Opinion Call the campus protests what they are
It’s neither neutral, nor accurate, to call these demonstrations “antiwar” or “pro-Palestinian.”
By Ramesh Ponnuru
Contributing columnist
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May 3, 2024 at 7:15 a.m. EDT
The protests engulfing many college campuses are spurring debate about U.S. foreign policy, free speech and the purpose of higher education. But there’s a more basic question that journalists, especially, have to answer: What should we call these protests?
The Associated Press says the demonstrators are “antiwar protesters.” CBS News has used the same label and has also labeled the protesters “supporters of Palestinian rights.” Many outlets — including The Post, USA Today, Axios, CNN, Politico and the New York Times — have gone with “pro-Palestinian.”
These aren’t neutral, or accurate, descriptions.
A leading group backing the demonstrations, Students for Justice in Palestine, exulted in the terrorist attack “against the Zionist enemy” on Oct. 7. Protesters at George Washington University and Cornell University have been chanting, “There is only one solution: intifada revolution.” (“Globalize the intifada” is another popular slogan.) Terrorist-group regalia has been spotted at protests at Yale, Princeton, Stanford and the University of Minnesota. At UCLA, a Jewish student claimed he was chased by a group of protesters for intruding on their turf.
Perhaps because of its location, Columbia University in New York has had the most publicized demonstrations. It’s also a place where Jewish students have been subjected to such chants as “We don’t want no Zionists here!” and “the 7th of October is going to be every day for you!”
These are too numerous to count as isolated incidents, and they help to explain why Jonathan Greenblatt, the head of the Anti-Defamation League, has labeled the Columbia demonstrators “pro-Hamas activists.”
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Obviously, not every protester at Columbia or elsewhere approves of these aggressive acts and sentiments. After speaking with dozens of student protesters around the country, Jeremy W. Peters of the New York Times reported that many of them condemned Hamas — though many others “declined to engage” when asked about it. And while many supporters of Israel have called the protests antisemitic, many Jewish students are participating in them.
What’s fair to say is that peace is not the organizing principle of the protests. The protesters at Columbia have listed several official demands. They don’t include that Hamas release all its hostages. It’s no answer to note that they have no influence over Hamas. Absurd as it might be, the conceit of the protest is that the university is in some meaningful sense an actor in the Middle East. The protesters have no influence over Israel, either, but it doesn’t stop them from condemning it.
While “pro-Palestinian” is better than “antiwar,” it, too, fails to convey the point of the protests. For one thing, it’s possible to be concerned about Palestinians, and critical of Israel for that matter, while also opposing a movement that can’t bring itself to oppose the events of Oct. 7. The massacres of that day have, after all, been a proximate cause of immense Palestinian suffering. The Columbia protesters have not hesitated, either, to shun Palestinians and Palestinian Americans they consider insufficiently confrontational.
The protests are not even bringing attention to the plight of Gazans. They’re bringing attention to the protesters (and sometimes to their dietary needs, as in the case of the Columbia students who sought food and drink from the administration they are protesting against). Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) implicitly acknowledged the point by complaining that the media is providing too much coverage to the campus drama and not enough to the conflict in the Middle East.
How college officials and law enforcement should respond to the protesters does not turn on whether we see them as “antiwar” or as something more sinister. Even the antisemites among the protesters have free-speech rights. And all of the protesters, whatever their views, should comply with the restrictions on the time, place and manner of protest that the law and campus rules impose — or be willing to face the academic and legal consequences. Blocking other students’ ability to traverse the campus, or threatening them with violence, ought not be tolerated.
The rules governing these protests should be neutral with respect to their viewpoint. But the public is under no obligation to refrain from judging that viewpoint, and the media is under no obligation to provide the protesters with public relations assistance. If the extremism on display in the protests were associated with the right rather than the left, I suspect the media would be covering it with less sympathy. The anodyne descriptions journalists are instead giving, such as “pro-Palestinian,” will only deepen distrust of the news media in the center and on the right.
The media should call the protests what they are: anti-Israel.
Opinion by Ramesh Ponnuru ... Ramesh Ponnuru, a contributing columnist for the Washington Post, is the editor of National Review and a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. Twitter
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