Protest and Civil Disobedience

What is happening at USC, Columbia, Yale, Ohio State and many other Colleges and Universities regarding the Israel/Hamas war has exceeded the bounds of reason and civil behavior.   This is now civil disobedience perpetrated by the so-called “pro-Palestinian” anti-Israel protesters (which is what they call themselves despite the reality that many are simply pro-Hamas).

Do not get me wrong, please.  I believe that students should protest those things they feel strongly about.  That’s what students are supposed to do.  The complication is that the long running debate about “freedom of speech” is specious because civil disobedience is not free speech.  Civil disobedience is the purposeful flouting of laws, rules, and regulations to draw attention to your cause.  Moreover, that practice has consequences  –  as we are seeing at Columbia, Ohio State and other institutions.

Infringing on private property, shouting vile hate speech, harassing students, squatting on property that is not yours, and blocking access is not free speech.  It is not legally protected.  Those participating should be prepared to reap the consequences.

But, of course, they are not so prepared.  Those protesters and their supporters are aghast that they are being physically removed and/or arrested for their activities.  They believe that they have a right to be intimidating, to vilify Jewish students, to disrupt the functioning of the institution because………because they think they are right.  That’s privilege for you.  Privilege is the belief that because of who you are, or what you believe in, the consequences do not apply to you.

Luckily, the vast majority of colleges and universities do not see it that way.  God only knows what Emerson College Jay Bernhardt was thinking when he said the college would pay the bail for any Emerson student that gets arrested.  And yes, President Bernhardt is Jewish and I would bet money on how far left his politics lean.   But for the vast majority who are not attending Emerson, it is break the rules, pay the price.  Going 80 miles an hour in a 40-mile-an-hour speed zone is illegal.  You will get a ticket.  Squat on someone else’s property and they have the right to have you removed.  Take over a university building does not obligate the university to provide snacks.  It is not that complicated.

But beyond that simple reality is the other reality.  That reality is that the majority of these protests are being led, encouraged, supported, and attended by groups like Students for Justice in Palestine, a supporter of Hamas.  Hamas is an internationally recognized terrorist organization responsible for encouraging and carrying out violence not just against Jewish Israelis, but also Jews worldwide.  When these protesters shout, “Death to Israel” and “Death to the Jews” and “One State” they are supporting the Hamas charter which calls for killing all the Jews, everywhere.  It is actually illegal to provide material support to a terrorist organization.  One could argue that moral support is material.  I certainly could see that case being made, but so far no one has seen fit to do so.

The other reality is that in many cases, many of the “protesters” are not students of the college or university.  At Columbia, the police reported that 40% of those arrested were not students and in one closer to home, the college attending child of a good friend relayed that “many” of the protesters at her college were not students.  Thus, I conclude that there are other organizations turning out so that the crowd is larger, and the support for organizations like Hamas is strengthened. 

Now, it is clear that many of the protesters are not there to support Hamas.  There are legitimate reasons to dislike what the Israelis are doing, particularly if you believe that Jews are not indigenous to Israel, that they are white, colonialist oppressors, and they are committing genocide.  As discussed before, none of those accusations stand up to the facts.  Jews are Indigenous (read any version of the Bible or Koran), they were the people who fought against the British colonialist oppressors, the majority of Israelis are Mizrahi/Sephardic and non-white, and the Israeli Defense Force actions have resulted in the lowest ratio of civilian casualties in modern warfare (tragic, yes, but not with genocidal intent). 

Never the less, true college anti-war activists have cause to protest.  My only question is where were all of these “activists” as Russia continues to  indiscriminately bomb Ukrainian civilians and civilian infrastructure, or as Assad continues to murder his own people, or the Junta in Myanmar continues ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya, or what is happening to the Uighurs, Tibetans, and others?   Reminder – the definition of antisemitism is treating Israel and Jews differently than you treat others.   The fact that many protesters will deny being antisemitic does not matter – the fact that they only protest this particular event is proof enough.

The calls for cease-fire ignore the fact that Hamas is an armed terrorist group that has committed itself to killing Israelis and Jews and that the only way to stop them is to degrade their ability to fight.  The calls for cease-fire ignore that Hamas bears the responsibility for returning the hostages they took — Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions explicitly proscribes the act of taking hostages.  This prohibition is further echoed in the Fourth Geneva Convention (Article 34), wherein it is characterized as a grave breach (Article 147).

The Hamas terrorists who embed themselves with civilians, commandeer civilian infrastructure, and use civilians as human shields are just as responsible, if not more so, for the civilian deaths in Gaza, but the protesters ignore that.  It is Hamas who attacked the civilians of the sovereign State of Israel without any regard for the health and safety of the people that they were elected to govern, with no provisions for protecting or feeding them in time of war.  Why is the victim’s retaliation held solely responsible for the care and feeding of the enemy’s population?

Ignoring all of that is another source of privilege – the privilege of young college students in the US and Europe to object to a nation protecting its people from invasion and violence.  Only those who have never been preyed upon have that privilege.

I look at that privilege and can only see it along with its attendant hypocrisy.  The far-left progressives – who believe in voting rights, minority rights, LBGTQ+ rights, women’s rights, and religious freedom actively supporting Hamas, a group that believes and practices none of those things, is hypocrisy of the highest order.

I am clueless as to why those protesters believe that intimidating and threatening their Jewish classmates along with spewing anti-Jewish hate speech (whether they actively participate or not) somehow supports their cause in the United States.