Nobody is going to believe us
Nobody is going to believe us
Cynical politicians and cringe fabulists put Jewish people at risk
Welcome to a Monday evening edition of Progress Report.
I was all set to send a newsletter about the latest in Arizona’s battle over abortion, including how the GOP is trying to fool the public and curtail democracy in order to maintain a strict ban now in place.
Then I got sidetracked by the chaos unfolding uptown, which becomes more absurd by the minute. That is the focus of tonight’s newsletter, while Arizona is queued up for publication tomorrow. It’s been a long night!
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I had a lot of fun during my four years as an undergraduate at Syracuse University, which felt mostly like a hermetically sealed bubble of self-discovery and liquor-infused absurdity that in hindsight bore little resemblance to the real world. It was always a bit weird to see news crews, older alumni, or local fans of the basketball team wandering around the quad, and now that I’m a fully grown adult living in reality, it seems even creepier to me.
College students have always made good foils for conservative elites because they are as earnest and committed to their beliefs as most politicians and pundits are cynical and calculating. When students began protesting the Israeli war on Gaza, they became prime targets for this crowd, who succeed in using them to distract from the atrocities that have been rained down mercilessly on innocent Palestinians.
Now that Israel’s genocide has become so overwhelming that even the White House has tsk-tsked it, a new and even more embarrassing effort to scapegoat campus protestors has suddenly bloomed.
Over the past four or five days, peaceful protests at Columbia University, many of which were organized by Jewish students, have been seized upon by a group of truly deranged propagandists, self-righteous weenies, and political opportunists. They have depicted the protestors’ tents on the quad as a terrorist compound, spread disinformation about campus events, and posted videos of themselves walking across the manicured green toward student housing and dining halls as if navigating an active war zone. I’d laugh at them, but having been raised Jewish myself, they mostly just make me feel embarrassment.
Unfortunately, these people tend to have large platforms, and they’ve enjoyed further amplification from prominent pro-Israel diehards and politicians who revel in attacking higher education. Last fall’s Congressional inquisition into student protests should have taught university administrators that so much of the criticism was bad-faith nonsense, but somehow the opposite seems to have occurred. More than 100 students were arrested on Thursday, which in turn encouraged the hysterics of people like Shai Davidai, an assistant professor at Columbia who has quickly become the manic face of the anti-protestor movement.
Whether performative or the result of a sociopath’s clean break with reality, he has produced some of the most demented posts and discordant videos I have ever seen, which is saying a lot given all the years I spent covering Hollywood and attending fan conventions like Comic-Con.
The clip below is what Davidai called “Brainwashed Hitler Youth.”
Earlier today, Davidai claimed that his campus badge had been deactivated because Columbia couldn’t guarantee his safety — in reality, the school had to take measures to keep him and the angry mob he was leading away from campus. But Davidai, more interested in playing the victim, still had the audacity to compare the moment to 1938, when Kristallnacht a new phase of what would ultimately become the Holocaust.
That vile and unspeakably stupid comparison has invited opportunistic support from Christian nationalists like Sen. Tom Cotton, who said the campus protests were “pogroms,” a term that is most frequently used to describe the tradition of ransacking Jewish communities throughout European history.
Rep. Josh Gottheimer, who has built a reputation as an unrepentant Islamophobe, visited campus on Monday with Rep. Jared Moskowitz, each claiming that they were there to “protect” Jewish students, even after the president of the campus Hillel group tried to dispel the notion that they were in peril.
It is uncomfortable to have your classmates so vehemently and vocally oppose the actions of a state that you have been raised to believe is the morally righteous guardian of your people. But there is a big difference between being uncomfortable and being in actual danger, especially when the discomfort stems from a refusal to acknowledge mass ethnic cleansing.
Instead, it’s the antics of crazed hardliners like Davidai and posturing of desperate, camera-seeking politicians and media figures that are actually putting Jewish people in danger.
There is no shortage of real antisemites in this world, and they have been increasingly brazen about gathering in public and revealing their identities, even when they’re members of Congress. It’s only a small leap from assembling around swastikas on highway overpasses and strip mall parking lots to shooting up synagogues, so it requires a broad public vigilance to prevent such atrocities.
Keeping a close watch is impossible when people start rolling their eyes at accusations of antisemitism, which is bound to start happening if Hitler continues to be invoked every time a student disagrees with Israeli policy. Soon enough, nobody is going to believe us at all, because when everything is antisemitic, the term loses its meaning.
There are no doubt some students on the campus of Columbia University are ignorant to the history of the long-running Middle Eastern conflict and prone to stepping over the line. Some students may even be assholes, judging by what they’ve reportedly said to counter-protestors who have gotten in their faces.
But for the most part, any truly vile comments have come from outsiders beyond campus gates, from people with no connection to the school, there in response to the university’s heavy-handed response. This inconvenient truth has been reported by network news and reporters for Columbia’s prestigious student newspaper.
“I didn’t see a single instance of violence or aggression on the lawn or at the student encampment,” Antonia Hylton, a reporter for NBC News, said in a Twitter thread posted on Sunday. “The student-led protest was peaceful and often very quiet… The students I met were mostly praying, eating, holding signs. Other students walked by the encampment throughout the afternoon. Never saw anyone bother or harass them.
“The only moments of conflict or aggression I witnessed took place beyond the gates, out on Broadway Ave,” Hylton added. “I repeatedly approached people in that crowd. Every single person I approached told me they were NOT a Columbia or Barnard student. None of them had badges to get on campus.”
Days later, the same point was echoed by the reporters who were allowed to remain on campus.
“It's sort of hard to make that distinction sometimes super clear where these are the protesters who are off campus and might be coming from around the city versus the students who are on campus,” Esha Karam, the managing editor of The Spectator, told The Daily Beast. “We have seen many arrests off-campus since Thursday, but we have not seen any arrests on campus since Thursday. So the distinction is hard to make sometimes, and I think what can be lost is sort of that nuance.”
Nuance isn’t really a core concern for the people who have been hysterically comparing students to Nazis, because any discrediting of their claims would return public focus to the actual crimes being perpetrated in Gaza. That would also perhaps finally force them to confront their support for six months of merciless maiming and killing done in service of a corrupt prime minister’s desperate attempt to avoid prison.
Late this afternoon, hundreds of faculty members walked out of classroom and onto the quad to show solidarity with the protesting students who have been suspended, arrested, and smeared. Professors at NYU were themselves arrested today for standing beside students who are now protesting at the school’s downtown campus. Arrests were also made at a Yale encampment, further stoking a movement that cannot be shouted down by dishonest, self-interested pundits and politicians who vote to finance mass murder.
These egomaniacs have failed to protect Jewish people, but they did succeed in obscuring the news that Palestinians discovered a mass grave at the Khan Younis hospital in Gaza with nearly 200 corpses, including the bodies of children whose hands were tied behind their backs.
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It’s saddening and maddening .
Jordan, I generally agree with what you've written, but in one place your history is wrong. Pogroms were initiated in Russia in the 1880s by the czarist regime (and there was a history of pogrom-like violence against Jews in Eastern Europe long before that). The Bolsheviks were in general LESS antisemetic than the previous government. See the Wikipedia entry for "pogrom". The Soviet Union remained relatively tolerant of Jews until the purges of the late 1930s. In fact, Stalin established a Jewish homeland in Birobidzhan, in far eastern Russia, in the early 30s. My father, an idealistic Jewish socialist, was one of many US and Canadian Jews who went there to settle. (I'm glad that didn't work out!)