Kill-the-Jews protesters at Columbia have taken over that school’s main administration building, Hamilton Hall. Scenes from the campus are horrifying:
Students at Columbia University have occupied Hamilton hall. Today the university president explicitly said to students the school would not be divesting and threatened to suspend students protesting. The last time this building was taken over by student protesters was in 1968 pic.twitter.com/IhoWVYlocB
— Lama Al-Arian (@lalarian) April 30, 2024
It will be interesting to see whether these vandals are punished as harshly as the January 6 protesters.
אירוע מטורף בדקות האלה באוניברסיטת קולומביה: פרו פלסטינים מנפצים שמשות ומשתלטים על בניין המילטון בקמפוס.
אמרתי בשידורים בשבוע האחרון שהאירוע יצא משליטה. צפו ותבינו למה התכוונתי.
השעה 1:30 בלילה במנהטן. מתרחשת כאן נקודת מפנה. pic.twitter.com/6DYLKpLzDf— נריה קראוס Neria Kraus (@NeriaKraus) April 30, 2024
An INTIFADA flag is hung from Hamilton Hall, Columbia University
Intifada is an armed terrorist uprising fyi. America take back control of your universities and arrest their asses. And stop the radicalisation of your youth! pic.twitter.com/pYGqdWcZoT
— Brian BJ (@iamBrianBJ) April 30, 2024
These riots are a disaster for Columbia. This is true in several respects; for one thing, the demonstrators are robotic morons, mindlessly repeating pro-genocide chants. Intellectually, they are about on a par with Joe Biden reading “pause” off the teleprompter. I wonder whether Columbia’s academic reputation can recover. For another, the university’s administration has behaved spinelessly throughout the crisis. Columbia administrators have thus joined those from Harvard, MIT and Penn as objects of ridicule.
Perhaps most notably, campus riots like the ones at Columbia could be a disaster for the Democratic Party. That is what happened in the late 60s. Voters hate these childish and destructive outbursts. Conservatives like Ronald Reagan (and moderates like S.I. Hiyakawa) who stood up to student tantrums became heroes, while soft-on-crime Democrats suffered. That likely will happen again. Worst of all, the antiwar (ar, more accurately, pro-Viet Cong) riots that engulfed the Democratic National Convention in 1968 likely dealt a death blow to Hubert Humphrey’s candidacy. The same thing could happen again, in the same venue–Chicago.
Democrats had better figure out a way to deal with their pro-genocide left, or they could be in trouble.
UPDATE: The New York Post has nice updates on events at Columbia and other campuses beset by riots.
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