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