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Cornell Tag

There are a small number of movies that had a profound impact on me as a child. Having grown up in the generation for whom nuclear war was the looming threat, many of those formative movies concerned the aftermath of nuclear war. I particularly remember Fail Safe and Dr. Strangelove.

When a coalition of student groups at Cornell University, led by Students for Justice in Palestine, recently tried to pass a divestment resolution against certain companies doing business in Israel, a couple of interesting things happened. First, as is now a common tactic, the dispute was racialized to portray it as a coalition of "students of color" against the white supremacist (Jewish) Israelis.

Students for Justice in Palestine brought a thoroughly misleading and false resolution divesting from certain companies doing business in Israel before the Cornell University Undergraduate Student Assembly. The President of Cornell previously rejected the SJP divestment request. So the vote in front of the Student Assembly would have been merely symbolic.

The recent interaction in DC between high school students (one in particular) and an older activist who is Native American reminded me of a warning I once received from a colleague as to how I needed to prepare myself if I ever was in a hostile crowd or confronted. A classic leftist/occupy activist tactic, I was warned, was to confront a target and immediately start screaming that the target was being aggressive even though that was not true.