U.S. Universities Struggle to Calm Campuses Torn by the Gaza War, by: Alan Blinder

These university protesting students are on the RIGHT side of what’s morally responsible, with the U.S. government being on the WRONG here!  From The New York Times that came with today’s edition…

At New York University, the police swept in to arrest protesting students on Monday night, ending a standoff with the school’s administration.

At Yale University, police placed protesters’ wrists into zip ties Monday morning and escorted them onto campus shuttles to receive summonses for trespassing.

Columbia University kept its classroom doors closed Monday, moving lectures online and urging students to stay home.


the latest arrests on college campuses across the U.S, from YouTube

Harvard Yard was shut to the public.  Nearby, at campuses including Tufts and Emerson, administrators weighed how to handle encampments that looked much like the ones that police dismantled at Columbia last week——which protesters quickly resurrected.

Less than a week after the arrests of more than a hundred protesters at Columbia, administrators at some of the country’s most influential universities were struggling, and largely failing, to calm campuses torn by the conflict in the Gaza Strip and Israel

During the turmoil Monday, which coincided with the start of Passover, protesters called on their universities to become less financially tied to Israel and its arms suppliers.  Many Jewish students agonized anew over some protests and chants that veered into antisemitism, and feared again for their safety.  Some faculty members denounced clampdowns on peaceful protests.  Alumni and donors raged.

And from Congress, there were calls for the resignation of Columbia’s president from some of the same lawmakers Nemat Shafik tried to pacify last week with words and tactics that inflamed her own campus.

It is all but certain that the demonstrations, in some form or another, will last on campuses until the end of the academic year, and even then, graduation ceremonies may be bitterly contested gatherings.


how the originally peaceful assembly turned, violent…

For now, with the most significant protests confined to a handful of campuses, administrators’ approaches sometimes seem to shift from hour to hour.

Protesters have demonstrated with varying intensity since the October seventh Hamas attack on Israel.  But this round of unrest began to gather greater force last Wednesday, after Columbia students erected an encampment, just as Shafik was preparing to testify before Congress.

At that hearing in Washington, before a Republican-led House committee, she vowed to punish unauthorized protests on the private university’s campus more aggressively, and the next day she asked the New York Police Department to clear the encampment.  In addition to the more than one hundred people arrested, Columbia suspended many students.  Many Columbia professors, students and alumni voiced fears that the university was stamping out free debate.

And, this is, a REPLAY of the ANTI-WAR protests of the Vietnam War Era (not around that long, so wouldn’t know for sure!), but one thing’s for certain, people these students felt that the U.S. is on the WRONG side of justice, standing on the side of the Israel, that’s why they’re all, standing UP to protest to FREE the people of Palestine from Israeli control, and they’re, not wrong.

After all, they were, only, merely, EXERCISING their FIRST AMENDMENT rights to ASSEMBLE peacefully, and, the law can’t do a thing, to MAKE them stop, because it’s the citizens’ rights, and, these protests are going to expand, across the entire, U.S. because U.S. support for Israel is unjustified, nor is it, morally, responsible.

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