Replies

Welcome to protest season, where the cause changes but the tactics stay the same

https://www.azcentral.com/story/opinion/op-ed/2024/04/27/college-protests-israel-hamas/73454043007/

Excerpt:

It’s protest season. Again.

This time, the Israel-Hamas conflict is the pretext for activists to block freeways, vandalize buildings and occupy universities.

Protesters took over Columbia University’s Morningside Heights campus, renaming it the Gaza Solidarity Encampment.

An estimated 800 students set up tents before replacing the American flag with a Hamas banner. They chanted Islamist slogans, told Jewish students to “go back to Europe” and menaced anyone who disagreed.

Being a prestigious Ivy League school (annual cost of nearly $90,000), Columbia administrators quickly shut down the unrest.

Just kidding, they canceled in-person classes, as during the pandemic. Seems $90K doesn’t buy what it used to.

his week, the occupation has spread to other campuses, including Harvard and Yale, where a Jewish student was stabbed in the eye.

Students tried a similar stunt at the University of Texas, but the Lone Star State wasn’t having it.

Although Columbia’s organizers have tried to keep out the press, videos have spread across social media. The anger and chaos recalls scenes from 1934 Germany.

What were initially sold as anti-Israel protests quickly dissolved into pro-Hamas, antisemitic mobs.

Although 2024’s target is new, at least for America, we’ve witnessed the same tactics summer after summer after summer. Only the cause has changed.

Every year presents a new excuse to hoist signs, spray-paint buildings and shatter glass. Let’s review recent history.

It’s the latest in a string of causes to protest
In 2017, the Women’s March was launched in reaction to the #MeToo revelations, while in 2018, the anti-gun March for Our Lives dominated headlines. Neither attracted much violence; you could find that at anti-Trump protests.

In 2019, Greta Thunberg grimaced at the United Nations over climate change, which apparently was solved by blocking traffic and throwing tomato soup on Van Gogh paintings. This Monday was Earth Day, but it didn’t get much coverage. Environmentalism is so five years ago.

The pandemic put the kibosh on public gatherings, which made mass protests a bit hypocritical. So, the anger went online. In 2021, it was COVID masks and vaccines, while in 2022, anyone skeptical of funding Ukraine was labeled a Putin devotee.

But those annoying COVID restrictions were put on hold back in 2020, just as the virus was at its peak. Black Lives Matter protests swamped cities from coast-to-coast, often peaceful during the day but turning ugly by night.

Downtown Seattle was turned into the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone while Portland burned for months.

What uproar are we planning for 2025?

One year, statues are toppled and the next, Jews are bullied, but it’s amazing how the far-left treats such wildly diverse issues with the same small toolbox.

It has ever been thus. As one radical wrote for a Students for a Democratic Society publication in the 1960s, “The issue is never the issue. The issue is always the revolution.”

All the topics cited above are important issues for public debate. Sexism in the workplace to gun control to wars abroad, each is worthy of media attention, no matter the year.

What’s bizarre is the singular focus on one moral panic each summer to the exclusion of everything else. Earth Day was huge in 2019, while in 2022 it was met with a yawn.