A huge crowd of faculty members who teach at Columbia University in New York held a mass walk-out on Monday afternoon to protest the institution having called police to arrest students at a pro-Palestinian encampment protest last week.
Hundreds of members of the teaching cohort at Columbia walked out in solidarity with the students who were arrested by the New York police department last week and also suspended by the university.
The solidarity protest came as students put protest tents back up in the middle of campus on Monday after they were torn down last week when more than 100 arrests were made.
The university on Monday morning announced that classes would be held remotely after further days of unrest on the New York campus, following the arrest of pro-Palestinian protesters there last week.
This entire article is revolting.
"Back at Columbia, Nicholas Baum, a 19-year-old Jewish freshman who lives in a Jewish theological seminary building two blocks from Columbia’s Morningside Heights campus, told the Associated Press that protesters over the weekend were “calling for Hamas to blow away Tel Aviv and Israel”. He said some of the protesters shouting antisemitic slurs were not students but that Jewish students were scared.
“There’s been so much vilification of Zionism, and it has spilled over into the vilification of Judaism,” he said."
I think you can agree that we can support a group that is suffering from genocide to fight back and it isn’t necessarily antisemitic. Of course, there may be antisemitism from some sectors, but Israel conflates criticism and antisemitism all the time. As a result, at this point, I don’t think it is a big concern. Allowing the protestors to fight against a genocidal nation is the more important issue.
Honestly, I blame AIPAC. AIPAC has been weaponizing any criticism of Isreal as antisemitism for the past decade - doing this erodes our ability to call out genuine antisemitism. AIPAC is accelerating social acceptance of absolutely vile positions.
For reference, I’m not Jewish but grew up in an antizionist slanted Jewish community and I think that Isreal’s actions in Gaza are atrocious but I also don’t fucking tolerate any genuine antisemitism (which does pop up on lemmy from time to time).
AIPAC and Israel’s government itself.
I was just shocked that there are apparently people who don’t hear “zionism” and have the same reaction as hearing the word “Nazism”. The whole article is written from the perspective of a Zionist (bad).
Exactly, you have people protesting a genocide, and then there are students carrying the flag of the genocidal nation to provoke the protestors. To me, I would probably treat it as a white supremacist carrying a Nazi flag to a George Floyd protest.
I agree with the other poster, this article is revolting in it’s one-sided treatment of the issue.
I saw a TV playing Fox News today, and they were running a bit on this labeled “anti-israel protests”, so that certainly doesn’t help either.