stand where they stand and pay the price. But half of life is standing where you stand and paying the price. They see themselves as indignant, sincere and uniquely vulnerable. They looked to me more cosseted and indulged.
I was at Columbia hours before the police came in and liberated Hamilton Hall from its occupiers. Unlike protesters of the past, who were usually eager to share with others what they thought and why, these demonstrators would generally not speak or make eye contact with members of the press, or, as they say, “corporate media.”
I was on a bench taking notes as a group of young women, all in sunglasses, masks, and kaffiyehs, walked by. “Friends, please come say hello and tell me what you think,” I called. They marched past, not making eye contact, save one, a beautiful girl of about 20. “I’m not trained,” she said. Which is what they’re instructed to say to corporate-media representatives who will twist your words. “I’m barely trained, you’re safe,” I called, and she laughed and half-halted. But her friends gave her a look and she conformed.
I watched small demonstrations of dozens:
“Israel bombs, Columbia pays! How many kids did you kill today?”
In front of Hamilton Hall, students milled about and chanted. From a second-floor open window, next to the window police would enter that night, two male students with a big rough rope were hauling up food—vegetable sandwiches on wheat bread, Dunkin’ Donuts—from the first floor entrance way. They hauled that black plastic supermarket hand cart up like they were re-enacting the siege of Sevastopol. There was a lot of re-enacting going on.
What struck me, beyond the chanting and bull horns, is that the demonstrators didn’t seem to want to make progress on questions you’d think would engage them. If they cared about the pummeling of Gaza, about overall U.S. policy in the Mideast, or the destructive impact of Benjamin Netanyahu’s leadership in Israel, half of New York City would march alongside them. But they don’t want allies. Nor did they seem interested in marching in compassion for the people of Gaza.
They weren’t a compassionate group. They weren’t for anything, they were against something: the Israeli state, which they’d like to see disappear, and those who support it.
The night the New York City Police Department was taking back Hamilton Hall I spoke with a friend who counsels students at Columbia. He said many students who’d sought him out the past few weeks had mixed or unsure feelings about Israel and were trying to think it through. The demonstrators weren’t.
Those students don’t believe the terrorist organization Hamas was unjustified in its actions on Oct. 7, he said. They are “totally on board with neo-Marxist oppressor-oppressed ideology.” They don’t have compassion for Gaza and its people “any more than they’ve had compassion for Ukraine.” They are driven by an anti-Israeli animus that is also and inextricably an anti-American animus. “They see themselves as great freedom fighters—they are Mandela in South Africa.”
An important thing now is that the students of the class of ’24, at Columbia and most other schools, will be allowed to graduate in the usual ceremony, with the usual celebrations. Most of them had been denied a high-school graduation because of the pandemic. They were robbed of steady classroom instruction when they entered college. They have been denied so many of the signposts of academic and personal effort. It would have been the injustice of injustices if they had been robbed of this final undergraduate graduation ceremony on May 15. Columbia’s President Minouche Shafik was prudent, and perhaps spirited, in asking the police to stay on campus until two days after the commencement.
Everyone is tired of disorder. Our culture, our politics, our flailing media world—everything seems chaotic, on the edge of something.
The Vietnam demonstrations came to a country at relative peace with itself and said: Wake up! The Hamas demonstrations come to a country that hasn’t been at peace with itself in a long time. It watched, and thought: More jarring hell from kids with blood in their eyes making demands.
The people of my liberal-left town were relieved to see the NYPD come in, drag the protesters away, restore order, and let people clean things up.
People want peacefulness. They want to go about their lives. It’s not too much to ask.