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By Hugh Fitzgerald
Students For Palestine, Students For Justice in Palestine, and so many other campus groups of that sinister ilk, have been disrupting colleges and universities across the country, making demands of various degrees of malevolence and absurdity. More on these demonstrators can be found here: “Ithaca College President Rejects Anti-Zionist Group’s Demands,” by Dion J. Pierre, Algemeiner, April 1, 2024:
The president of Ithaca College, a school located in New York, has rejected the demands of an anti-Zionist group on campus that staged a “die-in” at the school’s Peggy Ryan Williams Center while events for newly admitted students took place there.
According to The Ithacan, the official campus newspaper of Ithaca College, President La Jerne Terry Cornish refused to accede to three demands made by Students for Palestine (SFP): issuing a statement acknowledging a falsely alleged genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, shuttering Ithaca Hillel’s Birthright program for Jewish students, and, in the paper’s words, [conducting] an audit “that would provide access to information about if the college receives funding from any Israeli or Zionist corporations.”
Through the college’s public relations office, Cornish told the paper that she has higher priorities.
President Cornish told them that her sphere of influence and focus remains on representing the entire Ithaca College community, and that the best use of her voice is in advocating for dialogue across differences and in encouraging further opportunities for education, both inside and outside of the classroom,” college spokesperson Dave Maley said in a statement.
This response was not nearly good enough. Cornish should not have answered the Justice for Palestine demands by claiming she was just too busy on other things that had a higher priority. What President Cornish should have said it that the demands by Students for Palestine were outrageous, and that: primo, Israel is not committing genocide in Gaza; secundo, that the campus Hillel’s Israel Birthright program has not violated any campus rules and will remain open; terzo, there will be no audit to uncover, and presumably to cancel, any funding the college receives “from Jewish or Zionist corporations.”
“President Cornish has great concerns about the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, and she stands by her previous statements to the campus community expressing her horror at the ongoing violence in Gaza and Israel; her support for the college’s Muslim, Arab, and Palestinian students; and her condemnation of all forms of hatred and bigotry, including Islamophobia and antisemitism,” Maley continued.
At a time when the college’s “Muslim, Arab, and Palestinian students” are attempting to bully the administration into submitting to its demands, this was hardly the moment to declare “support for the college’s Muslim, Arab, and Palestinian students.” Why would they need such a declaration of support? It is not they who are being berated and attacked on campus, not they who are subject to constant hostile chanting. They don’t feel threatened; it is they who are doing the threatening. And why, in deploring the “ongoing violence in Gaza and Israel,” did President Cornish make no mention of the Israeli hostages? Have they already been forgotten, and the world’s attention focused only on all those “innocent civilians” whom Hamas claims have been killed by the IDF in Gaza?
One student told The Ithacan that Students for Palestine intends to take further action, such as “showing the administration how many students are disappointed and unhappy and angry with them.” He suggested that a legion of students will join them to “keep pushing that it is not okay to stay silent.”
That’s a threat to hold a mass demonstration against the college administration. Who is to be master at Ithaca College? The pro-Hamas, anti-Israel students seeking to disrupt the campus, or the administrators whom they are trying to disrupt?
“Sit-ins” and “die-ins,” demonstrations in which anti-Zionist students unlawfully occupy a building and lie on the floor for hours until campus officials give them what they want, have occurred at higher education institutions across the country since Hamas’ Oct. 7 massacre of civilians in southern Israel.
These “sit-ins” and “die-ins” right outside or even, in some cases, inside the administrative offices, in an attempt to massively disrupt the workings of colleges, can cause university presidents to cave to the Justice for Palestine bullies now spreading their venom on so many campuses. But not all have done so.
Last week, Vanderbilt University in Tennessee suspended over a dozen students belonging to an anti-Zionist group that occupied an administrative building and refused to leave, according to the school’s official newspaper, The Vanderbilt Hustler. During the demonstration, students performed in full view of their peers private bathroom functions, including relieving themselves in plastic bottles. The suspended students are banned from campus until further notice.
At Vanderbilt, a dozen students who occupied an administrative building were suspended. Perhaps they had simply gone too far, not so much by taking over an administrative building and preventing staff from entering, but by urinating in public, which attracted a great deal of publicity and outrage, that required the administration to act. Will those students be permanently expelled? Let us hope so.
Another sit-in at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, staged by Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), has lasted nearly a week despite the college’s president, Sarah Willie-LeBreton, saying that the demonstration is against school policy and has interfered with official business, including serving students who are disabled.
“Disruption is necessary when injustice is occurring,” SJP said on Sunday in a statement attached to a petition which defends the group’s actions. “There can be no status quo during genocide, at Smith College, or anywhere. There is no disability justice, no equity and inclusion, no protection from legal discrimination, no class justice than can exist without a free Palestine.”
My, my. Talk about narcissism and navel-gazing. Ever more absurd, at Smith the Students for Justice in Palestine believe that nothing good can happen anywhere without a “free Palestine.” And “free Palestine” means the destruction of the tiny Jewish state and its replacement “from the river to the sea” by a twenty-third Arab state. Without that state of “Palestine,” they claim, preposterously, that there is no “disability justice” (?), “no equity and inclusion,” no “protection from legal discrimination,” “no class justice,” and so on. Everything depends on “justice for Palestine.” Apparently, the moral arc of the universe cannot bend toward justice — remember that phrase Obama liked to quote, believing that it came from Martin Luther King, when, in fact, King lifted it, without attribution, from the nineteenth-century abolitionist Theodore Parker — unless “Palestine is free.” That freedom for “Palestine” is the central issue of our time, that must be resolved if there is to be justice anywhere, on any matter, from China to Peru. Nothing good can happen anywhere, about anything, until Israel is replaced by Palestine.
Note to college presidents: don’t bother to negotiate with, or take seriously the demands of, these demonstrators who are disrupting campus life. Call in the police, clear the buildings where they stage their ghastly sit-ins, and have them arrested for criminal trespass. Let the state punish them for that, and meanwhile, expel those students — without hope of reprieve — from the schools whose educational mission they are subverting. Once a dozen schools have responded thus, as Vanderbilt has done, with suspensions or expulsions, word will get around and students will discover that they no longer are so enthusiastic about expressing their support for the Cause of Palestine by disrupting both faculty and administrators from fulfilling their tasks.
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