My wife, a 71-year-old retired Presbyterian minister, and I, an 82-year-old retired journalist, were among the witnesses —searching, in our separate wonted ways, for the moral high ground. In the end, the cops stood on it, by default.
Hamas blew it by its inhuman tactics against Israeli civilians. Israel blew it by its excessive force and disregard of civilian casualties in Gaza. Columbia blew it by caving in to political pressure, and refusing to respect what started out as a peaceful protest. The US blew it by mindlessly pouring arms into another unwinnable war. Biden and Blinken are blowing it daily by allowing themselves to be blown off by Bibi Netanyahu.
The students blew it by allowing the protest to be derailed by the usual suspects — agents provocateurs, and fringe political groups pushing violence and hate. We saw it last night, standing by the police barricades. The usual call and response chants were going on —and the students, like sheep, followed whatever calls were loudest. A couple of middle-aged guys showed up on Amsterdam Avenue, one with a bullhorn, and from the rear of the crowd they took the lead intermittently with chants like “NYPD, Piggy, Piggy, we will make your lives shitty” and “NYPD, KKK, we know you’re Israeli-trained.” I asked the one guy where he got his bullhorn. "Amazon," he said. I asked the other who he represented, and he said “the people.”
The chants, of course, were all recorded, and will be used as evidence that the protesters were “spewing hatred” and deserve to be expelled. I can attest from my own and others’ eyewitness reporting, that the core of the student protest was moral outrage over US and university support for Israel’s assault on Gaza. But Fox News has half of America’s viewing public, and it is now having a ball vilifying and ridiculing the protesters. In his prime-time stew of news and right-wing views, Jesse Watters last night called it the “Arab Spring Break,” led by the “Columbia Caliphate” AKA the "Keffiyeh Antifa" in their “terror tepees.” The protesters are “Pro-Hamas” and “Hamas is Iran.” Their Columbia professors are “indoctrinators.” Meanwhile the hero of the nation is detained at a “show trial” downtown, designed to prevent him from going out among the people.
Right now at Columbia, the cops are playing the role of grownups. Shoulder to shoulder at the barricades last night, they were in defensive mode, confident in their overwhelming numbers, with face shields and bullet-proof vests, but only lightly armed, A friendly sergeant at the corner turned away everyone who wanted to cross the barricades, even students with Columbia IDs, and an old lady who said she wanted to go home. It’s a hard freeze, he said. Nobody gets in. We’ll tell you when it’s over.
Their operation was meticulously planned and methodically carried out, with little if any resistance and no casualties. It was like the strategy General Colin Powell used to rout Iraqi forces from Kuwait in 1991 in four days, with so few US losses that American medical units wound up treating the enemy’s wounded.
There’s more to to the Powell Doctrine, though, than overwhelming force. It’s a list of questions that have to be answered “yes” before undertaking a military operation. Is a vital national interest at stake? Do we have a clear attainable objective? Have the risks and costs been fully and frankly analyzed?
Did anyone, in Israel or the US, ask those questions about Gaza? And at home, has anyone asked if the Powell Doctrine is appropriate to use against college students?
By its own request, Columbia will be a police state through graduation. It’s a nanny police state, created by a university that treats its students like misbehaving middle-schoolers, not “men and women” supposedly educated to think and judge for themselves.
No disrespect to the police. But when they hold the moral high ground on an Ivy League campus, where do we turn for instruction?
Copyright 2024 by Tom Phillips
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