By: Jessica Schwalb – nationalreview.com – May 16, 2024

The main thing I’ve learned from the events of the past month is that the protest mindset disinclines students to learn from one another. 

A black mask and the hood of a Choate sweatshirt helped conceal her identity. But her eyes were familiar.

 “You don’t need to do this,” I said to my old friend, her arms chain-locked with about 20 others barricading the entrance to Columbia University’s Hamilton Hall. “Go away,” she responded.

When our final stare ended, I knew our bond had been severed.

We met volunteering back in October. Together, we held study halls with inmates at Rikers Island for a class in Music Humanities. I remember feeling an immediate connection between us.

Two days after our second study hall, Hamas attacked Israel. Only then did I learn she was Palestinian.

Last week, as I was filming on my iPhone, shattered glass fell at my feet. A masked man with a hammer bashed in the glass of a door to Hamilton Hall. He tightened a bike lock on the exterior door handles while another man immediately zip-tied together the handles to a second doorway. When the door was flung open, glass sprayed everywhere as the press was told to “Get out!”

Groups of pro-Palestinian protesters barricaded the doorways from inside with stacked chairs and tables and shoved metal picnic tables against their exteriors, lugging over more to be zip-tied together.

 “Down, down with occupation. Up, up with liberation!” The crowd chanted, cheering on those vandalizing Hamilton Hall. With his lunch bag in hand, a Columbia University Public Safety officer watched from the corner of the Hamilton courtyard.

Just a week before the protesters took over Hamilton Hall, I and two Jewish friends were encircled by nearly 200 pro-Palestinian demonstrators at the campus encampment. Khymani James, one of the leaders of the protests, shouted for the encampment members to “form a human chain right here, please. We have Zionists that have entered the camp!” Wearing bright pink Crocs, he commanded the crowd to take a step forward to push us out; they did.

Two of our other friends immediately notified Public Safety officers, who, again, decided spectating was more appropriate than intervening. “You don’t want to put yourself in harm’s way,” one of them said. “We don’t even set foot in there.”

Maybe Public Safety knew something then that we didn’t. In January, James had told his Instagram livestream to “be glad and be grateful that I am not just going out and murdering Zionists.” He said this during a disciplinary hearing initiated by the university to address his claims, also posted on his Instagram, that he would fight “a Zionist” not to injure them but to kill. Apparently, after the hearing was concluded, Columbia University forgot to punish him.

Had his rhetoric been targeted at blacks or any other minority group, I believe James would have faced instantaneous expulsion. Why was an exception made for antisemitic threats of violence against “Zionists”?

Moreover, James’s unwavering belief that Zionists are terrorists illustrates the impotence of Columbia’s Center for Student Success and Intervention, which held the January hearing. Only in late April, when the recording of his livestream spread like wildfire, did the university ban him from campus. And even then, he was potentially still allowed to return to campus.

Beneath his hateful rhetoric, I see a radicalized, misinformed individual who is emblematic of the larger pro-Palestinian movement on my campus. Columbia’s leftist echo chamber, sealed within a social-justice-warrior culture, has driven students to latch onto a social cause in search of belonging.

Many find community in causes that are anti-Western and anti-authority. These are the students who shout threats at the NYPD, likening officers to the Ku Klux Klan. It appears that the pro-Palestinian student movement prefers Marxist ideas and Soviet-era rhetoric.

I witnessed hundreds of pro-Palestinian protesters swarm around a man with a megaphone urging his listeners to be ready to “rally for your comrades” to defend the encampment. Using martial terminology, he assigned the protesters to “platoon leaders,” who commanded their groups to tidy their belongings in the event of an NYPD sweep.

While the protesters claimed to be peaceful, they lost all credibility the night they stormed Hamilton Hall. One facility worker claims to have been taken hostage. Moreover, their purported tactic of nonviolent civil disobedience, modeled after Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr., neglected the part where they accept the consequences of their disobedient behavior. Those arrested for setting up Columbia’s first encampment and for storming Hamilton Hall detest the enforcement of law, twisting it into a violation of their First Amendment right to peaceably assemble. Apparently, they also neglected to read the word “peaceably.”

Having witnessed the dangers of the Hamilton Hall mob, and having watched from afar as UCLA devolved into anarchy, I believe that one thing has become starkly clear: We cannot allow a situation in which people believe that, to remain safe, they must take matters into their own hands. University administration, working with authorized law enforcement when necessary, must prove its ability to protect its students at all times.

College authorities cannot continue to ignore or tolerate the unruliness on campus. The result is a perilous Hobbesian state of nature in which students must fend for ourselves. The university must stand against bigotry, regardless of the response it may elicit from the bigots. Law enforcement, whether Public Safety or the NYPD, must not wait until someone has been sucker punched, or worse, before they intervene.

Columbia administrators claim to stand against bigotry while failing to condemn it when it sleeps on its lawns. If the university wishes to redeem its disgraced reputation, it needs to resolve that contradiction. After all, Columbia’s motto is “In your light shall we see the light.” We have the chance to set an example for the world to follow.

To those partaking in this pro-Palestinian movement, I say it is time to have dialogue. There is a vacuum of leadership at the university, so we have little guidance on how to mend student relationships. We already know how to scream into our own echo chambers. We need to find a way to talk to one another.

As a human-rights major at Columbia, I seek to learn from uncomfortable conversations, to negotiate and empathize with those holding diverse viewpoints on sensitive issues. Many involved in either the pro-Israel or pro-Palestinian camp are too entrenched in groupthink to look up.

This week, I reached out to that old friend whose eyes I saw between her navy blue hood and black mask. I reached out to other friends who may have been remotely involved in the encampment. No one has responded yet.

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Source: Columbia University Protest Mindset Hinders Learning | National Review