Bill Maher, on his HBO talk show this week, said that pro-Palestinian student protests on college campuses are what happens when “activism merges with narcissism.”
Atlantic columnist David Frum referred to protesters like the UCLA students who were violently attacked Wednesday by a mob of counterprotesters as “revolutionaries allergic to banana.”
During Tuesday night's tactical police response to the takeover of a building on campus by Columbia University students, author Judith Miller tweeted: “Hello Columbia protesters! If they are so proud of what they are doing, why are they covering their faces?
Mocking student protesters has become an easy and fun pastime since they began marching and camping in opposition to Israel's ongoing military incursions into Gaza following the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel. All critics and old scoffers need is a platform (cable TV, Instagram, a tattered soap box) to discredit the movement as the performative act of irresponsible snowflakes and spoiled children.
The protective gear of “gluten-free warriors” is a form of disguise. Their security measures – barricades in camps and self-managed medical tents – are seen as ploys to attract attention. They are called cowards for covering their faces with masks and glasses.
But these actions they were not just for show. UCLA pro-Palestinian protesters did They needed to protect and defend themselves when a violent mob of pro-Israel counterprotesters attacked their camp.
Video recorded by The Times and others. media and witnesses at the scene show counterprotesters dressed in black and white masks breaking down barricades, hitting people with batons and sticks and shouting racial epithets. Campers were dragged, kicked and beaten by a predominantly male mob Tuesday night and Wednesday morning, as police and campus security remained on standby for three hours before responding.
Authorities eventually exonerated the counterprotesters, who reportedly included non-student organizations. No arrests were made.
But 24 hours later, more than 200 pro-Palestinian protesters were arrested when UCLA called for a massive police presence to clear the student camp.
“What we just witnessed was the darkest day in my 32 years at UCLA,” David Myers, a professor of Jewish history at UCLA who is working on initiatives to bridge divides on campus, told The Times. “Why didn't the police, UCPD and LAPD show up? Those in the camp were defenseless against a violent gang of thugs. And no one, regardless of their political position, is safer today.”
The optics, at best, discourage free speech on campus and encourage violent retaliation by those who disagree with the message. In recent weeks, universities including USC, UCLA and Columbia have called in police to quell largely peaceful student demonstrations and clear encampments, while racial slurs, verbal threats and violent attacks against anti-war protesters have gone unaddressed. with the same seriousness or urgency.
Naturally, Fox News took the “Good vs. Evil” theme a step further by depicting the protest movement as a Trojan horse for nefarious, anti-American operations.
“Many of them appear to be the same type of protesters we saw during the George Floyd protest,” host Trace Gallagher said in response to the NYPD's tactical response in Columbia this week. “The songs have changed. “It’s a new location and a lot of the same people are moving into these things.”
His guest went on to say that protesters are “targeting the American system and using the Palestinian cause to leverage their meaningless and veiled beliefs to start mass anarchy.”
Delegitimization is a classic tactic in the debate over who has the higher moral ground. But it shouldn't matter: All peaceful protesters, on and off campus, need to be protected, regardless of their participants' position on the war.
Watching images of the violence at UCLA this week is chilling, and there are sure to be more dangerous confrontations if the safety of protesting students is mocked as unnecessary, or if universities continue to treat them as a threat. Your right to exercise freedom of expression safely needs to be protected.
Cynical agitators like Maher will always exploit incendiary moments to get ratings and clicks. But turning opposition to the protest movement into frivolous speech against Generation Z is not only unpleasant, it is dangerous. It feeds a harmful narrative that their need for protection is fictitious, that they are a spoiled, whiny generation that we should ignore or, worse, allow others to take aim while we watch from the sidelines.
