Outside agitators
As encampments have spread across college campuses the issues have often been muddled. Israeli brutality against Gaza has been a focus, while the Hamas hostage taking and massacre has faded into the background.
One issue has received only passing attention: the role of “outside agitators.” But its not just antisemitic hecklers outside the gates at Columbia University. Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson and education committee members like Elise Stefanik and Virginia Foxx should be counted among the ranks.
New York City officials have been quick to point to outsiders involved in the encampment and in the takeover of an administration building at the Morningside Heights campus, which ended with more than 100 arrests Tuesday night. (Full disclosure, I am a Columbia Journalism School graduate.)
It’s fair to express skepticism over a familiar strawman when civil disobedience escalates into violence. Bringing solid proof of outsiders will be necessary, especially since there’s no evidence of physical violence.
Just a lot of ugly speech. And some outright antisemitism.
But with the party’s likely presidential nominee sitting in a Manhattan courtroom, Republicans need a distraction. So they set the Wayback Machine for 1968. After all, it worked for Richard Nixon.
Let’s stipulate, as the lawyers say, that the roots of the Israel-Hamas war are deep, two peoples and two religions fighting for the same land reach well beyond October 7. The Hamas massacre and the Israeli response in leveling buildings and denying food and water to Gazans — even as Hamas uses those citizens as human shields — is ripe for emotional debate.
It’s also ripe for political manipulation. Witness the tactics of the party dominated by Christian nationalists — an America First movement that believes this is a nation governed by god, not men. Think that’s an overstatement? Listen to Johnson:
“…Go pick up a Bible off your shelf and read it. That’s my worldview.”
Which makes taking up the fight against antisemitism um, a tad hypocritical.
But that’s the cause they espouse as they throw gasoline on the smoldering campus unrest, the real target of a party that has declared it own ”war on woke.”
“The ‘war on woke’ has involved brazen attacks on academic freedom in universities and schools; on the rights of transgender people, particularly children, to gender-affirming health care; and on any person, group or business deemed too liberal – even Mickey Mouse.”
The latest battle in that campaign began in earnest in December, when the House education committee hauled the presidents of Harvard, MIT and the University of Pennsylvania before them to explain the reaction to what were then milder though hardly less vocal protests.
The appalling, talking point response of two presidents ultimately led to their departure. But for a previously planned trip out of country Columbia President Nemat “Minouche” Shafik likely would have met the same fate.
So when her time in the barrel arrived, Shafik was determined not to make the same mistakes. Even when the Egyptian-born president was lectured on scripture:
“In one head-scratching moment, Rick Allen, a Republican congressman from Georgia, asked Shafik whether she wanted her university to be “cursed by God.”
“Definitely not,” Shafik replied.
The congressman then went on to suggest that administrators at the Ivy League school require students to read the Bible, even though they already do. Most undergraduates have to read parts of the text as part of a mandated series of classes every student must pass to graduate.”
Nevertheless, she fell into the trap set for her, inflaming a campus that had been a relatively peaceful encampment. Prompting her to call in New York City Police (for the first time) and sparking protests at campuses around the country in response to her overreaction.
Enter Mike Johnson, traveling to New York to lecture students to, in effect, sit down and shut up:
“This is dangerous. This is not the First Amendment, this is not free expression. If this is not contained quickly and if these threats and intimidation are not stopped, there is an appropriate time for the National Guard.”
It doesn’t take an academic study to draw a direct line from those remarks to the building takeover and the NYPD’s second visit. Just days before the 54th anniversary of the Kent State massacre.
Today’s news cycle is replete with coverage of Columbia and a violent protest at UCLA.
Testimony by a lawyer about what even the don’t rock-the-boat New York Times characterized as the “seamy world of celebrity hush money and corroborated key facts underpinning the prosecution’s case” against Donald Trump fell out of TV network A blocks. As did the $9,000 contempt of court fine leveled against the once and potentially future president.
As a different Republican president once declared: Mission Accomplished.