Columbia University once again became the center of a radical universe.
More than 50 years after anti-Vietnam War protesters rioted on Columbia’s campus in 1968, anti-Israel agitators have disrupted school operations and inspired similar actions at universities across the country.
Although today’s demonstrators are more violent than their 1960s predecessors in openly supporting terrorist groups, they are still the ideological heirs of the New Left and the spirit of the first Morningside Heights revolutionaries. He is the grandson who inherited the.
It’s “Columbia 1968” — the anti-Semitic version.
Admittedly, the protests back then were larger and more violent events.
Demonstrators occupied the building and temporarily took the dean hostage.
The campus has been closed.
When police arrived in the early morning hours of April 30, 1968 to retake the occupied building, they arrested over 700 people, some of whom they assaulted.
The situation at Columbia University today, while toxic, would have to be much worse to rival the 1968 riots.
Rather than seizing buildings, protesters set up encampments.
Police arrested about 100 people when they were called in to temporarily quell an illegal gathering last week.
The protests drew national attention (and deserved condemnation from the White House), but they are not the cause of 1968, when famous journalists and poets joined demonstrators in barricaded buildings. .
But the head of the university’s Jewish learning initiative urged Jewish students to stay home fearing for their safety, and classes were moved remotely.
Both demonstrators’ arguments are nearly identical.
In 1968, protesters denounced the university’s “complicity” in the Vietnam War and its “systemic racism” for wanting to expand a gym into the neighborhood.
Decades later, these are still popular catchphrases.
To today’s radicals, Israel is what the Pentagon was in 1968.
Just as protesters back then demanded that universities sever ties with Pentagon organizations conducting research on the Vietnam War, today’s radicals want universities to withdraw from Israel. I’m here.
The essential argument is the same: Colombia bears moral responsibility for the crimes against humanity committed in imperialist wars.
Former agitators may have been surprised to learn that student demonstrators, acting in the tradition of 1968, were embarrassing and harassing Jews and expressing support for horrific terrorist attacks.
However, here too there is a connection to 1968, or at least to more radical elements.
Mark Rudd, a famous Colombian protest leader, became a member of the violent Weather Underground.
The group’s manifesto is a blistering attack on American influence in the world.
The group claims that “the main struggle taking place in the world today is between U.S. imperialism and the national liberation struggles that oppose it.”
The fact is, according to the manifesto, that “all other empires and petty dictators depend in the long run on American imperialism, which has unified, allied and defended all the reactionary forces of the whole world. “That’s what it means.
That’s why “we judge who is our friend and who is our enemy by whether they help U.S. imperialism or fight to defeat U.S. imperialism.”
The same logic animates radicals today.
Hamas is the equivalent of Che Guevara or the Viet Cong, and Israel is an expression of Western imperialism that must be opposed at all costs.
(The Weather Underground statement briefly mentions “Israeli imperialism.”)
The main difference between 1968 and today is that protesters then were revolting against universities dominated by traditional liberals, whereas radicals have been steadily occupying universities ever since. It’s about being there.
Today’s protesters are only crudely expressing the attitudes and metaphors heard in many classrooms.
A large contingent of Columbia University faculty members came out to protest the arrest of the instigators.
Columbia 1968 is widely recognized as a seminal event in academia.
If Colombia in 2024 ends up looking the same way, it will be a disaster.
Twitter: @RichLowry
