The Distortion of Campus Protests over Gaza - TomDispatch.com

The Distortion of Campus Protests over Gaza - TomDispatch.com " Helen Benedict, Students on the Right Side of History May 2, 2024 I live reasonably close to Columbia University. Over the years, on my daily walks, I've often wandered through the gates of its striking campus on 116th Street, crossing from Broadway to Amsterdam Avenue, passing students, admiring the enormous Low Library and the scene generally. About noon on a recent day (but before students there occupied Hamilton Hall and were violently cleared out of it by the police), with Columbia Professor Helen Benedict's piece in mind, I decided to walk to that now embroiled, embattled campus. Everything looked normal as I headed up Broadway until I hit 110th Street and noticed that there were police officers on every corner. As I went farther uptown, the sidewalk suddenly narrowed because part of each block now had metal police barricades with plastic white police tape on them, clearly meant to hold possible protesters outside the school later in the day. The smaller (but still huge) gate I often enter at 114th Street was bolted shut with a giant "kryptonite evolution" lock on it and a security guard standing behind it. I could at least peer in and see a few of the on-campus tents that Columbia students protesting the nightmare in Gaza were now living in. Another block up and it was just police, police, police, plus a few orthodox anti-Zionist Jews with strange protest signs and a man waving an Israeli flag and shouting at them. And then there were all the TV cameras waiting for something, anything, to happen. As I stood there, with police everywhere and not a demonstrating student in sight, I thought: how strange that all of this had happened on the very campus where, in 1968, amid the Vietnam War and after the killing of Martin Luther King, the cops had similarly been called in on demonstrators in a way that would prove historically memorable. Live and learn? Not a chance. The present Columbia president, Minouche Shafik, despite (as Benedict told me) the advice of her faculty, did it again and, in the process, not surprisingly created a nationwide movement against the nightmare in Gaza that's already spread to more than 40 campuses and is still growing. Sometimes, it seems as if no one ever learns anything. A striking but solitary protest over Gaza and then throw in the modern version of McCarthyite Republicans, a cowed university president, and the decision to call in the police on a peaceful set of demonstrators. The next thing you know, you have a national movement embroiling campus after campus. But let Benedict, author most recently of the novel The Good Deed, in her second TomDispatch piece, explain the madness of it all in a distinctly up close and personal fashion. Tom