Israel vs Hamas (3 Viewers)

Columbia vandalism:

Statement by Columbia University spokesperson:

"These were not peaceful protesters," Chang said. "I surveyed the damage myself, and as the president has indicated, severe damage was inflicted on that building."

University of Wisconsin-Madison - violence during arrests / resisting arrest

The majority of those arrested have been released with no citation issued, but four people have been booked, according to the university. The charges they are facing include attempted disarming a police officer, resisting arrest, attempted escape and battery to a police officer.

Four police officers were injured at the University of Wisconsin-Madison where police were dispersing an encampment of protesters on the Library Mall.

Three of the four officers sustained injuries "directly related to the physical resistance," according to the university. A state trooper sustained injuries when a protester allegedly "struck their head with a skateboard."

City College of New York, near Columbia:

The school described a "series of violent indents" that it said put public safety at risk over the last six days.

"This includes a fire Sunday night at the Marshak Science Building caused by use of a flare gun that brought FDNY to campus, clashes with public safety, an attempted break-in at Shepard Hall tonight, and a break-in at the Administration Building tonight that included the vandalizing of offices and smashing glass doors," the university said in a press release early Wednesday.

Cal Poly Humboldt

“Those arrested faced a range of different charges depending on individual circumstances including unlawful assembly, vandalism, conspiracy, assault of police officers, and others. In addition, students could face discipline for conduct violations while any University employees arrested could face disciplinary action," Cal Poly said in a statement.”

I have officially run out of time here. I’m just amazed at the glossing over being done in this thread of what is actually going on. And this is just using that ABC running update thread. There has been a change in tactics in these protests. They are being coached to not submit peacefully to arrests. I read a website by a pro-Palestinian organization that was linked in Twitter. It specifically includes instructions to not submit to arrest, how to break into and occupy buildings and so forth. I had hoped I had bookmarked it, but I did not. And since it was accessed through Twitter it’s not in my browser history. If any knows of a way for me to find it I will be happy to go get it.

Also, not included was the horrible attack on the protestors at UCLA. Police didn’t do their job there. There should be consequences for those people as well. Obviously.

There were also cases where police intervention was possibly heavy handed, and I didn’t include those either.

one of my main concerns is that I have read quotes from students who got caught up in this escalation. One had missed her final exam, and now won’t graduate. Others will face charges. Some university employees will be fired. These are idealistic kids who probably didn’t really intend to get into battles with police or counter protester goons.

These protests didn’t have to escalate like this, and to be clear there are plenty of places where they have not escalated. But there is some serious instigating going on in other places. And to turn a blind eye to what is happening doesn’t serve the cause and does harm to these kids.

So this happened at Ole Miss. My home state. Frat goon hecklers surround anti-genocide protesters, decked out in USA garb with some being racists, unsurprisingly:


Congressman praises heckling of war protesters, including 1 who made monkey gestures at Black woman

MT15 said:

one of my main concerns is that I have read quotes from students who got caught up in this escalation. One had missed her final exam, and now won’t graduate. Others will face charges. Some university employees will be fired. These are idealistic kids who probably didn’t really intend to get into battles with police or counter protester goons.

These protests didn’t have to escalate like this, and to be clear there are plenty of places where they have not escalated. But there is some serious instigating going on in other places. And to turn a blind eye to what is happening doesn’t serve the cause and does harm to these kids.

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Don't take this as a personal attack. It's really constructive criticism.

Do you not see the same similarity of attack between what you are demonstrating here and what the blm movement suffered?

Do you not remember that we had to cite the study that 93% of the protest were not violent? That the looting and vandalism, used to delegitimize them, were mostly not their fault? Again, you keep citing columbia, and yes, I agree. In that case they went too far. And we had reports at tuft that there were vandalism. You know what kind? Chalk on statues. The report said it was vandalism.

And I can't believe this. Does anyone else remember Paul's criticism of activist, college students, and social justice warriors? He said folks shouldn't try to change the world. That people shouldn't try to achieve excellence. When I read that, I had to snicker. These protestors are well aware of the consequences. That makes them more admirable. They are risking cushy jobs that their ivy league education offers.

My God. Look what these protestors are facing.

samiam5211 said:

Maybe the protestors should change the focus from Israel/Gaza to just general de-escalation. Ukraine, Gaza, China, we need protests to force us to solve these problems before these little fires lead to a big fire and we get into a world war, even if the outcome is less than any of us want.

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This is a really interesting angle. My first impression is that like the vietnam antiwar protest, the country wouldn't care about college kids no matter what the cause. That average americans won't have a connection to those who they view as elites. Ultimately, it will fail because of it.

But I did wonder what makes a successful protest. For me, protests are from those marginalized that are either lashing out without a purpose or reactionary with a determined set of goals. And to this point, the current protestors aren't actually marginalized or suffering. It's the gazans. Therefore, again, it's difficult for the average americans to empathize.

So I did a little digging, and came up with a few sources.

First, who goes:

We find that protestparticipants constitute a diverse set of individuals who are representative of the United Statespopulation and come from a variety of backgrounds. Decisions to attend protests appearto follow a deliberate and intentional thought process, as individuals are responsive to thecosts (e.g., COVID-19 risks) and benefits of participation, as measured by issue salience.

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Most strikingly, we find that many people go to different types of protests that dominant narratives pit against one another.

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Don't assume that if one who goes to one protest that it would automatically extrapolate towards a set of beliefs.

Individuals can simultaneously abhor excessive police violence and also worry that they will lose their jobs or childcare arrangement due to what they perceive to be overly stringent or long-enduring public health measures.

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Our findings also call into question the assumed homogeneity in political thought and action that are often used in media portrayals to characterize populations, especially economically disadvantaged populations. Such media portrayals are particularly harmful because they reify misleading stereotypes and warp public perceptions of population subgroup preferences, beliefs, and behaviors, which can impact broader political outcomes. Many examples of these misperceptions exist.

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Right? Don't assume that in the current case, that we only have students, and that they're the only ones who care about what's happening in Gaza.

For example, prior research suggests that although many people do support efforts to drastically reform policing and community safety, community members in highly policed, racially segregated areas do not unanimously support efforts to reduce police budgets (Parker and Hurst, 2021). In fact, some people support additional government funding to improve community outcomes along with maintaining an improved police presence when needed (see e.g., Go, 2021a,b). Media framing reinforcing policing and removal of police as a singular issue in these communities ignores important and often overlapping economic concerns that also need to be addressed to improve well-being. These are particularly insidious forms of political scapegoating that not only serve political agendas but also allow populations of higher socioeconomic status, often the consumers of news media (see e.g., Martin and Yurukoglu, 2017), to be blameless in the face of extreme inequality.

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And this supports my view that voting and getting folks out to vote is a more effective method:

While voting is most prominent and well-understood, protest is another. However, protesting tends to be seen as a representation of fringe or extreme views, out of step with a silent majority that does not participate in this form of civic engagement. This perception created by dominant narratives about these demonstrations undermines any urgency to take their views seriously.

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So now, what makes a successful protest?


1. Clear, concise unifying messaging. For BLM, it was successful in that we had convictions of the police officers. On the other hand, the more abstract messaging of social justice such as police brutality was more difficult to achieve.
2. Make the message as salient as possible.

For a protest to spur change, he finds, it has to become unignorable.

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3. Pivot from talk to action.

During the civil rights movement, Fisher reminds, people didn’t just show up for a march on Washington. They had specific plans of action to put political pressure on politicians to address their concerns. There were boycotts, “freedom rides,” acts of nonviolent resistance, walkouts, and more. Fisher also points to the anti-apartheid movement in the 1980s, where students pressured their universities to divest money from South African companies. Those were specific targets of the protest movement that were thought to move the needle.

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Here as I'm more aware of the protests, I believe the common action is to divest.
4. Protests can’t just be reactive. They need to be proactive.

Oliver notes that proactive protests — in which demonstrators are trying to prevent an action from happening — tend to be more effective than reactive protests, where people mobilize in response to an outrage.

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Right, the difference between lashing out to an injustice vs trying to solve.

Ultimately though, I believe the failure is that there isn't a clear leader or set of leaders.

What makes a demonstration successful?

One thing that I think everyone would agree on is that the young people who are sparking these protests have no single charismatic, supremely articulate leader. One of the consequences is they don’t control the messaging of it. I think that is one of the weaknesses of Black Lives Matter. There is no established leadership to articulate messages. What is the goal? Is it simply to express anger or is to achieve reform about police behavior? If it is to bring about reform, then what would that look like? It doesn’t have to be one charismatic spokesperson. It could be many leaders, but there needs to be people saying, ‘This is what we want’ and clearly articulating that. That’s just not happening now with any consistency.

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And we find this with the Iranian women's movement. There isn't a clear leader. On the one hand, it's more difficult to suppress. On the other, there isn't a coalescing glue. For example, during the soviet coup, Yeltsin was the leader that was ever present stating a clear message. The maidan had a set of leaders like that Kyiv mayor.

meanwhile

UriUT said:

Do you not remember that we had to cite the study that 93% of the protest were not violent?

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Speaking of that, there are similar studies being done here as well:


"While some notable violent clashes have recently taken place, such as on the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) campus, where demonstrators and counter-demonstrators fought at a student encampment overnight on 30 April, the overwhelming majority of student protests since October — 99% — have remained peaceful."

Heathen said:

So this happened at Ole Miss. My home state. Frat goon hecklers surround anti-genocide protesters, decked out in USA garb with some being racists, unsurprisingly:


Congressman praises heckling of war protesters, including 1 who made monkey gestures at Black woman

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Republican Gov. Tate Reeves reposted a video on X that showed counter-protesters on the campus singing “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

“Warms my heart,” Reeves wrote. “I love Mississippi!”

Straight out of Nuremberg. Reeves is a piece of work for those not familiar

faceman said:

Republican Gov. Tate Reeves reposted a video on X that showed counter-protesters on the campus singing “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

“Warms my heart,” Reeves wrote. “I love Mississippi!”

Straight out of Nuremberg. Reeves is a piece of work for those not familiar

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His heart is warmed by proud ignorance

Sums up a lot of the views there.

SaintForLife said:

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Dr. Phil for a debrief???

UriUT said:

Do you not see the same similarity of attack between what you are demonstrating here and what the blm movement suffered?

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I know you see what I am saying as an “attack” on these protests. It isn’t. I am clearly not communicating what I want to communicate here.

I am going to bow out of this thread, with this final thought. There are certainly forces at work here that are not on the up and up. Just as we chastise MAGA for being in their bubble, and not seeing the whole picture, I see that happening here. When you take every anti-Israel news item at face value, no matter the source, and excuse every troubling bit of news from the Palestinian side of the conflict, well, it’s the same sort of bias.

This issue isn’t BLM all over again. It’s just not. There aren’t any good sides to this conflict. If you think there’s a ‘good’ side and an ‘evil’ side, you aren’t seeing clearly. The entire thing makes me sad.

Edit to add - this thread sums up my feelings pretty well. Only posting the first tweet.

So, it seems like putting a tent up will get you arrested?
I'm sure some other excuse would be made.
Also, does anyone think getting arrested is an attempt to suppress free speech?
Where might a person be able to safely protest w/o the threats of getting arrested? I guess where might there be some neutral ground?

Twenty-five people were arrested Saturday for trespassing at the University of Virginia after police clashed with pro-Palestinian protesters who refused to remove tents from campus, and demonstrators at the University of Michigan chanted anti-war messages and waved flags during commencement ceremonies.

I guess this answers some of it. I'll post some of the topic headers below
- The First Amendment doesn’t automatically apply at private schools
- ‘Time, place and manner’ is a crucial standard
- Another important test is ‘imminent lawless action.’
- Are encampments covered by the First Amendment?
- Can universities change policies?