It Has Come to This: The Hamas Lockdown

On Friday Stanford Law School canceled in-person classes and moved all classes back to Zoom as they did during the COVID lockdown.

Late last week Columbia University announced that it would limit campus access to student and staff ID holders only, after a Jewish student was beaten by a stick-wielding assailant. Elsewhere we have seen scenes of students and, at the University of Michigan, one faculty member, tearing down flyers of missing Israelis. Some Jewish students are having the Star of David scrawled on their dorm room doors.  How soon before Students for Justice in Palestine demand that Jewish students wear a yellow Star of David on campus? (Don’t think this is farfetched; see below.)

And here’s the campus-wide notice to the entire UC Berkeley staff and student body Friday:

Out of an abundance of care and concern for our community due to heightened tensions around the world, we will be enhancing our security presence on campus. While there is no credible or direct threat to the campus at this time, we believe it is prudent to be proactive and to have a more visible security presence on campus. We know this may be upsetting to some members of our community and we do not take such action lightly. We will continue to monitor the situation and adjust safety and security needs accordingly.

So, are colleges afraid that militant Jewish “colonizers” are a violent threat on campuses? Of course not, though the conspicuous silence about just where the threat comes from speaks loudly. Call it the Hamas lockdown.

The case of Stanford Law concluding that it was not safe to hold in-person classes comes after a classroom episode in which an instructor has been been suspended for telling Jewish students to take their belongings and stand in a corner. The instructor said, “This is what Israel does to the Palestinians” The instructor then asked, “How many people died in the Holocaust?” When a student answered, “Six million,” the lecturer said, “Colonizers killed more than 6 million. Israel is a colonizer.”

While Stanford has declined to identify the instructor, students have been more forthcoming:

While Stanford’s website has locked up Prof. Loggins’s background, you can find out all you need to know here. I’m going to go with Prof. Loggins was a diversity hire for Stanford, because they desperately needed to get certain demographic numbers up, and who cares about civic education at Stanford anyway. (More about Loggins here, including his role in radicalizing Colin Kaepernick.)

Students for Justice in Palestine are promoting a template for campus protests:

Other campuses have their own self-generated hate.

Heidegger would be proud of the inner truth and greatness of the campus left.

I have occasionally referred to our “East German Universities” over the last few years because of their narrowing conformity to a party line. Looks like I understated the depth of the problem.