Hey, tribe.
So between my last newsletter and this one, a lot has happened. I’m going to stay focused on Columbia as a microcosm of what’s happening across the nation.
After many, many warnings and missed deadlines, Columbia finally brought in the NYPD to disperse the encampment in the “Liberation Zone” on the lawn. That night, protestors broke into Hamilton Hall, smashing windows and doors to gain entry to the building, took a staff member hostage for at least some amount of time, declared “This building has been liberated,” and proceeded to illegally occupy it for the next 12 hours.
The next day — and you seriously can’t make this up — the protestors were demanding that Columbia allow delivery of food and drinks to their outpost. Here is 34-year-old spokeswoman Johannah King-Slutzky, reportedly a writer for Vice and Gawker, telling a reporter that the protestors need “basic humanitarian aid”.
A reporter asked her the question that was surely on every sane person’s mind: exactly why should Columbia “be obligated to provide food for people who have taken over a building?”
The protest spokeswoman answered: “Well, I guess it’s a question of what kind of community and obligation Columbia feels it has to its students. Do you want students to die of dehydration and starvation or get severely ill even if they disagree with you? If the answer is no, then you should allow basic — I mean, it’s crazy to say because we’re on an Ivy League campus, but this is, like, basic humanitarian aid we’re asking for… like, could people please have a glass of water?”
I don’t think The Onion could write a better parody. Eve Barlow of Blacklisted wrote a hilarious send-up in response to this, and I needed that laugh more than I can express.
I present to you the sharpest thinkers of a generation. UNRWA, please help! WFP, where are you when the First World needs you?! Daddy Sinwar has ghosted these poor little slaves. We must divert the food aid trucks from Gaza! These kids are starving!
Couldn’t they have occupied the dining hall? They didn’t really think this one through, hey? These children are trapped in an open air prison in their own minds. They can leave any time. Uber is a push of a button away. It’s as fictional as the open air prison in Gaza, and yet they must keep the idea of it alive. Could it be that Hamas has given these kids Stockholm Syndrome without ever stepping a foot near them?
Do they not know that there's tap water in the bathroom sink? That’s a serious question. I assume nothing now about Gen Z’s knowledge base. The lack of resourcefulness and survival skills is deeply disappointing. Weren’t these infants raised on The Hunger Games? Did they learn nothing? They need humanitarian aid, they say! URGENT: please airdrop some brains to Ivy League campuses.
Erica Le Bon, an Iranian-American attorney and activist, has a more serious take (though Eve touched on it too), and it’s this I want to look at it in more depth because I think it’s very illuminating:
I can’t believe I have to explain what’s happening here, but here goes. Elite students of Ivy League schools have glamorized oppression so much that they have now reached role play status to satisfy their fantasies. Here, the students have appropriated the suffering of Gazans and are cosplaying as living through humanitarian crisis. In their American make-believe story where Ivy League infrastructure sets the scene, the students play Gazans and the school administration plays Israel.
Israel (the school) is blocking their “basic humanitarian aid” in this play, and if they don’t receive it soon, they will “die of thirst and starvation” (appropriating exact experiences of Gazans). They also destroy upper class buildings and claim them as “liberated” while the students repeat chants in zombie-like chorus, playing the role of “freedom fighters” destroying Israeli infrastructure and claiming them freed. If I’m alive in a world where people don’t see the levels of perversion in this, I give up.
Once you look through this lens, it’s impossible to ignore the parallels. The mini tent cities set up on campus. The complaints, once the suspensions they’ve been warned about over and over are finally meted out, that the college has forced them to be homeless. The entitlement they feel to disrupt everyone else’s freedom of movement, ability to study, and access parts of their own campus — not to mention the entitlement to break into locked buildings by force and take a hostage for any length of time — is matched only by the outrage they spout when they’re finally arrested.
What chills me most is the faculty members who are egging them on, donning fluorescent vests and linking arms to protect them from the consequences of their actions. And the senators upping the optics of victimhood as AOC did, tweeting in the midst of the arrests that:
“If any kid is hurt tonight, responsibility will fall on the mayor and univ presidents. Other leaders and schools have found a safe, de-escalatory path. This is the opposite of leadership and endangers public safety. A nightmare in the making. I urge the Mayor to reverse course.”
So first, these aren’t kids. They’re adults, the same age as the ones we routinely send off to die in wars exponentially more “genocidal” than the one Israel is waging on Hamas.
Second, much like the progressive narrative around the I/P conflict, these Palestinian proxies bear no responsibility for anything that happens to them. Even though they are full-blown adults who chose to ignore warning after warning to do whatever they wanted, including take part in criminal actions, it’s unforgivable to arrest them and the college is the most dastardly of oppressors.
Here are screenshots from the social media pages of the groups leading the protest:
Columbia students are UNDER SIEGE.
Admin has chosen the most repressive ways of STARVING OUT and BLOCKING IN the entire student body.
Students in the encampment have NO access to food or water!
COLUMBIA IS A REPRESSIVE POLICE STATE.
Truly, this is taking their oppression fetish to preposterous lengths.
If these groups can be this histrionic, their rhetoric so over the top, toward the draconian institution they pay $90,000 a year to attend, then do you imagine maybe, just maybe, their claims about Israel should be taken with a grain of salt?
I had similar feelings listening to the hearing between Khymani James and the two staff members tasked with asking him about his stated intention of “fighting to kill.” They could not have been more solicitous or gentle as they tried to determine whether he was a danger to himself or others.
He told them the meeting was an example of “institutional violence” and later mused to his social media following that he didn’t want to go too hard on them because they were two Black women, but it really made him sad when Black women upheld white supremacy in this way.
I want you to know that amidst all this madness, there are still many spots of light — so many that they deserve their own post. And since I try to send you into Shabbat on an uplifting note, my tentative plan is to devote Friday’s newsletter to those.
In the meantime, we’ll get through this. We do have allies. We do have support. There is a whole constellation of shining stars in this firmament and I promise I will share them with you very soon.
In the meantime, hold steady. We will outlive them.
Am Yisrael Chai.
I was told in the ‘89 Facebook group that these protesters are brave, and i said they were brave like the Jan 6 protesters. I got a 😮 which nearly caused me to overdose on dopamine.
Once again, you have articulated so beautifully what I have been feeling, but unable to articulate clearly.