A huge crowd of faculty members who teach at Columbia University in New York held a mass walk-out on Monday afternoon to protest the institution having called police to arrest students at a pro-Palestinian encampment protest last week.
Hundreds of members of the teaching cohort at Columbia walked out in solidarity with the students who were arrested by the New York police department last week and also suspended by the university.
The solidarity protest came as students put protest tents back up in the middle of campus on Monday after they were torn down last week when more than 100 arrests were made.
The university on Monday morning announced that classes would be held remotely after further days of unrest on the New York campus, following the arrest of pro-Palestinian protesters there last week.
Good on the faculty.
We can continue to see Israel’s playbook here. Any criticism of their despicable actions (was genocide ever mentioned in the article?) gets converted to antisemitism.
I hope the protestors keep it up. Force the media outlets to say the word genocide. Don’t let them ignore what’s going on with the Palestinians.
It’s an awful thing to do to the greater Jewish community to leverage antisemitism as a political defense. It’s diluting a concept that has plagued the Jewish people for millennia.
It’s an awful thing to do to the greater Jewish community to leverage antisemitism as a political defense. It’s devaluing to a concept that has plagued the Jewish people for millennia.
It’s also increasing the blind hatred of all Jews.
Yep. I am no friend of Israel by any stretch of the imagination, but one can’t help but notice how all the old Jewish stereotypes are beginning to rear their heads again in discourse related to the Israel/Palestine conflict.
Israel is committing genocide. Antisemitism is on the rise. Both these things are true, but the latter should not excuse the former, and the former should not invalidate the latter.
It’s also worth noting that most of the Israelis are oppsing the government and actively protest aginst it
A poster on news not too long ago posted a photo claiming the terrorist in Australia who stabbed a bunch of people was “Benjamin Cohen.”
Just so people know, anti-Palestinian, anti-Muslim and anti-Jewish bigotry are not tolerated in this community. We do not tolerate any form of bigotry here.
The funny thing is that abusing the accusation of anti-semitism to deflect valid criticism of the actions of the nation state of Israel could itself be considered anti-semitism as it can be harmful for anybody who is a Jew.
I’m a Jew and you’re right. It is. It’s self-hating antisemitism to gain power.
This entire article is revolting.
"Back at Columbia, Nicholas Baum, a 19-year-old Jewish freshman who lives in a Jewish theological seminary building two blocks from Columbia’s Morningside Heights campus, told the Associated Press that protesters over the weekend were “calling for Hamas to blow away Tel Aviv and Israel”. He said some of the protesters shouting antisemitic slurs were not students but that Jewish students were scared.
“There’s been so much vilification of Zionism, and it has spilled over into the vilification of Judaism,” he said."
I think you can agree that we can support a group that is suffering from genocide to fight back and it isn’t necessarily antisemitic. Of course, there may be antisemitism from some sectors, but Israel conflates criticism and antisemitism all the time. As a result, at this point, I don’t think it is a big concern. Allowing the protestors to fight against a genocidal nation is the more important issue.
Honestly, I blame AIPAC. AIPAC has been weaponizing any criticism of Isreal as antisemitism for the past decade - doing this erodes our ability to call out genuine antisemitism. AIPAC is accelerating social acceptance of absolutely vile positions.
For reference, I’m not Jewish but grew up in an antizionist slanted Jewish community and I think that Isreal’s actions in Gaza are atrocious but I also don’t fucking tolerate any genuine antisemitism (which does pop up on lemmy from time to time).
AIPAC and Israel’s government itself.
I was just shocked that there are apparently people who don’t hear “zionism” and have the same reaction as hearing the word “Nazism”. The whole article is written from the perspective of a Zionist (bad).
Exactly, you have people protesting a genocide, and then there are students carrying the flag of the genocidal nation to provoke the protestors. To me, I would probably treat it as a white supremacist carrying a Nazi flag to a George Floyd protest.
I agree with the other poster, this article is revolting in it’s one-sided treatment of the issue.
I saw a TV playing Fox News today, and they were running a bit on this labeled “anti-israel protests”, so that certainly doesn’t help either.
Why does the picture in that article look so fake? Is it just the lighting? The signs look like a terrible photoshop
I think it’s because some people are holding their signs with no bends directly at the camera and no light glare… It looked odd to me at a glance too.
I just checked back and that picture is gone from the article. It had a crowd of people with 4 or 5 if them holding up signs on what looked like printer paper with messages like “protect our students” but the signs and fonts looked unnaturally crisp, almost like a meme template
