After years of leftist activists disrupting the speech of groups and individuals they disagree with and threatening people with “cancellation” for having the “wrong” opinions, it’s hard to find sympathy for them when they finally get a taste of their own medicine. Woke protesters have recently sought to bring back the old Seattle CHAZ model of taking over public property and declaring it their own territory; in this case the territory is college campuses around the US.
The problem of western progressives hijacking causes in order to insert their own agendas has been noted by many in the independent media. While some people may be approaching the Gaza protests in good faith, there are many others who are not.
Apologists might argue that the goal of a protest is to “disrupt” but there are still laws in place that activists must follow. These include laws that make it illegal to obstruct other citizens from using public property, public roads and public buildings (the insane actions of anti-oil protesters come to mind). Regardless of how you might feel about the Israel/Hamas conflict, the reality is that it has nothing to do with students trying to go to classes at universities across the country, and stopping them from doing so violates their rights.
This is something that the Gaza protesters seem to have forgotten; their cause is not the only important matter at hand. If they are merely speaking their minds and engaging in fair discourse then they have every right. Once they start taking over colleges and acting as if they own the place, then there’s going to be a problem. It has also been reported that more than half of these activists are not even members of the colleges in question.
Various states have handled the matter differently. Texas Governor Greg Abbot received criticism for what some argued were heavy handed tactics when removing protesters from campuses after declaring a no-tolerance policy for “antisemitism.” Many conservative commentators suggested that even though they don’t like the activists involved, antisemitism is not a valid reason to remove them.
In other states police have been mostly de-fanged and can do very little even when protesters block other students from attending classes. However, they may have found a way around this. At Arizona State University fraternity members stepped in and tore down protester encampments while police stayed out of their way.
Early this morning police at ASU, with help from fraternity members, tore down the pro-Hamas encampment.
An extremist watching whined because she wasn’t being allowed to continue to break the law.
Imagine the embarrassment of being this girl’s parents.pic.twitter.com/CU4IwuuCYb
— Paul A. Szypula 🇺🇸 (@Bubblebathgirl) April 27, 2024
In other words, this is not a case of police interfering with protester activities, this is members of the student body cleaning up their own campus.
One has to wonder why campuses are being targeted over a war on the other side of the world that does not directly involve them in any way? If funding of Israel is the issue, then why aren’t these protestors on the front lawn of the Biden White House? It only makes sense if the goal is to exploit the Gaza issue in order to get visibility for other agendas.
Tyler Durden
Sun, 04/28/2024 – 14:35
