Camera-Ready Victims of “State Violence”
If not 1968, then, argues Daniel Henninger in the WSJ, it’s “even more like 2020, when George Floyd protests spread almost instantaneously to hundreds of U.S. cities. “The so-called Gaza solidarity encampments sprouted on many campuses isn’t spontaneous. This is modern protest as produced by the cookie cutter of social media” (Instagram).
Give the Authorities No Choice
Last Tuesday, a group named the Columbia University Apartheid Divest posted on Instagram a call for an “urgent mobilization” at Hamilton Hall, recalls Mr. Henninger.
Earlier, the group said: “We will not move until Columbia meets our demands or we are moved by force.”
This was effectively a mini-Hamas strategy—give the authorities no choice but to come after you. It’s the most basic flip-the-script tactic: The perpetrators of mayhem transform themselves into camera-ready victims of “state violence.”
Who Wouldn’t Worry
There is good news. Mr. Henninger expects the FBI and Department of Homeland Security will have this Palestine-justice activity on its radar.
Why wait for another domestic act of terror to happen?
The encampments’ defenders will say that is an overreaction, that despite the violence at Columbia and UCLA, their protests are only about conditions in Gaza.
The fact remains that Gaza is inseparable from Hamas and Iran, two entities in a network dedicated to attacking the U.S. Add to that the revived terrorism units of Islamic State.
All of a sudden, we have pro-Palestinian encampments spread across a country with a porous, overwhelmed southern border. Not to worry?
What’s the Goal?
Bland statements from pro-Gaza protesters emphasize the easing of the misery of Palestinian women and children, which sounds “rote, almost scripted.”
A conscious strategy from protesters is to “establish an equivalence of sincerity—a facade of empathy is always mandatory now—between the pro-Palestinian students and the Jewish students resisting antisemitism on these campuses,” with the goal of generating interviews, surmises Mr. Henninger.
Declarations of humanitarian concern – an equivalence of sincerity between them and Jewish students – will come to dominate the media narrative.
The students’ naiveté and willful “river to the sea” ignorance about the realities of the Middle East peace process is the benign explanation. More cynical is what has emerged the past week as the activists’ primary interest: forcing university endowments to divest from Israeli companies.
Israelis Shunned in Academia
When people say antisemitism has been building in universities for years, this is what they are talking about. BDS (boycott, divest, sanctions) made Israelis shunned, second-class citizens of the academic community.
The President’s Political Calculation
Then there’s Joe Biden. Because his re-election team assumes an equivalence between younger Democratic voters and the Gaza encampment occupants, the American president has himself become a hostage to the hardest of the U.S. hard left.
(Joe Biden) won’t cross them, and they know it.
