BAY AREA HATEWATCH UPDATE: Here’s a report of a riot by palestinian supporters attacking pro-Israel demonstrators at San Francisco State University.
Way back in September I looked forward to the day when the benighted Bay Area would be as cosmopolitan and tolerant as Knoxville. It hasn’t happened yet.
UPDATE: No sooner did I post it than I found this post from Meryl Yourish with many links and additional information.
Yourish is right to say that no university would support this kind of behavior from white-supremacist students. Why should pro-palestinian students get off easy?
ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Alex Bensky writes:
I am, alas, unastonished by several results of this little attempt at a pogrom: the administration has said nothing; the faculty as a group has said nothing; the papers seem to have said little, if anything; the Jewish students will never hold another public activity and are thoroughly intimidated; and the savages who run through the streets shrieking, “Kill the Jews” have won this round.
And I have to confess I’m getting a little scared. But I’m just some paranoid Jew, so who cares?
Don’t get scared. Get mad. If I were on the SFSU faculty, they’d be hearing from me. Come to think of it, they are anyway. But the proper response is to turn out with a bigger march. And video cameras. And hey, if the Administration won’t provide security, provide your own. The iron rule of pogroms is that as long as the victims don’t defend themselves it’s not a threat to public order. Once they stick up for themselves, it suddenly gets noticed and the pogrom is stopped.
STILL ANOTHER UPDATE: Rod Dreher writes in The Corner: “One thing that strikes me about the account, which was provided by the director of the school’s Jewish Studies Program, is that its author (who helped lead the peaceful pro-Israel demonstration) appears to be a garden-variety peace-and-justice multiculturalist who is genuinely shocked and saddened by the hateful display. When will the Pim Fortuyns of the American academic left stand up to this fascism?”
AND ONE MORE: Reader Allen Thorpe writes: “Maybe the school administrators need to be sued for failure to provide safety for ‘academic freedom and dialogue.’ Schools seem to be hypersensitive to lawsuits, and then there’s the bad publicity. Wouldn’t the ACLU take this case?”