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Shocked at Yale and Mizzou? Pro-Israel students have lived with intimidation for years

Shocked at Yale and Mizzou? Pro-Israel students have lived with intimidation for years

Welcome to our world, everyone else.

WAJ video screenshot, okay to use

The recent incidents at Yale University and U. Missouri of students-gone-wild against open discussion and press freedom have shocked not just conservatives, but also liberals.

(language warning)

The fact that a professor was involved in the silencing has Twitter in a storm:

This has been a long time coming on campuses.

Jonathan Chait, liberal columnist at New York Magazine, writes Can We Start Taking Political Correctness Seriously Now?:

The student protest at the University of Missouri began as a response to a serious problem — outbursts of vile racism on campus — and quickly devolved into an expression of a renewed left-wing hostility to freedom of expression. At the protest on Missouri’s campus yesterday, on a space that is expressly open to free expression, protesters barred journalists from covering the demonstrations….

In recent weeks, UCLA, Wesleyan, and Yale have seen left-wing student activism aimed at shutting down the expression of contrary viewpoints.

That these activists have been able to prevail, even in the face of frequently harsh national publicity highlighting the blunt illiberalism of their methods, confirms that these incidents reflect something deeper than a series of one-off episodes. They are carrying out the ideals of a movement that regards the delegitimization of dissent as a first-order goal. People on the left need to stop evading the question of political correctness — by laughing it off as college goofs, or interrogating the motives of p.c. critics, or ignoring it — and make a decision on whether they agree with it.

The attention on physical and other intimidation to silence opposing viewpoints is welcome, but don’t think this is something new on campuses, even if liberals are just paying attention because liberals now are targeted.

For Israelis and pro-Israel students, physical disruptions of events by groups such as Students for Justice in Palestine, have become common.

We reported just the other day how Protesters shouted down an Israeli Professor at U. Minnesota law school. Law Professor Dale Carpenter gave this first-hand account:

The lecture, which I attended, was delayed half an hour as one by one the protesters stood up to shout denunciations of Israel and were escorted from the hall by university police. One young woman came screaming back into the lecture after having been ejected. Outside the hall, the protesters chanted so loudly that it was difficult to hear Halbertal, much less to concentrate on what he was saying, until 45 minutes after the lecture was to have begun….

Just a couple of weeks earlier, an Israeli diplomat — who happens to be the first Israeli diplomat who is Bedouin — had his event disrupted at the University of Windsor.

The walkout tonight was in protest to a pro-Israeli Arab speaker by the name of Ishmael Khaldi. He came to our campus to speak about minority rights in Israel (as if those exist), and we as pro-Palestinians refused to allow a Zionist to lead the discussion on such a topic. After we left we held a talk outside the room to dicuss what is really happening in Israel, and opened the floor to intersolidarity. The pro-Palestinian voice is in charge of leading the discussions on Palestinian human rights on our campus, not Zionists.

Posted by University of Windsor Palestinian Solidarity Group on Wednesday, October 21, 2015

A “Taste of Israel” event at Tufts University was disrupted in late October.

Cornell students were physically threatened by SJP and Ithaca activists for silently holding pro-Israel signs (language warning):

And a speaker from TIAA-CREF was disrupted:

“Dorm Stormings” and other aggressive behavior are meant to intimidate others into silence (language warning).

And the list goes on and on. Cornell is by no means the worst campus. This happens nationally.

Some of the disruptions are minor — but why do anti-Israel students feel the need to disrupt someone else’s speech, rather than expressing their own without disrupting someone else’s?

Don’t be so shocked that at Mizzou a professor was involved. The academic boycott movement against Israel is led by professors. Despite systematic academic boycotts having been declared by the American Association of University Professors to be a violation of academic freedom, thousands of faculty at U.S. campuses have signed on. This fall and winter will see academic boycott efforts at the American Anthropological Associations, the Women’s Studies Association, the American Historical Association, and from what I am hearing, others as well.

Anti-Israel students and faculty long have run amok in silencing opposing views and rejecting academic freedom. They are steeped in the same far-left ideology that Chait described in New York Magazine:

But to imagine p.c. as simply a thing college kids do relieves us of taking it seriously as a coherent set of beliefs, which it very much is. Political correctness is a system of thought that denies the legitimacy of political pluralism on issues of race and gender. It manifests itself most prominently in campus settings not because it’s a passing phase, like acne, but because the academy is one of the few bastions of American life where the p.c. left can muster the strength to impose its political hegemony upon others. The phenomenon also exists in other nonacademic left-wing communities, many of them virtual ones centered on social media, and its defenders include professional left-wing intellectuals.

We have lived for years in a campus environment that now is so shocking to liberals because it no longer is targeting just Israelis and pro-Israel students.

Welcome to our world, everyone.

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Comments

We will shortly be (if not already) living in a country governed by the rule of the mob, as opposed to the rule of law. Mob rule is great, until you’re not part of it.

    Skookum in reply to Daiwa. | November 13, 2015 at 6:04 pm

    Where have you been? For a century we’ve been told the US is a democracy (ie, rule of men). For a long time we have not been the republic (ie, rule of law) our worthless Constitution guarantees.

Jonathan Chait? He has been part of the PC problem since his undergraduate days. Please.

The pendulum swings progressively left and the bitter left clings and cries that they are not the enemy.

I read this as a fail for Progressive Elites who are now targeted with the same screed, the seeds of which, they sowed since the 1960s.

The Progressives’ institutionalized hatred against Jewish people on campus apparently wasn’t getting enough attention to suit their needs of sowing hate.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but the term “mobsters” exists for a reason.

    Milhouse in reply to Daiwa. | November 10, 2015 at 6:44 pm

    It does, but not for this reason. “Mob” has two opposite definitions, and the Mob to which mobsters belong is anything but a mob in the sense used here. In the sense used here, “mob” means an unorganized rabble, with a potential for violence that has no inherent direction, but is ready to be directed by any rabble-rouser who takes the mic and sets it off. The Mob, on the other hand, is all about organization, and formal, structured, directed violence, with no emotion involved. It’s about the scientific application of violence, the exact amount calculated to be enough to achieve the desired result, delivered in the exactly the right place and at exactly the right time, and no hard feelings afterward.

      DaveGinOly in reply to Milhouse. | November 11, 2015 at 1:35 am

      The students themselves may be part of a disorganized fringe, but let there be no mistake – that fringe is being directed by a higher authority. The students give the appearance of being a “mob,” but they are the foot soldiers of a highly organized machine. These events are not random or disconnected.

        Milhouse in reply to DaveGinOly. | November 11, 2015 at 1:48 am

        Foot soldiers are disciplined. These are anything but. The Yale incident was not directed by anyone. Just ask yourself who benefited from it? Nobody. It was a random outburst by undirected rabble. These students have been agitated to the bursting point by the organized left, but then left to simmer unsupervised until needed, so it’s to be expected that in the meantime there will be spontaneous eruptions. Lefties don’t do organized foot soldiers; rather than execute revolutions themselves they identify ones that are happening anyway and get in front of them. They’ll set off a bomb, see what happens, and figure out how to use the results to their advantage.

        The Mob works on very different principles.

21st Century Red Guard. Mao is replaced by Alinksy.

    DaveGinOly in reply to alaskabob. | November 11, 2015 at 1:37 am

    And they tell us that Hitler was right-wing, while using his very own bag o’ tricks. (Just without the spiffy uniforms.)

http://twitchy.com/2015/11/10/is-this-in-america-read-the-chilling-email-from-missouris-campus-police-on-hateful-anor-hurtful-speech/

So, the campus cops are going to police “hurtful” speech on a public state university campus?

Sounds like someone needs to sue the live dogspit out of the University of Missouri for violations of the Constitution.

I’m available for part of that legal team.

    Valerie in reply to Ragspierre. | November 10, 2015 at 1:17 pm

    Me, too.

    The University of Missouri is entangled with government funds and government policies. For free speech purposes, it should be considered a branch of the government.

The insight has been spreading. Just yesterday I noticed an article in a magazine published by the APA, saying that we should be using our colleges to strengthen the character of the students, not coddle them.

I did not get to read the whole thing, but the thrust was clearly that creating special snowflakes on campus has no benefit to either us or the snowflakes.

So, yes, people who self-identify as Liberals are not happy with our school system, and for the same reason as Conservatives.

DINORightMarie | November 10, 2015 at 1:23 pm

They (leftist profs, educators, etc.) created this Frankenstein. Now, when the monster runs amok, they object?!

How to reverse this? That is the question…….

Sammy Finkelman | November 10, 2015 at 1:59 pm

but why do anti-Israel students feel the need to disrupt someone else’s speech, rather than expressing their own without disrupting someone else’s?

You know the answer to that: Because they are wrong, and they know they are wrong. And they are liars, and they repeat lies, and they want people to be afraid to contradict them.

Or was that a rhetorical question?

Sammy Finkelman | November 10, 2015 at 2:02 pm

Who exactly is being made to “feel unsafe?”

It’s all lies.

    The Friendly Grizzly in reply to Sammy Finkelman. | November 10, 2015 at 2:57 pm

    That, or the ones feeling this lack of safety are a combination of being the products of helicopter parents, and attending every-child-gets-a-trophy activities since age 2.

The Friendly Grizzly | November 10, 2015 at 2:56 pm

I’d like to see answers to these questions:

1) How many of those running around screaming are STEM majors?
2) What is the breakdown between the sexes – oh, dear, I mean “genders” of those running around screaming?

Based on the answers to these questions, a hard-nosed Board of Regents could pay attention to just what courses offered are meaningful and what courses are feel-good nonsense, and adjust accordingly. As for collegiate athletics: at the very least there should be no sports scholarships in the first place.

They are nothing more than the future government bureaucracy workers in training.

Seems to me that we can:
1- turn off the lights, water and heat.
2- cancel the university’s accreditation.
3- revoke tenure.
4- cut off all state funding.
Knowing the IQ of the average University Prof (present company excluded), you might have to do this 3 times before the lesson was learned.
Or we can do the kind of halfhearted stuff we have been doing for the last 30 years for the next 30 years and wind up with 100x the misery and suffering.
It’s cancer – cut it out and give the patient chemo.

Student protesters do not make “requests”; for the last half-century they invariably make “demands” (yes, including those always-popular “non-negotiable demands”).

A “demand” is not an offer to dialogue and does not imply a wish to collaborate; rather, a “demand” implies that the target had better comply, otherwise something unpleasant might happen.

We’ve all just gotten so used to protesters acting like this that no one questions its legitimacy. Who, exactly, are these protesters that they have should have the right to make demands on others (yet you presumably have no reciprocal right to demand anything of them)?

After fifty years of “demands” which have almost always been followed by appeasement (and hardly ever by assertion that decisions will not be made in the face of mob violence) we learn the age-old lesson that appeasement only invites more “demands.”

The only question is, why is anyone surprised at this outcome?

Sammy Finkelman | November 10, 2015 at 7:51 pm

Jonathan Chait:

Political correctness is a system of thought that denies the legitimacy of political pluralism on issues of race and gender.

Not just issues of, or related to, race and gender. It could be anything.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB107698348237931093

Is Your Grocery List Politically Correct?
Food World’s New Buzzword Is ‘Sustainable’ Products; Fair Trade Certified Mangos

Admittedly, it isn’t used by people wanting “local,” “sustainable” or “family farmed” foods.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VQDjWRkeXns

It’s anywhere where there are people who do not want to brook any disagreement over. Sometimes it is used disparagingly.

http://www.foodrenegade.com/