This should be easy. Expel them all. Kick them off campus. They can protest on someone else’s time and property.
Student negotiators representing the Columbia encampment said that after meetings Thursday and Friday, the university hadn’t met their primary demand for divestment, although they had made progress on a push for more transparent financial disclosures.
“We will not rest until Columbia divests,” said Jonathan Ben-Menachem, a fourth-year doctoral student.
Columbia officials had earlier said that negotiations were showing progress, although a heavy police and security presence remained around the campus.
“We have our demands; they have theirs,” said Ben Chang, a spokesperson for Columbia University, adding that if the talks fail the university will have to consider other options.
If they are antisemitism, then you must be racist against Palestine and Muslims? This is how that works, right? Rather than address the concerns just blanket your opposition with negative labels.
Have to agree with JV here (!!!)…….(Mark the Tape, Bo!!)
The definition of “anti-Semitism” includes anything that Certain People don’t want said out loud. Which reminds me: Gov. Abbott should be forced into a 90-day course on the First Amendment to the US Constitution.
Violence? Yep. Toss ’em out of college.
Bad Think?
We all know where that goes.
UGGGH! Arrest these leftist insurrectionists already!
>If they are antisemitism, then you must be racist against Palestine and Muslims?
I don’t agree, actually. Was the world racist against Nazis for trying to genocide Jews in WWII or could one be against the violence perpetrated by them without being racist? So there are no victims in racism, it is just everyone hating everyone. Hmmm. By JVs standard, blacks are clearly racist against whites as well as other blacks, right? There are no victims JV, just racists? Kind of invalidates the entire Dem platform doesn’t it?
Or are we having our cake and eating it too, again?
One side kidnaps and kills women and children as a primary target while the other side attacks the enemy forces with civilian losses being primarily a result of the other side (Hamas) using them as shields. No, I think there is a gulf between the sides there where one side works for genocide while the other works to secure their borders from terrorists. Personally, I think there is room to hate the Hamas acts of violence and terrorism without it being racist while there is little room for supporting a genocide campaign without being racist.
The fact that JV brings that up as a ‘valid’ argument just means that he uses the liberal definition of racism which clearly is: If you are a liberal you are by definition not a racist while everyone else is racist. The fact that he can try to defend the liberal support of Hamas with a straight face is pretty strong support for my opinion.
If Hamas and their supporters who want to kill all the Jews in the world are racist, then we are all racists. Just, wow…liberal intelligentsia brilliance at its clearest.
T, the fact that you think this all “started” with Hamas attacking is foolish. Go back to 2019 and the snipers shooting at unarmed protesters at the Gaza border. And I am sure you can go back before that and find something Palestine is guilty of. This goes back hundreds of years.
And saying that the civilian deaths are “primarily a result of the other side…”, have you seen the early reports about the mass graves with zip tied dead? Mass graves with women and children? If true and the IDF are responsible, the IDF is out there committing war crimes and atrocities and makes them NO BETTER than Hamas. I try to take all news accounts with a grain of salt, especially in war zones. But it is being reported in multiple places. Or how about when the IDF drone attacked innocent workers “by mistake”. Or when they bombed unarmed teens walking back to their destroyed homes. They are killing indiscriminately.
Israel has almost all the power here. Being anti-Israel government isn’t antisemitic. They need to be held to a higher standard if we are supporting them. And how close are we to “eliminating Hamas”? When will we know? What are the criteria? How many hostages have we rescued with all the destruction? My guess is they have killed more than they have saved. All Israel is doing right now is creating the next generation of enemies to them and their culture. There is no longer a “good guy” and “bad guy”, everyone has lost the moral high ground. But, I do see one side saying that it is worth “x amount” of civilians for every POTENTIAL Hamas.
But going back to the original point. Owen lying and calling them all antisemitic. He knows that isn’t the case, but would rather label them with an easy to hate moniker than actually address the real situation. College campuses have LONG history of anti-government & anti-war protesting (most of which look good from a historical POV now). And I don’t agree that anyone should block the functioning of the university for students who want to continue their education, but if they are not doing that… I don’t care if they protest.
>T, the fact that you think this all “started”
Hmm, did I not say ‘current’? Sorry, you can read and write so I ASSumed you would consider the conversation about the current crisis. Or I could say: “The fact that you think this all started only hundreds of years ago is foolish…well I would have used the word ‘ignorant’, but I was copying you.
This goes back thousands of years, but there has never been an independent country or kingdom of Palestine. The Kingdoms of Judah and Israel were the last independent nations on the geographical site and when the Romans took those kingdoms and then put down the Jewish rebellions the Romans renamed the area Syria Palestine and kicked most of the Jews out of the region right around 2000 years ago. There were no “Palestinians” back then, but the people that did move in under the Roman and later Ottoman Empires (not many Ottomans) were a mish-mash of many peoples including Jews. They did not have power, the Ottoman Empire controlled it and taxed it heavily for centuries. Giving the country back to the Jewish people after WWII (the last people to govern it locally) made sense on many levels in my opinion and I can go over more of them if you like.
Every incident that has happened since 1948 could be blamed on earlier incidences and if Libs are stuck on that train I’ll give you a hint about the destination, there is none. If you would like to debate the primary historical reasons for the conflict from a deep historical perspective we can do that too, but guess where it starts? The first step on that path begins with the Romans taking the area from the Jews, and the Jews started a revolution to gain back their land and freedom, something most Americans throughout our history would cheer for…until the modern liberal. There were probably many riots in support of it at the Universities then too. “Free Israel” and the like. For it they were defeated and over the next 50 years driven from THEIR land. And to stop all of the genocide attempts, pogroms and the like, we gave it back to them about 2000 years later. And at an estimated cost of 6 million lives to German butchery (not to mention the millions lost to the Russian pogroms), I still say they deserved it. Then interlopers on their historical land resisted the gift and received aid primarily in the form of war materiel from their Muslim neighbors. The Muslim nations hate the Jewish people and used the remaining Muslims(Palestinians if you like) shamelessly to harm or kill as many Jews as possible. This is clearly shown in the lack of any help the Muslim world gives to the ‘Palestinians’ besides more bombs. They have closed their borders (at least someone can) to Palestinian refugees and the western world are the only ones actually sending non-military aid that I have heard.
Current crisis cause? The attack that killed and/or kidnapped an estimated 1200 Jewish civilians on 10/7/23. Sorry, but if any other country surprise attacked and killed 1200 Americans on American soil, our response would normally have been much greater, who knows what Joe would have done, though…
Now if your best argument is that now or in the past the Jewish reprisal was as bad, so they are as morally bankrupt as the murdering rapists known as Hamas, you go with it, man. I think I will stick to disagreeing. There are always many very sad stories in war, and people who pretend to see both sides, but most really only focus on reported atrocities caused by one side or naively conflate the sides because of battle choices, and will have their opinion set for them by that news. You always talk about how you listen to and read about both sides of any argument, but your words continually prove you only listen to one side. It seems to me that if liberals are right on every level of every argument they would have much healthier margins of victory in US elections, especially since liberalism is the only side taught in schools today. I find sympathy with many liberal positions, I have seen you show support for no conservative ones. Which am I missing?
You seem to have no idea that Hamas uses its citizens as shields to protect their materiel and human assets (and to kill their soldiers Israel will have to crash through some of those civilian shields to get to them) and there will be many photos of that situation taken. You seem to have no idea that Hamas killed or captured around 1200 civilians in a surprise guerilla attack during a supposed peace or ceasefire (I don’t remember what they called the last one at the time). Or worse yet, you do know about it, but think that was both not a reason for reprisals against the militant arm of Palestine and that any retaliation makes the original victims as bad as the perpetrators of murder, kidnapping and rape.
>But going back to the original point. Owen lying and calling them all antisemitic. He knows that isn’t the case
Of course you are right there, he should have said hopelessly ignorant and naive. Most of them probably don’t even know what the word means and couldn’t be bothered to look it up before they rushed off to skip class and disrupt other people’s lives in the unknowing name of murdering kidnapping rapists. Sorry dude, but there is a bad guy in this scenario and ridiculously comparing them as the same is either hopelessly naive, heavily programmed and/or shameful. But I already know, liberals never feel shame so that debate too would go nowhere.
Hamas does use civilians as shields. That doesn’t give anyone the right to kill the civilians in order to kill Hamas. You still have a choice. And while Hamas ARE the bad guys, like I said… Israel has lost the “good guy” moniker by killing those civilians as a means to an end.
I don’t have an issue with Israel retaliating against Hamas for their barbaric actions. But it is HOW you retaliate. If someone killed a family member of yours, do you think it would be appropriate to wipe out the entire block full of people in order to make sure you got retaliation and revenge? Because that is what Israel is doing. They are no longer the sympathetic victim, and I think you see that all over these days. In fact to the point where I think it may actually cost Biden the election in Nov.
Once the diplomacy fails and the fighting starts, Hollywood pew-pew doesn’t apply to the real world. When you get it right people die. When you get it wrong more people die. Urban combat is about as ugly as it gets.
Hamas not only uses civilians as human shields, but they also use women and children as direct combatants. Combatants intentionally indistinguishable from the general populace. No flags, no uniforms, no rules. It is incredibly naive to think that Hamas’ actions are not dictating Israel’s rules of engagement.
The last “good” known stats (grain of salt coming out of a warzone) is that over 34,000 dead. 70% women and children. Nothing like this in recent history.
And if reports are to be believed from The Guardian, they are using AI to gather a list of possible Hamas targets (with 90% accuracy?) and there is some sort of civilian to soldier ratio that they are “ok” with. Gross. War is gross. But indiscriminate killing is still murder. Wiping out every hospital & school isn’t tactical, it is revenge.
From The Guardian article…
‘It’s much easier to bomb a family’s home’
The testimonies published by +972 and Local Call may explain how such a western military with such advanced capabilities, with weapons that can conduct highly surgical strikes, has conducted a war with such a vast human toll.
When it came to targeting low-ranking Hamas and PIJ suspects, they said, the preference was to attack when they were believed to be at home. “We were not interested in killing [Hamas] operatives only when they were in a military building or engaged in a military activity,” one said. “It’s much easier to bomb a family’s home. The system is built to look for them in these situations.”
As I said, you LOSE the moral high ground when you are wiping out entire families because it is “easier”. Forever we have known that bad guys don’t play by the rules, and it is harder to be the good guy. Israel stopped being the good guy and people EVERYWHERE around the world are seeing that. Much like the US, even in the country of Israel itself there are protests against what the gov’t is doing.
In a world where everyone has a camera and everyone can be a journalist, you need to fight your battle not only on the field, but in the public eye. It sure looks like Israel is losing that side of the battle.
-In a world where everyone has a camera and everyone can be a journalist, you need to fight your battle not only on the field, but in the public eye.
Having a camera by no means makes you a journalist. You can show me anything you want me to see and supply your favorite event narrative right along with it. Get AP or any of the other cheap and lazy wire services to distribute it and you have an instantly credible propaganda bonanza going for you. Perception is shaped by who gets a voice and who doesn’t, by what you’re shown you and what you aren’t. As always, sensationalism sells. The higher the stakes, the greater the shaping. This is nothing new.
Merlin, that is just it. We have an entire new generation of citizen journalists now that do not work for anyone other than themselves. They are distributing their media via every social network. Yes, these are journalists whether you want to take them seriously or not. You no longer have to work for Fox News to be considered a journalist. (Fox journalists are great by the way.) Many of the old gatekeepers are no longer in charge. Everybody has a voice now, you just need to know where to look for it.
And there you have it. Israel is not the white knight, today nobody is. And the world can be manipulated by anyone with a camera, but who is there taking the pictures, the average American tourist or a shitload of Hamas people and their supporters? We will continue to disagree on whether there is an acceptable number of potential non-combatants.
As Merlin said, Hamas uses women and children as soldiers so every dead woman and child is a victim to one who believes as you do, while I, like Merlin will continue to believe that a significant number of those dead were active participants. In addition, another significant number (majority?) of those dead shield victims knew what they were doing and were okay with shielding them.
If your (or most standard liberals) answer to terrorism is to ignore it because the perpetrators hide among largely sympathetic ‘civilians’, I pity the day it ever comes to your town, and I doubt you will feel the same if the Government just said ‘live with the killings, kidnappings and rapes’. So your wife was kidnapped and then shown on Youtube being raped and then beheaded, your answer is to forgive and forget. Hmmph, okay. However, I know dozens of issues, instances, etc. how liberals are the most hypocritical people (even ahead of most religious fanatics) out there and shit happening to others is way different than if they are happening to them.
T you are right that the world can be manipulated by any individuals. But, there ARE other journalists there, not just Palestinians and their supporters.
With 30K+ dead, 70% women and children (12,000 children), you are burying your head in the sand if you think a significant portion were Hamas. You may not agree, but I think you are putting your head in the sand and justifying the murder of civilians because they lived under a terrorist regime. Hindsight will most likely not look kindly on this.
No where did I say forgive and forget. But if something like that were to happen to my family, I wouldn’t murder an entire person’t family seeking revenge just to make sure that the person was punished. And Terrorism should be rooted out and dealt with. But as I said, it can’t be done the way Israel is handling it. Not only are they murdering civilians at an unheard of rate. But in doing so are just creating the next generation of probablye terrorists. I don’t know if I would call this a genocide, some are, but I do feel that the Israeli gov’t really doesn’t seem to care about civilian casualties in the slightest.
I know hypocritical conservatives as well. All that says is that people can be hypocrites. No more one side or the other.
SON OF A BITCH!!! This is the third time in a week where i had a longer response not publish for one reason or another.
Very short version of the response: Journalists and their editors have an agenda they follow. The same picture of a dozen dead women and children and 0-3 Israeli soldiers may have been interpreted as a child/woman suicide bombing or senseless Israeli slaughter, that is quite a difference.
I am not putting my head in the sand. As a lifelong student of war (the primary reason for my History major) I know that a professional military fighting an amoral guerilla foe looks exactly like this.
If a terrorist group hides and lives among civilians there is no way to fight them without relatively heavy loss of civilian life. WWI started with the death of one person with military value. The intentional deaths/kidnappings/rapes/torture of 1200 innocent civilian people of a single ethnic group targeted by another seems like a valid excuse to go to war and should be pretty heavily supported by the world public, imo.
>And Terrorism should be rooted out and dealt with
Please expound on a way to do this without civilian losses. I would be very interested for my own education.
>I know hypocritical conservatives as well. All that says is that people can be hypocrites. No more one side or the other.
Of course we all do, I mentioned a significant group in an earlier comment. But no more one side or the other? Not even close. Dems consistently have a much more uniform belief (and usually identical arguments) as a group on virtually every election level issue, even to supporting terrorists so on an occasion when a lib position is hypocritical you are virtually all being hypocritical. Conservatives have much wider beliefs on many different issues some of which will be hypocritical and some maybe not. This gives Dems better electability, good for them, but it also leads to heavier corruption (and hypocritical opinion) when the populace is lead around by the nose by Government.
First… every long post on this site I copy before posting… had that happen to me as well.
There is no way to eliminate all civilian deaths. Never said there was. But this is on a level we haven’t seen in recent history.
>There is no way to eliminate all civilian deaths. Never said there was.
There is an easy way to vastly limit civilian population deaths, though, but it is in the Hamas strategy that civilians die en masse. If you don’t think they are counting on tens or even hundreds of thousands of Palestinian civilians dying specifically because of Hamas tactics, you have crawled into your lib hidey hole and are refusing to face real facts again. I think Dems redefine things and libs just sit back and agree with whatever comes out, whether it has any claim in reality or not.
2 professional militaries create less civilian casualties unless it is part of the home side strategy to use their own people as shields. Only one professional military has to go find the enemy before engaging. The Guerilla Afghanis hid in all the caves and bunkers built in its country and the almost constant war in their country has caused a relatively low civilian body count because of it. You have to fight wars on the home side’s terms. Hamas wants a lot of casualties to gain support for their Israeli genocide manifesto and you buy what the terrorists are selling without independent thought, in my opinion.
>But this is on a level we haven’t seen in recent history.
That is because most guerilla wars are not called wars, but something nicer like minor conflict, police action, petty war or limited war. When you have 2 armies, neither side wants to fight in the middle of civilians. One side wants to preserve and protect its people while the other wants to avoid the negative world-wide press that comes from ‘civilian massacres’. The Ukraine still has a regular military, but if they went into the homes of nearby civilians to hide in and fight from, Russia would not and has not hesitated to attack areas where soldiers are found regardless of potential civilian casualties.
Again, when one side is a regular military and the other is a guerilla force that attacks out of and hides in urban areas among their own people the guerillas are at least equally responsible for civilian losses. Hamas doesn’t hide their guns and barracks inside hospitals, schools and residences because they are the best hiding places, they do it so that if/when civilians die they can try to spotlight how the professional military is ‘doing bad things’. Israel’s answering strategy has to either include attacking Hamas among the civilian population or let Hamas get away with everything they do. When there have been Hamas targets away from civilians, no civilians were killed. If Ukraine had employed guerilla tactics against the Russian military there would have been hundreds of thousands more Ukrainian civilians butchered by now.
It is all in the manner in which both sides fight and actions have consequences. If you are willing to hide in your parents house and shoot out their windows, you can expect non-combatant members of your family to die. Pretty basic, really.