Columbia University’s Misguided Youth

Columbia University’s Misguided Youth
Students and pro-Palestinian activists face police as they gather outside of Columbia University to protest the university's stance on Israel, in New York City on April 18, 2024. Spencer Platt/Getty Images
Anders Corr
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Commentary
The rowdy “pro-Palestine” protests on April 18 at the prestigious Columbia University have created international news.
Students are willing to sacrifice their freedom, through getting arrested, and academics, through suspensions, for something they—and many liberals of all stripes—believe passionately and sincerely. That they are ultimately misguided does not mean that they have no good points, the most important being that there are too many civilian casualties in Gaza. As long as bombs kill civilians anywhere in the world, there will rightly be protests. Every such death is a tragedy for a person, a family, and ultimately all of us.
However, this in no way justifies violent and anti-Semitic rhetoric, along with scofflaw protests that attract abusive outsiders and make other students on campus feel physically unsafe. Some protesters in and around the university yelled, “Long live the intifada,” “From the river to the sea,” “Revolution until victory,” and “By any means necessary.” All of these are unacceptable, given the millions who have died under such banners.
A video of the protests, and 113 associated arrests, mostly for breaking university rules, show that protesters apparently broke the law by pitching tents on April 17 and refusing to leave when asked by the university. After the arrests, according to The Nation, hundreds of additional “enraged students and spectators … hopped the fence around the West Butler lawn to resume the occupation.”

The mainstream media on both sides tend to cover the protests in a way that serves a selection of the facts that yields confirmation bias among their watchers. While much of the mainstream media portray the protests as Muslim versus Jewish students, this is not the case. There are Jews and Muslims on both sides of the issue, which the protesters are the first to point out.

So what really divides the protesters from the counterprotesters? Ultimately, it is support, or not, for the right of the State of Israel to exist as a Jewish state. Given the ongoing war against Israel by Iran and its proxies, the refusal of Hamas to release hostages, which should be a precondition for talks, the protesters’ demand for a ceasefire and divestment from Israel despite historical anti-Jewish attacks, and Israel being the only Jewish state in the world, the protesters are really serving the aims of Iran, Hamas, and cultural conformity, not of peace and diversity.

To allow these anti-Semitic actors to do ongoing violence against Israel and then to say that Israel cannot defend itself by attempting to return the hostages, including through force, is to deny the right of Israel’s self-defense, which, given the constant drum of anti-Semitic violence in history right up to the present, is its right to exist. To deny the only Jewish state in the world its right to exist is ultimately anti-Semitic. That some misguided Jewish students do so at Columbia University only means that internalized anti-Semitism exists in the highest ranks of higher education.

Many “pro-Palestine” protesters wrongly believe that Israel is a “settler colonial state” because they do not understand the history of discrimination against Jewish people in the region, for example, while under Ottoman rule or during the anti-Jewish riots of May 1, 1921, under British rule that started the most recent, from a historical perspective, spiral of violence.

Palestinians and Arab states surrounding Israel rejected the United Nations partition of 1947 and chose the path of violence instead. This led to Israel’s 1948 independence and its war of self-defense, known as its war of independence against Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria. Up to 700,000 Palestinians fled Israel in the process, which they call the “Nakba.” Protesters tend to focus on the Nakba as the cause of the current conflict, but this is a selective use of history to prove their point, not an unbiased understanding of the source of the conflict, which is regional antisemitism that extends almost uninterrupted to as far back as the Roman era.

Calling Israel’s self-defense from Oct. 7, 2023, and other such repeated attacks over the years a “genocide” is backward. Iran and its proxies are targeting Jewish civilians directly with weapons meant to kill. Israel’s defensive response is to target Iranian military, proxy, and terrorist elements. Yes, there are too many civilian casualties caused by the more technologically sophisticated Israeli weapons. However, Israel would not exist without these weapons, used almost exclusively in self-defense.

The number of mortalities supplied by Hamas’s “health ministry” is unreliable and, in any case, not equivalent to genocide, which, according to the U.N. definition, requires intent on the part of a state to destroy an entire people. This is what Iran and its proxies are doing and what protesters ignorantly support when they carry signs such as “from the river to the sea.”

Columbia University recently liberalized regulations to accommodate the protests. But protesters took this inch and demanded a mile. The Manhattan campus is small, so pitching 55 tents at a central location precludes other uses, including, for example, protests by those with alternate views. There is a video of what appears to be protester guards denying Fox News reporters access to the area, for example.

A few hundred misguided protesters should not impede the freedom of the press, cause the blocking of traffic on the public streets of New York City, or be able to unilaterally determine university policy on such an important issue as the Israel–Palestinian conflict. There are other opinions that deserve to be heard, and this is exactly what the Columbia University administration is attempting to ensure.

The arrests were the right choice for Columbia and higher education as a whole. They were pro-free speech, not the other way around. Let’s hope they were enough to bring the students to their senses and back to their books, where they clearly belong.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
Anders Corr
Anders Corr
Author
Anders Corr has a bachelor's/master's in political science from Yale University (2001) and a doctorate in government from Harvard University (2008). He is a principal at Corr Analytics Inc., publisher of the Journal of Political Risk, and has conducted extensive research in North America, Europe, and Asia. His latest books are “The Concentration of Power: Institutionalization, Hierarchy, and Hegemony” (2021) and “Great Powers, Grand Strategies: the New Game in the South China Sea" (2018).
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