Welcome back to Forgotten Fact Checks, a weekly column produced by National Review’s News Desk. This week, we look at attempts to downplay the occupation of buildings on several college campuses during the anti-Israel protests, and cover more media misses.
Left-Wing Media Tries to Normalize Behavior of Anti-Israel Protesters
Left-wing pundits want you to know it’s actually not that big of a deal to occupy a building — and they’re actually kind of annoyed you would suggest otherwise.
“Ok for the last damn time: THE OCCUPATION OF A BUILDING IS A PEACEFUL PROTEST,” said Nathan J Robinson, editor-in-chief of Current Affairs magazine.
And MSNBC’s Chris Hayes says he feels like he’s losing his mind a little: “People understand that “occupying buildings on campus” is, like, one of the most common forms of student protest for decades and not some devious new ploy devised by professional anarchist plotters, right?”
He doubled down later on his show, All In, attempting to contextualize the recent events at Columbia University by discussing an incident at Morehouse College in the 1960s when civil rights protesters locked college trustees in their offices.
“College activism has long been a part of college education,” Hayes said, arguing the media’s “sense of proportion” in its recent reporting “seems to be lacking.”
He claimed it is “easier to argue about what college kids are doing than to confront the human misery and destruction that’s happening in the actual conflict which is, of course, the source of these protests.”
But it’s worth noting it’s hardly “kids” behind these protests — demonstrators range from undergrads to Ph.D. and law students, with some faculty and outside agitators afoot as well.
Protesters who seized Columbia University’s Hamilton Hall renamed it “Hinds Hall,” in commemoration of the death of Hind Rajab, a six-year-old Palestinian girl who was killed by an Israeli airstrike in Gaza. Demonstrators vandalized the building, breaking doors and windows, and blockaded entrances before the New York Police Department performed a sweep of the building. At least 119 people who barricaded themselves inside the admissions building were arrested. The cost of damage to the building is likely to total thousands of dollars.
New York City mayor Eric Adams said that he believed outside agitators were responsible for the escalation of campus protests.
One of those arrested at Columbia was James Carlson, a 40-year-old lawyer and “professional agitator” who owns a $3.4 million Brooklyn brownstone.
Carlson, the son of late ad mogul Dick Tarlow, has a long history of riot-related arrests dating back to 2005. He is believed to be a leader of the efforts to seize Hamilton Hall and has been charged with burglary, reckless endangerment, criminal mischief, conspiracy and criminal trespassing, according to the New York Post.
“I observed the defendant inside the location with several other individuals,” a police officer wrote in the arrest report. “I did observe doors with shattered windows, doors off hinges, broken desks and exits blockaded by piled-up chairs.”
Carlson was also charged with a hate crime, assault and petit larceny for allegedly setting fire to an Israel supporter’s flag and then hitting the 22-year-old in the face with a rock during an April protest.
Multiple media reports have also indicated there is big money in play in encouraging and supporting these protests. The People’s Forum, a New York City nonprofit that received more than $12 million from Goldman Sachs’ charitable arm, encouraged anti-Israel activists to recreate the protests of the summer of 2020 hours before demonstrators seized Hamilton Hall, the Washington Free Beacon reported.
Politico, meanwhile, received backlash from conservatives over the weekend when it reported that “Pro-Palestinian protesters are backed by a surprising source: Biden’s biggest donors” — a fact that came as little surprise to anyone who had been paying attention.
“Glad you guys could make it,” Washington Free Beacon reporter Joe Gabriel Simonson quipped. “Surprising to who?” Rep. Jim Banks, R-Ind., responded.
But until reporting makes it into the mainstream media, of course, it’s merely Republicans pouncing.
“Trump, GOP seize on campus protests to depict chaos under Biden,” the Washington Post reported, adding that Republicans are highlighting “images of turmoil, though most of the pro-Palestinian demonstrations have been peaceful.”
But one need not look very long or hard for these “images of turmoil.”
At California State Polytechnic University at Humboldt, students took over two campus halls and caused property damage that could cost the university millions of dollars, according to a spokesperson.
And at UCLA, students erected a fortified encampment. After police dismantled the encampment and made arrests, demonstrators left a massive mess in their wake. “So you can see the graffiti and everything. It’s just defaced the campus, damaged property, they left a lot of mess behind, tents and plywood, and all types of things that other people had to clean up,” UCLA senior Milagro Jones told Fox News.
Jones said he was stopped by anti-Israel protesters who “mistook me for someone of Jewish background” and said he was an Israeli agitator before physically assaulting him.
After protesters at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill took down the American flag and replaced it with a Palestinian flag, students who stepped in to defend the U.S. flag were hit with projectiles including rocks, sticks, water bottles and chicken broth balloons.
Yet Representative Rashida Tlaib has apparently looked at this on-campus chaos and determined it is simply students exercising their First Amendment rights.
“Sending in militarized police and snipers to stop students from exercising their First Amendment rights is truly disgusting,” she said. “Why are my colleagues and the mainstream media more outraged over these anti-war protests than they are about the over 35,000 Palestinians killed in Gaza?” she added, citing questionable data from the Gaza Health Ministry.
Others gave a full-throated endorsement of the vandalism on campus.
Marc Lamont Hill, a City University of New York professor and Al Jazeera host, said he told his own child to join in and “tear some sh** up” on campus.
“Again, you don’t have to tear up the whole university, but making the university uncomfortable is exactly what you are supposed to do,” he told The Blaze host Jason Whitlock.
Hill was fired from his role as a CNN commentator in 2018 after he called for a “free Palestine from the river to the sea.”
Headline Fail of the Week
The Onion under Ben Collins’ leadership is about as funny as one would expect:
Media Misses
Let’s start with the easiest and most obvious corrective. This bill has nothing to do with criminal law, does not “ban” anything, and thus does not criminalize speech.
As for the argument that the bill is somehow making preaching Christian doctrine illegal, the only relevance the IHRA definition has to Christianity is the example, noted above, that using classic antisemitic tropes derived from Christian polemic to criticize Israeli actions can, in context, be antisemitic. It’s hard to imagine anyone sensible arguing that, for example, the statement, “Of course Israel is massacring Palestinians, that’s exactly what Christ-Killers would do” can’t be antisemitic.