Last year, at colleges across America, students etched themselves into history, or infamy, with the most dramatic campus protests in a generation.
In preparation for the fall semester, some major universities—from NYU to UCLA—have implemented new rules and decided to enforce old ones to protect Jewish students from activists who had declared sections of campus no-go zones for Zionists. Universities that turn a blind eye to the Tentifada phenomenon now risk violating federal statute.
Nonetheless, the chaos appears to be returning. At Temple University, protesters marched in solidarity with Palestinian “resistance against their colonizers.” Last week, a man attacked a group of Jewish students with a glass bottle on the University of Pittsburgh campus outside the school’s “Cathedral of Learning.” Meanwhile at the University of Michigan, four agitators were arrested during a “die-in.”
So clearly the danger is not yet over entirely for campuses, even though some of the steam may be leaving the movement. The Democratic National Convention, for example, was supposed to be the exclamation mark of rage, but the protests barely registered as a tussle.
But history teaches us that it takes only a few student true believers to make quite a mess once they decide that boycotts and sit-ins aren’t making a difference.
To understand this moment and the risk these student protesters pose, Free Press columnist Eli Lake looks at America’s history with Ivy League domestic terrorists. More than 50 years ago, campus unrest also spilled into the streets and moved off the grid as a small and lethal group of radicals called the Weather Underground took the plunge from protest to resistance. But the Weather Underground railed against the establishment. Today’s campus protesters are supported by it. Call them. . . the Weather Overground.
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In my view, this present student uprising differs fundamentally from previous ones for four reasons:
.- As Eli emphasizes, the previous movements were opposing the establishment while they presently get supported by the establishment, professors, university authorities etc.
- A second major diffference with previous uprisings is that in my knowledge, the previous student organizations were not funded, while the present ones definitely are. The Muslim Brothers are behind these wokist useful idiots, and they are richly funded.
-They get technical support from outside the campus. A journalist from the Free Press has infiltrated the encampments and has discovered various manuals for revolutionary action provided by Muslim organizations;
- Most of the previous activists- students were at the University for just a couple of years and then blended into society. It was just a parenthesis in their lives whereas Islamists are here to stay, and they are not in ahurry, they have very long term plans, and they know how to adjust intelligently to changes of circumstances. This is why the situation is so frightening . It is not just one more of these cyclical students upheavals
I am shocked this hasn’t generated more discussion. Thanks for this Eli Lake.