Editors at National Review Online assess efforts to end anti-Israel protests at a high-profile Ivy League school.
Things finally reached a breaking point on Columbia University’s campus late last week. There, the implicitly antisemitic protests that have disrupted America’s college campuses since the October 7 massacre evolved into something more explicit. At long last, Columbia’s administrators had enough.
The pushback appeared to shock the demonstrators who resolved to “occupy” portions of the Ivy League campus they had overwhelmed. New York City police entered the premises last Thursday, rolling up a makeshift tent city consisting of conspicuously pristine camping gear and arresting 113 keffiyeh-clad students for trespassing.
Since the 10/7 massacre, Columbia’s Jewish students have been forced to endure routine calls for their execution. It shouldn’t have taken the slaughter, rape, and brutalization of Israeli Jews to expose chants like “Globalize the intifada” and “Death to the Zionist state” as calls for violence, but the university refused to intervene on behalf of its besieged students. When an Israeli student was beaten with a stick outside Columbia’s library, it occasioned little soul-searching from faculty. Indeed, it served only as the impetus to establish an “Antisemitism Task Force,” which subsequently expressed “serious concerns” about the university’s commitment to enforcing its codes of conduct against antisemitic violators. But little was done. Indeed, as late as last month the school served as host to speakers who praised the 10/7 attacks and even “hijacking airplanes” as “important tactics that the Palestinian resistance have engaged in.”
The school’s lackadaisical approach created a permission structure to menace and harass Jewish students, and that’s what happened. On Saturday, students and anti-Israel New Yorkers alike converged on Columbia’s campus. There, they harangued and physically intimidated the Jewish student body. …
… At least some Democrats now appear increasingly unnerved by the spectacles they’re witnessing on America’s college campuses. “Silence is complicity,” read a rare statement of unequivocal condemnation of events at Columbia from President Biden.
