The importance given to the recent anti-Israel student protests at Columbia University, on close inspection, turned out to be a case of mistaken identity.
Stampeded by the news media, prominent people, very much including Columbia president Minouche Shafik, believed they were confronting something like the second coming of Black Lives Matter.
These elites imagined the protesters to represent the vanguard of a radicalized generation, the Zoomers, eager to storm the precincts of power and shove American society toward the extreme progressive left.
As with the BLM riots, the elites were terrified of doing or saying the wrong thing.
To keep their jobs in the coming Age of the Zoomer, they felt the need to tread carefully.
None of this was remotely true.
Despite the media’s unwillingness to ask probing questions, we know a couple of things about the protesters.
We know they were few in number, for example. The original “Gaza Solidarity Encampment” was said to be the work of “about 70” activists.
News reports never mentioned more than “hundreds” of students involved — and the abundant video taken of the episode shows this to be a generous estimate. Columbia has 31,000 students. The protesters never came close to 1/100th of the total.
But did these angry few somehow embody the revolutionary fervor of the younger generation? The question is impossible to answer empirically, but signs point in the opposite direction.
The Harvard Youth Poll showed Gaza to rank “near the bottom of young Americans’ concerns.”
According to the poll, the Zoomers, like their elders, are less worried about the Middle East than about inflation and lack of affordable housing.
It can be argued that the poll didn’t specifically focus on the children of affluent families who attend elite institutions like Columbia. That’s certainly true — and a clue to the underlying reality behind the protests.
The young rebels at Columbia had no wish to overthrow a society they expected to rule by birthright, as an inheritance from mom and dad. The point of protesting was to out-virtue the competition on the way to the top.
Nevertheless, even at Columbia, at the height of the turmoil, the mass of students elected an Israeli as president of the student government.
It would be safe, I think, to assume that the protesters represented nothing higher than themselves.
A disproportionate number were women. That accords with the Zoomer facts of life: the women of the cohort skew sharply left (the guys skew right, which makes mating problematic).
If the videos and selfies tell an accurate story, many of the protesting men were gay.
The combination was probably responsible for the striking color-matched tents and pleasing “buffets” at the encampment, and the wearing of the Palestinian scarf, the keffiyeh, as an elaborate fashion statement. The effect was what you would expect if Vanity Fair planned a revolution.
For all that, there was enough hysteria and testosterone to allow a bit of bullying and violence. The trigger was the eternal enemy: the Jew.
“Nazi bitches!” shrieked the women at their Jewish fellow students. “Go back to Poland,” others screamed. The men took care of the physical intimidation, which included shouting, shoving, and punching members of the offending ethnic group.
Though phoniness and posturing characterized the protests, the hatred looked real. Unless they were willing to condemn their own kind, Jews were verboten at the Gaza Solidarity Encampment.
One of the leading voices at the encampment — personal pronouns: “he/she/they” — when asked by school administrators to explain such antisemitic venom, observed, “I don’t fight to win — I fight to kill.”
To this Nietzschean boast, he added a Hitlerian threat: “So be glad, be grateful, that I’m not just going out and murdering Zionists . . . Zionists, they don’t deserve to live comfortably — let alone, Zionists don’t deserve to live. I feel very comfortable calling for those people to die.”
The young man lisped the words with an almost childlike lack of self-awareness: a fair definition of a sociopath.
How did the offspring of our ruling class fall into such a distempered mental condition? The vast majority, truth be told, were simple herd animals, devoid of moral anchors, eager to repeat whatever inane slogans the activists put in their mouths. (Leader: “We don’t want no Zionists here!” Herd: “Say it loud! Say it clear!”)
The students protesting at Columbia (I repeat) were a tiny subset of the student body; the most powerful motivation for that subset was mindless conformity rather than humanitarian zeal.
Still, among the main organizers of the protest I find Students for Justice for Palestine, a group that is nominally “anti-Zionist” but is in fact pro-Hamas and, when the mask slips, rabidly antisemitic.
SJP’s attitude toward Jews can be deduced from its celebration, as a grand victory for the cause, of the slaughter, rape, and kidnapping of Israeli civilians on Oct. 7, 2023.
At the encampment, protesters screaming “Pigs! We are all Hamas!” warned Jewish students to expect “ten thousand” repetitions of that massacre.
The bulk of the activists knew little and cared less about Israel or Palestine.
They hailed from the fever swamps of the identitarian and anti-capitalist left, which dumbs the world down to ideological stick-figures: oppressors versus oppressed and capitalism versus utopia.
Like so many lost souls before them, these people have found the perfect target for their resentments in the person of the Jew.
Exterminated by Hitler for not being European enough, the Jews, at Columbia, became the white oppressors and colonizers — and, to complete the stereotype, the swinish capitalist exploiters too.
To the right and the left, in Nazi Germany and democratic America, the Jews are always the chosen scapegoats of history: a grim lesson for the students about the necessity of Israel.
An indeterminate number were not students or associated with the school in any way. These were the nomadic, semi-professional window-smashers of the left, whose task it is to instruct the amateurs in the art of provoking a visually compelling police response.
Mayor Adams called them “outside agitators.” The media pretended they weren’t there — we know of their existence largely through arrest records.
The first encampment was erected April 17 and, on Shafik’s orders, was almost immediately dismantled by a special detachment of NYPD cops.
However, a second encampment went up and, by April 19, protests and occupations had spread to many of the country’s elite campuses, all inspired by Columbia’s example.
Faculty in large numbers supported the protesters. Confronting what looked like a generational uprising, Shafik lost her nerve and chose to negotiate.
Who is Manouche Shafik? We know a few things about her.
For one, she’s a magnificently accomplished human. Born in Egypt, raised and educated as an economist in the US and Britain, she is the author of many books and articles, and served at the highest levels in the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the Bank of England before becoming president, first, of the London School of Economics, and finally, of Columbia.
She is not an empty vessel after the fashion of Claudine Gay.
Yet leadership consists of making difficult calls about the demands of duty. Shafik’s multiple accomplishments were channeled toward success in an institutional environment that prizes magical words and gestures but has lost all memory of the concept of duty.
This malady afflicts our entire elite class, for whom self-interest now occupies the place where duty once stood.
For a particularly egregious example, we need only consider President Biden’s attitude regarding Israel and the Gaza war.
If Israel was the victim of a savage attack and is fighting to ensure such a horror never recurs, then it’s the president’s duty to support our friend and ally without qualifications.
If Israel is embarking on genocide, however, the president’s duty is to oppose that crime with all the power at his disposal. It’s a call only Biden can make — only he refuses to make it.
Concerned solely about political advantage, oblivious to duty, he has zigged and zagged on Gaza, attempting to please all sides and predictably alienating everyone in the process.
Shafik faced the same choice, at a different level. If the protesters had broken the law and the university’s rules, it was her duty to disband them, even if it meant calling in the police.
She did this, initially, when the chief peril to her position seemed to come from Congress.
But Shafik followed rather than led. The great unspoken fear was that a new wave of righteous protests, on the model of Black Lives Matter, was about to overwhelm the political scene.
To be perceived as the villain of that story would be career-destroying.
So she temporized. Her attempt to negotiate gave the activists a legitimacy their numbers never warranted. When negotiations faltered, she set a hard deadline — then allowed it to lapse.
Only when the protests’ profound unpopularity with the public became apparent, and the media abandoned the myth of a second BLM, did taking down the encampment appear to be a safe option — even an imperative.
As any half-awake observer might have foreseen, the student occupations turned out be a gift to the presidential campaign of Donald Trump
In the world of the elites, that’s a more serious offense than lawlessness or Jew-hatred.
In the end, the activists made the decision easy: their goal had always been confrontation.
In the early morning of April 30, a mob of protesters swarmed into Hamilton Hall — romantic site of the 1968 occupation — and barricaded themselves there, smashing windows in the approved manner along the way.
At that moment, the most revealing episode of this dollhouse revolt took place. One of the trespassers encountered a janitor blocking his way; a tussle ensued.
The two men embodied radically divergent directions for American society.
The invader was James Carlson, 40, white, privileged, protected, not a student at all but the offspring of big capitalist money — a trust-fund revolutionary, owner of a $2.3 million Brooklyn home, for whom life held only happy consequences.
The janitor, Mario Torres, was none of those things. Abandoned to his fate by Columbia (where the average janitor makes $19 an hour), he had the distinction of being the single member of that sorry institution who stood his ground and carried out his duty, at the risk of personal injury. Afterwards, he worried about being fired by the university.
Though the occupation of Hamilton Hall lasted less than one day, the ordeal seemed to stress the activists to the breaking-point.
A keffiyeh-wearing female was delegated to demand food from the university as “basic humanitarian aid.”
“Do you want students to die of dehydration and starvation even if they disagree with you?” she asked, apparently in all seriousness.
Rather than cucumber sandwiches, Shafik at long last sent in the cops to clear out the building. Of the 112 persons arrested, 32 had no link to Columbia. They belonged to Adams’ outside agitator class.
The university, which had already switched to remote learning, now canceled the commencement ceremony — thus making a social desert and calling it peace.
But peace and tranquility, I would guess, are unlikely to return to Columbia unless the institution’s leadership starts to resemble Mario Torres a lot more than Minouche Shafik.