Campus Anti-Israel Chaos: College administrators “need to grow a spine and they need to enforce the rules”

Campus Anti-Israel Chaos: College administrators “need to grow a spine and they need to enforce the rules”

I appeared on Fox 5l DC’s Sunday Morning Show today, talking about what to expect on campuses this year regarding anti-Israel disruptions.

Bottom line: More of the same, but more intense, a full blossoming of the Red-Green alliance.

(Transcript auto-generated, may contain transcription errors, lightly edited for transcription clarity)

Maureen Umeh: Well, outside the convention in Chicago, thousands of people turned out to demonstrate against the war in Gaza, about 75 pro-Palestinian protestors were arrested. This is part of a larger movement that expanded to college campuses earlier this year. William Jacobson is a law professor at Cornell and the founder of the Conservative website, Legal Insurrection. You’ve been studying this issue for decades now. What can you tell us about who is behind these protests?

WAJ: Well, this is really a worldwide movement against Israel that has shown up on our shores. There are international groups like the Boycott, divestment and Sanctions Movement, which is overseas, which has established, uh, a strong presence on campuses. So this is really something that is not a domestic US issue. In fact, a lot of the protestors, and if you see their rhetoric and their signs, they’re against the United States every bit as much as they’re against Israel. So I think this needs to be viewed in a more global context of what amounts to a war on the United States in a war on the West.

Umeh:  I’m concerned in that. Are people taking it for the potential threat or the threat that you’re saying it is, particularly as we talk about college campuses and what’s happening there. Uh, I, I saw a recent report saying that some college campuses are sort of going back on, uh, the policies they put into place in the spring regarding protests on campus, uh, maybe making it, uh, students more able to now protest. Put that in context. What does this mean for college campuses as they’re reopening? What can we expect there?

WAJ: I think you’re going to see a lot more disruption. We already see the groups organizing over the summer, including at Cornell. They’ve announced they’re going to try to get the president who’s an interim president removed if he doesn’t do what they want. So I think it’s gonna get much more aggressive. I think the sort of protests we saw outside the DNC is what we’re gonna see on campuses, and it’s something that a lot of people refer to and I do as a Red Green Alliance. You have, on the one hand the far left Marxists and anarchists, and on the other hand you have the Islamists and they’ve come together and we’ve not really seen this before in the United States.

Umeh: What do these protestors want? I know you touched on it earlier, obviously it’s a for, for there to be, they’re pro Palestinians, but I wonder what is their ultimate goal? What else are they looking to accomplish here?

WAJ: Well, I think we just need to listen to what they say they want. Decolonization, that’s the term you hear most often on campuses nowadays, and they consider the United States to be an illegitimate, colonial, uh, enterprise that consider Israel to be the same thing. So what they want is what they say they want. And what they say they want is the destruction of the United States. Israel I’ve always argued, is merely an organizing tool for these groups. It’s what allows them to bring together a lot of groups who have nothing in common, like the Marxists and the Islamists to unite in, in their effort.

Umeh: And we’re talking about college campuses bringing it back there. What then can colleges do to protect students from these extremists, if you will,

WAJ: Enforce their rules. So campuses, I think virtually every campus has a policy that you can’t camp on campus and enforce that. They have rules about using bullhorns and electronic amplification inside academic buildings, which took place at Cornell, enforce those rules. So we don’t need any special rules for these protestors. We simply need, for the most part, to enforce the rules that already exist that everybody else has to live by. But these protestors feel they should not have to live by the same set of rules, so enforce what you already have.

Umeh: But we’re seeing that col some colleges are, I’m taking American University for instance, here in the DC area. They are now going to allow protesting inside their buildings. So it seems like they’re reversing some of their rules.

WAJ: Well, that, that’s right. I mean that the administrations have, for the most part been extremely weak. There are some exceptions, but for the most part, they seem to be afraid of these student protestors. And a lot of times they’re not just students, particularly at Columbia University, we saw that I think the majority of people arrested for taking over buildings, were not even students.

So I think that the administrations are afraid. The president’s office at Cornell in the past has been taken over. Other offices have been taken over. People are harassed on the campus and harassed at their homes. There has been a tactic employed of harassing university senior administrators at their homes. So I think a lot of them are very afraid.

They “. And if they need more security, then hire more security, but they can’t capitulate to these protestors.

Umeh: William Jacobson, thank you for your perspective on this this morning. Appreciate it.

WAJ: Thank you.

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