“Free Palestine,” the brave Ivy League protestors call. After all, they are brave, aren’t they? They are obviously the second iteration of Martin Luther King Jr and the Civil Rights Movement, aren’t they? Ready to lay down their lives for their cause? Be jailed? Risk death?
Not quite.
In fact, the Ivy League protestors are delicate. They are only able to protest under fundamentally ridiculous conditions. These conditions include the quaint belief that they have a right to privacy even when they are in view of the public, they deserve donations from the public to pay for their melatonin gummies and tampons, and if their IDs are deactivated, they have absolutely no recourse. There’s no way they can find a synagogue, or housing, off campus. No way whatsoever.
This peculiar combination of self-involvement, learned helplessness and fragility makes them, and their movement, fodder for comedy.
Take a look at the Columbia Gaza Solidarity Encampment’s Community Guidelines:
Look at #6- “We commit to never photograph or videotape another community member without their affirmative consent.”
These people are supposedly brave enough to come out, camp out and protest for what they believe- but not brave enough to stand by what they say and accept the consequences for their actions. What’s more, it’s not just that they cannot film each other. They restrict and prevent the press and others from filming them- even when the people are filming from locations outside of the encampment.
Check out this video where an AP reporter is told he can’t film the encampment (even though he’s taking a wide shot from outside of it). Instead, he is directed to the encampment’s press corps so they can control the message.
Student: Hi. Have you spoken to the media folks?
Reporter: I would love to speak to the media folks once my wide shot is done in about ten minutes.
Student: Yeah, but you’re supposed to have explicit permission from the students that are going to appear in your live shot. So no, this is not appropriate. Uh, no. But we have people who are willing to speak to you in the front.
Reporter: Yeah, if a media representative wants to come out and speak to me, I would love to speak to them.
Student: No. That’s not how it works. They’re already up there.
Reporter: Okay, so where would I be going?
In this video someone was filming the CUNY encampment and they blocked his phone, pushed him away and forced him out.
There’s another video (please provide the link if you have it) of a female protestor telling people they can’t film to “protect the privacy of students.”
So just so we get this right: you’re protesting, taking over spaces on campus and challenging the establishment- but you think you have the right to prevent other people from filming you while you do it? This is the hothouse flower mentality- I can protest, but only under very specific conditions where I can control the narrative/ have my privacy respected. What privacy? The point of protesting is to have eyes on you!
It gets worse.
Isra Hirsi, Ilhan Omar’s daughter, gave an interview to Teen Vogue. I’ve bolded some of it. Here’s what she said:
Teen Vogue: But you got out and couldn’t go back to your dorm.
IH: Honestly that was my biggest concern. Me and Maryam are the only ones that live in the dorms, and we were suspended pretty early, so we knew that we were not allowed to get back. When I got to 1 Police Plaza, my roommates had brought me a bag of clothes because they knew that I was likely evicted. We were reading our email and it said we had 15 minutes to go get our shit if we wanted it, and we'd have to go with a public safety escort. I was like, I'm not going to do that. But I was a little bit frantic, like, where am I going to sleep? Where am I gonna go? And also all of my shit is thrown in a random lot. It’s pretty horrible.
Have you seen the photo they showed to the desk attendants? The “no entry” photo? Maryam posted hers on Twitter, SJP posted mine. I live in a building where professors also live, and a lot of the professors that live in our buildings are in [Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine], so I reached out to them before I got out of jail like, can you guys please talk to desk attendants in my building? They were like, can we bring her in as our guest, anything? And they were like no, essentially. They also showed that [no entry] photo to every single public safety officer at Barnard and sent it to all my professors, so I kind of have no option.
Aww. You were warned in advance what would happen, chose not to gather your belongings, then became concerned over where you would sleep and now “have no option.” You’re basically homeless! Actually wait, no, you’re not. You could stay with an off campus friend. You could rent a hotel room. You could go hang out with your mother- which you ended up doing anyway when you, despite being suspended, somehow ended up back at the encampment on Columbia with her.
The Daily Beast took it even further.
Homeless? Left without food? Really? As a bonified left-wing protestor who is supposed to be checking your privilege, maybe spare a thought for the actual New Yorkers who are actually homeless and starving before cosplaying as one.
What are some of the items that it’s essential to have at these encampments, anyway? A reporter for the Free Press shed some light on that in her article, “Camping Out at Columbia’s Communist Coachella.” I’ve bolded part of it.
Ariella says that they spend most of their time in “the tarp,” which is a section of the encampment with all the supplies—the melatonin gummies, the gluten-free bread, the organic tampons, the Aveeno sunscreen, the charging banks, the board games, and the pins that say “Union Proud.” The workers who enter the tarp, which Ariella tells me is also called “the cornucopia,” have to take off their shoes first, since it’s also their makeshift kitchen and they “want to keep it clean,” in the words of one tarp volunteer.
It gets better. Who is paying for these items?
Why, you are! At least at the Northwestern campus. Look at this adorable fundraising campaign. Apparently students wealthy enough to afford Northwestern tuition need me to sponsor their Sharpies and tampons.
They also need dinner! Because nothing says “I’m very serious about protesting against what I perceive to be a genocide” like “I require a hot meal.”
Back to the left wing privilege based jargon- shouldn’t these students, if serious about their cause, be “centering Gaza” and asking that people spend money on causes that in their view aid the starving citizens in Gaza- rather than purchasing sleeping bags or hot meals for Ivy Leaguers?
It gets better. The Columbia Daily Spectator editorial board penned this opinion.
Through welcoming, diverse forms of religious expression, including Shabbat and Muslim prayers, and the featuring of multicultural performances from Mariachi music to Indian folk dances, the encampment serves as a zone of solidarity, tying together calls for liberation around the world. By contrast, the administration effectively denied suspended Jewish students the ability to practice their religion by preventing them from accessing the University’s synagogue, as explained in an open letter from JVP.
The claim made here, similar to that of Isra Hirsi’s “homelessness”- Suspended Jewish students couldn’t access the University’s synagogue. There isn’t a single other synagogue in the entire New York area that they could attend! They’ve been denied the ability to practice their religion! The horror!
It gets more ridiculous.
On Friday night, after the administration banned the use of tents on the lawns and Public Safety confiscated blankets, hundreds of students slept through the night, not only risking arrest but their personal health as well. These unnecessarily precarious conditions occurred only because the administration would rather jeopardize the health of its students than negotiate a solution that the majority of the community agrees to.
Students spent one night on a lawn without a blanket.
Students who are choosing to sleep outdoors rather than go inside to their well-appointed dorm rooms.
Surely they will catch a fatal disease and die immediately.
After all, they are risking “their personal health!” They are under “unnecessarily precarious conditions.” By taking away their blankets, the administration is “jeopardizing the health” of its student body!
And then there are the sprinklers- which tend to turn on when you are sleeping on a lawn. The sprinklers needed to be turned off so as not to “endanger” students.
I don’t know about you, but I don’t find sprinklers to be particularly dangerous, myself.
Just to recap- Ivy League protestors can’t handle outsiders taking video of them, require melatonin gummies and nail polish at their encampments, consider themselves homeless even when they have lots of money, require me to fund their blankets, hot dinners and sleeping bags, are denied the right to practice their religion if they can’t access the university synagogue, and find their health to be precarious when made to sleep without a blanket for one night. Additionally, they find sprinklers to be dangerous.
But these are the protesters Ilhan Omar characterizes as “brave.”
You know whose bravery and courage I find awe inspiring? Aner Shapiro’s. He had no weapons but used his bare hands to throw seven grenades out of a shelter where he and others were hiding on October 7. He ultimately died - but saved the others with him.
When it comes to people whose bravery and courage I admire,
the Hothouse Flower Ivy League ain’t it.
Please send this to the NYTimes and to the NYPost and to the Wall Street Journal - FAST.
And to Victor Davis Hanson, for good measure.
I’d like to see how these delicate flowers would have fared in the days of MLK or true heroes like Alexei Navalny