Palestine college student protest megathread

[Born to Slay. Forced to Work.]

One thing people on this thread don’t grapple with is that people only have limited time and energy to follow conflicts. Demanding that people give the same amount of energy to every conflict be it Gaza, Yemen, Myanmar, Sudan, etc. is not just unrealistic it’s cruel. Sympathy isn’t all of nothing.

[Born to Slay. Forced to Work.]

One thing people on this thread don’t grapple with is that people only have limited time and energy to follow conflicts. Demanding that people give the same amount of energy to every conflict be it Gaza, Yemen, Myanmar, Sudan, etc. is not just unrealistic it’s cruel. Sympathy isn’t all of nothing.

Okay but the focus shouldn’t be disproportionately on one from a societal level.

Why? There are very large amounts of Israeli Americans and Palestinian Americans, more so than most other conflicts. The US and Israel have deep ties in every way imaginable. Many Americans have been to Israel for various reasons and Vice versus. This isn’t really just or fair but that’s how it is.

[Born to Slay. Forced to Work.]

USC are cowards and will throw their student body under the bus to save face, got it

[Born to Slay. Forced to Work.]

Cancel her speech or not, cancel the graduation as a whole or not, what’s with the obsession of bringing in the national guard?

Beat up people they don’t like

So what if some student yells something off the stage, no one is going to think USC sponsors that message. It’ll be a flash for a month then everyone will move on.

[Born to Slay. Forced to Work.]

Cancel her speech or not, cancel the graduation as a whole or not, what’s with the obsession of bringing in the national guard?

Beat up people they don’t like

So what if some student yells something off the stage, no one is going to think USC sponsors that message. It’ll be a flash for a month then everyone will move on.

What if the students rush up on the graduation stage with a big banner that says "END THE GENOCIDE" and start chanting "from the river to the sea"?  Do you just tolerate it?  Or do you have them arrested and taken off stage?  If you tolerate it, then for how long?  If they intend to stay up there forever until graduation is cancelled, is that OK by you?  "If we can't have it, shut it down"?  "USC, you can't hide, we charge you with genocide"?

At a certain point you have to put your foot down and no longer tolerate lawlessness.  If you live life timidly and allow yourself to be bullied by protesters forever, then they're going to keep abusing you harder and harder.

You act like all of this hasn’t happened before. It’s really a rather mundane part of grad season. Anytime there’s a big stage and cameras people try to use it for their purpose.

Just last year David Zaslav was loudly booed and faced walkouts at Boston U’s commencement, U Michigan grad students lead a protest amidst their negations with the university, George Mason faced protests for inviting Glen Youngkin, and the students of the New College of Florida held an entirely separate ceremony in protest of DeSantis’s takeover of the school.

People that do something offensive get removed and appropriately punished depending on their actions. If someone were to say “Death to Israelis” or “Death to Palestinians” then they shouldn’t get a degree and be expelled.

The only reason there’s this pearl clutching is because the donor class wants USC to somehow control the actions and words of every student, which isn’t something they can or should do. So instead they take it out on the students.

Cancelling graduation really just amplifies the issue and gives everyone yelling about this and that around it a bigger platform.

[Born to Slay. Forced to Work.]

A lot of bootlicking in this thread

[Born to Slay. Forced to Work.]

don't have to eat sour skittles to survive

hold up what?

hang on, I'm going to guess what happened here.  Some of the food being delivered to Gaza included candy for the children, and some Palestinian took a picture of it and said "this is all we're being given to eat, it's either sour skittles or starve" and people believed it.  How far off am I?

You forgot to add that the skittles are expired that couldn't be sold in US markets and also how are they supposed to ingest sour candies when there is no water to relieve the sensation. The people were asking for flour to make bread, but instead we help a US company get a tax write-off.

God if companies giving expired candy as “aid” to a famine we enabled for a tax write off and people refusing to believe it isn’t the most horribly accurate summary of our current system idk what is

[Born to Slay. Forced to Work.]

Also, this entire movement showed its true face when it organized mass rallies immediately after 10/7 celebrating the slaughter, before Israel had struck back. No matter what they say their demands are, they showed their cards on day one and they will never be allowed to cover that up.

Support for Palestine is still low. But Israel, after having suffered the second worst killing of Jews since the Holocaust (the worst was in Argentina during the dirty war, where tens of thousands of socialists, 12% of them Jews, were killed with weapons bought from the IDF) has lost an incredible amount of goodwill and the polls reflect that too. Pre 10/7 the average American was probably a soft Israel supporter, now the average American says screw em both.

https://twitter.com/USA_Polling/status/1785006429625074159

Lol, even I don't go this far.

That’s objectively insane, why would anyone support this?

Honestly, probably just a lack of understanding of what joining NATO would mean.

One thing I don’t think people talk about when it comes to public polling is
a) most people just don’t really care about most policy specifics
2) for many this is probably the first time they’re hearing the idea so it’s more a gut reaction

[Born to Slay. Forced to Work.]

I can't imagine how awful it would feel to be a parent who invested 18 years into getting your child the absolute best education and opportunities, so they could perfectly craft a profile that got them admitted to Columbia, and then spend nearly $300,000 on their Columbia education... only to watch them proudly throw it all away because they want to martyr themselves for the cause of opposing Israel's war against Hamas.

And remember, if you're the parent of an 18-22 year old, you are probably age 45-55 and have very clear memories of the second intifada, images of blood-soaked schoolbuses and the body parts of blown-up Jewish children on the nightly news.  And now you watch your child get expelled from Columbia University because they refused to stop chanting "intifada revolution there is only one solution" at Jews walking by on campus.

Nothing makes me more anti-Israel then your posts

[Born to Slay. Forced to Work.]

Apparently they’re banning all students who live off-campus from campus now.

lol wat

[Born to Slay. Forced to Work.]

So again you’re just assuming that the people recommending the post didn’t know what they meant and even if they did so what? I didn’t realize a term for judgement and Heaven are apparently controversial in your eyes that it shouldn’t be recommended 🙄

Many Americans view Arabic (language and culture) as inherently violent and anti-American. Loved growing up with that

[Born to Slay. Forced to Work.]

Honestly this whole thing is a big example of the Streisand effect. I hadn’t really heard of or paid attention to most of these protests until they started sending cops in.

[Born to Slay. Forced to Work.]

Brown agrees to Israel divestment vote as House GOP digs in on antisemitism in a busy day for student protests

The college protests across the nation saw a slew of headline-grabbing developments on Tuesday, including the takeover of a building at Columbia University, a new House-wide effort by Republicans to investigate antisemitism and a major victory for activists at Brown University. 

The big success of the day for pro-Palestinian protesters came out of Brown, where President Christina Paxson announced Tuesday that students will end their encampment after an agreement was reached between school administrators and leaders of the protest to hold an Israel divestment vote.

The school agreed to let five students meet with the Corporation of Brown University in May to argue why they should vote to divest from companies associated with Israel or its war in Gaza. The Advisory Committee on University Resources Management will also provide recommendations related to divestment by the end of September, and the board will vote on the policy in October.

In exchange, students have agreed to take down the encampment and not violate the Rhode Island school’s rules around protesting through the end of the academic year, including during commencement.

“Another provision of the agreement relates to the application of Brown’s conduct code to students involved in the encampment. The establishment of tents and other related activities have violated a range of policies, and while Brown will continue to follow its conduct processes related to unauthorized activities, University leaders agreed that ending the encampment will be viewed favorably in disciplinary proceedings,” Paxson said. 

“The agreement also makes clear that reports of bias, harassment or discrimination received during the encampment will continue to be investigated. In addition, if the University receives new information about any conduct violations related to or following the encampment, students won’t be exempt from conduct proceedings for those violations,” she added. 

But I thought all these protestors were bloodthirsty anti-semites who deserve to be tear gassed

[Born to Slay. Forced to Work.]

Hamas are the bad guys, not Palestinians.

The majority of Gazans are children who were born under Hamas’s totalitarian regime and have never had a choice in the matter

[Born to Slay. Forced to Work.]

I’m just gonna point out that saying Palestinians/Germans/Iraqis are the bad guys isnt some harmless semantics.

There’s a famous picture from WWII of a Chinese woman at the beach with a massive Chinese flag so she isn’t mistaken for Japanese for her own safety.

Yes people have always generalized wars to the entire populous, but you shouldn’t unless you just want to or don’t care if you perpetuate hate against that group. And lord knows there’s plenty of hate flying around this war.

[Born to Slay. Forced to Work.]

I can't stress enough just how much >90% of employed people despise protests like this. The left has completely failed to appeal to working people and there seems to be no interest in fixing that.

gainfully employed people are the enemy, we support genocide by working for "the man" or something

It’s funny because when you say that it is a moral failing of the Palestinian people to let Hamas remain as their governing body, progressives become extremely hostile and insist that you’re evil for saying that citizens are responsible to some extent for the actions of their government.

It’s a moral failing for us to support a government which is funding Israel, but not a moral failing of Palestinians to support a government which is actively trying to genocide the Jewish people

“Silence is violence, except if you’re poor and brown skinned”

I don't think the two are equivalent.  Palestinians have not had the opportunity to vote Hamas out of power.

I don’t think that’s a valid excuse when your authoritarian regime is blatantly genocidal. If Trump suspended American democracy and blatantly tried to wipe Muslims off the face of the Earth, it would be the responsibility of every American citizen to, at the very least, undermine the actions of our government

I don’t disagree with you but for one, most Gazans are children and the rest live in abject poverty. They do not have the resources for resistance that you saw even in late 1900s South America.

Don’t forget that Netanyahu helped prop up Hamas for years and years hoping to divide Gaza from the West Bank and prevent the creation of Palestine so you’re not going up against Hamas, but a Hamas being supported by Israel

[Born to Slay. Forced to Work.]

I can't stress enough just how much >90% of employed people despise protests like this. The left has completely failed to appeal to working people and there seems to be no interest in fixing that.

gainfully employed people are the enemy, we support genocide by working for "the man" or something

It’s funny because when you say that it is a moral failing of the Palestinian people to let Hamas remain as their governing body, progressives become extremely hostile and insist that you’re evil for saying that citizens are responsible to some extent for the actions of their government.

It’s a moral failing for us to support a government which is funding Israel, but not a moral failing of Palestinians to support a government which is actively trying to genocide the Jewish people

“Silence is violence, except if you’re poor and brown skinned”

I don't think the two are equivalent.  Palestinians have not had the opportunity to vote Hamas out of power.

I don’t think that’s a valid excuse when your authoritarian regime is blatantly genocidal. If Trump suspended American democracy and blatantly tried to wipe Muslims off the face of the Earth, it would be the responsibility of every American citizen to, at the very least, undermine the actions of our government

Well yes I agree but it's a false equivalence to compare voting out the president to violent revolution to overthrow Hamas.

It really says something that nobody in Gaza is willing to cooperate with Israel for their own liberation though.  After the United States overthrew Saddam, there were plenty of Iraqis enthusiastic about cooperating with the United States to rebuild the country and be a part of its future.

The Israeli government under Netanyahu supported Hamas to prevent their liberation as it would mean a more united Palestine.

[Born to Slay. Forced to Work.]

How American to kick out people cause you don’t like what they’re saying