It's remarkable how the Gaza demonstrations on college campuses have become almost an exact mirror of the events they're protesting. One side spent a long time provoking, finally went a step too far, and the other, more powerful side, then massively overreacted. Art imitates life, or something like that.
41 thoughts on “Gaza here and there”
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The gang wars are heating up!
If one ignores the orders of magnitude difference between them…
Right. No one's calling it genocide of the protestors.
Tell of the birth, tell how war appeared on earth
[Verse 1]
Thunder and herbs conjugated sacred verbs
Musicians with gongs fertilised an egg with song
Asleep in the sphere, her foetus was a knot of fear
She butted with her horn, split an egg and war was born
A miracle of hate, she banged her spoon against her plate
[Chorus]
Upon her spoon this motto, wonderfully designed:
"Violence completes the partial mind."
[Hook]
Tell of the birth, tell how war appeared on earth
[Break]
Musicians with gongs fertilised an egg with song
She butted with her horn split an egg and war was born
[Bridge]
Stacking the bones on the empty aerodrome
Tinted turtle green haunts the slender submarine
She shakes her gory locks over the deserted docks
[Verse 2]
Come follow me out of dark obscurity
Follow my torch, pilgrims at the double march
Through meadows and seas, abattoirs and libraries
The pilgrims increase, boasting they are led by peace
They gut huts with gusto, pillage villages with verve
War does what she has to, people get what they deserve
[Chorus]
Upon her spoon this motto, wonderfully designed:
"Violence completes the partial mind."
_-Henry Cow- sung by the ever popular Dagmar Krause
https://youtu.be/GohtV7PV4cc?si=EMlor1I2RWkBlzCM
Wow, a fellow Henry Cow fan! That's amazing.
Feels like drivel. What is the "going to far" ? What was the series of provocations?
Good question.
I assume that Kevin is simply giving the 'more powerful side' the benefit of the doubt....because they overreacted it must be true that the other side went a step too far. We know they went a step too far because the more powerful side overreacted.
Lost in the Gaza student protest discussion, is the impact on non protesting students.
My niece is a freshman at Columbia and not involved in the protest: her words, 'campus is now crazy and its soo hard to focus on finals.'
I support free speech. However, on some campuses the protests are moving to civil disobedience that is negatively impacting other students.
i'd say for protests to be effective they must be disruptive. yes, there can be negative impacts on other, but you have to consider the balance of impacts. i'm sympathetic toward your niece but "hard to focus on finals" seems a reasonable cost to try to end war killing ten of thousands.
kahner - I would probably agree with your perspective, IF I thought student protests, on various colleges, would likely stop the war in Gaza.
1. Frankly, domestically, I think Biden has selected sides: it is very unlikely Biden will materially shift positions (not just provide verbal support for two states etc ) on the Gaza conflict before the election.
2. Even if Biden materially shifted sides, its not clear to me that Netanyahu would not just proceed with the war, and hope for a Trump victory.
Bottom line, I suspect, many of the Columbia protestors will end up arrests and not materially change anything...
This.
Yes.
You thinking Biden has taken sides doesn't mean Biden has taken sides. If Biden is wise, then he is taking the side of truth where "truth" is not one side's truth or the other side's truth but the truth that serves their common interest.
Show me how evidence supports your conclusion and I'll show you conflicting evidence you excluded. Inclusive evidence supports the idea that Biden is not perfect, but wise.
Thank God the current POTUS, unlike his predecessor, is wise.
In a very close election they might get blamed for the dictatorship.
They're not asking for the war to be stopped. They're asking for their universites to divest from Isreal and terminate contracts with vendors who are helping support the destruction in Gaza.
emh1969 - agreed the near term ask is primally divestment. However, if you ask the protesting student their goal, most will say an immediate end to the war in Gaza.
Either way, do you honestly think the Columbia protestors are going to achieve divestment ? Or, is the more likely outcome suspension and arrest ? Oh and Trump loves the political impact of all of this...ugh!
Nothing these students can do will end that war. Only the Biden Administration can hope do so by getting a ceasefire agreement between the parties involved which they've been trying to do. If you wish to have a University not invest in defense companies, fine but these protestors think investing in Google helps the Israeli cause. It's nuts!
I'm sure children in Gaza would LOVE to have your niece's problem...
Indeed. It sure would be nice not to be surrounded by the terrorists your parents likely supported and then later used you and your family as a human shield after said terrorists systematically raped, mutilated and murdered someone else’s children…
Again, denying any agency to Israel. And the parents of Gaza were less likely to have supported Hamas than not: Hamas got less than half the vote, running as the Change and Reform list.
"systematically raped, mutilated"
Hamas and affiliated militias and other actors were guilty of heinous war crimes Oct 7. What you list above however, is completely unsubstantiated. And give that the initial accounts and hyperbolic claims have been debunked or at least called into serious question, I'd put my money on this being propaganda designed to create an alibi for the criminal and unconscionable Israeli response.
As Kevin and the commenters make clear, minor disruptions to a girl studying for finals is a mirror of the initial attack on Israel.
MIRROR IMAGE! A GIRL WAS INCONVENIENCED!
This is my favorite part of American culture. Massive outrage over perceived/imagined minor inconveniences.
The protests are spreading world wide, so there's that. Israel may have finally burned through its Holocaust-driven good will.
Interesting. Israel gets credit for Holocaust survival, but not for being the lone democracy in the Middle East, standing alone in a sea of people literally saying “kill ‘em all.”
Thanks for your “good will”.
Israel isn't much of a "democracy." It refuses to grant citizenship to people in land it insists is theirs, even though those people have lived there for literally hundreds, if not thousands, of years. Certain ethnic groups, while technically granted citizenship, are still not permitted to buy property in certain areas or build. They have elected MKs, but there is an unwritten rule that they will never, ever be allowed in a governing coalition.
Lots of countries have the trappings of democracy, but are not.
While flawed, Israel is most definitely a democracy by any definition that normal people use. Heck, the Economist Democracy Index places it 30th in the world, just one place behind the USA.
Calling it otherwise just makes you look like someone who mindlessly hates all things Israeli. Which based on your comments elsewise might just be true.
When all you've got is ad hominem...
Perhaps you missed the Economist Democracy Index data?
Hamas definitely went too far from our and Israel's perspective. But do you think Hamas has regrets or considers it a big success?
I doubt they think it a success. I believe they were counting on other parties (Hezbollah, Iran) being compelled to enter on their side. I think at this point they are just trying to survive.
The mirror image effect is a frequently observed, frequently described, and potentially but not necessarily explainable phenomenon. Here's my explanation:
Our nature is inescapably tribal. Every legitimate religious or philosophical practice implies the perfectly logical principle that we are all subjects of a common tribe. The cause of the described phenomenon is the effect of people forgetting that principle.
I may be alone, but I can't help but think that this entire student protesting thing has been grossly overplayed. There are so many interested parties in making this a big thing. The Right loves the image of elite kids acting entitled and is pushing for the cops or troops to go in and bust some heads. The Progressive Left is getting all dewy eyed about Those Courageous Kids Fighting The Man on behalf of the oppressed. And the press is just loving all the clicks.
I for one am looking forward to the semester being over and this "crisis" abating. I just hope that it is not costing Biden votes (moderation is a hard sell in a time of outsized passion), but fear it is.
Nobody's voting yet. I think that the polls we see now are more about people's emotions than their likely votes. It is a fact that foreign policy rarely is much of a factor in US elections. And eventually most of those people who oppose Biden's Middle East policies will remember that tfg would be worse. The Abraham accords weren't a bad thing, but they are a side issue, and did nothing to prevent October 7.
Ah, well this is one of the dumber and more tone-deaf posts from Mr. Drum in a while.
Heh. He's just tossing out chum.
Ah, well this is one of the dumber and more tone-deaf comments from Mr. McMahon in a while.
I must’ve missed when the student protestors killed people including babies. Or when the police forces starved the protestors to near death and blew up their dorms and hospitals, killing protestors and their babies.
But yes. Otherwise the parallels between the two are striking.
Sometimes people including babies are killed by people driving through a red light. Sometimes people drive through a red lights and no one notices. Otherwise the parallels between the two are striking.
Kevin’s analogy certainly reflects a core Zionist narrative: that any round of the conflict starts with Palestinian misdeeds, never Israel’s.
So if Israel had killed 6400 Palestinians in the prior fifteen years and was waging war upon Palestine that entire time (blockades are an act of war under international law) and even when Israel committed an act of state sponsored terrorism the day before, when Palestinians escaped their cage and killed Israelis on 10/7, it was they who “started it”.
PS: If you don’t know about the 10/6 terrorist attack, your media diet is part of the problem.
Speaking of remarkable, this is a remarkably self referential posting! Your characterization of the protests is an exact mirror of the mainstream characterization of the assault on Gaza. The synopsis begins with "one side" provoking and ignores the fact that the side with the power is keeping the other side in an intolorable situation.
In Gaza, the narrative never starts with the enforced misery of 2 million human beings. In the story of the protests, the narrative does not start with 6 months of US government support for clear and ongoing war crimes.
My comment is not about who is right or wrong, only about an unfair framing.
//One side spent a long time provoking //
Are you talking about Hamas? A few days before the Oct 7th attack, a mob of ultra religious nuts marched through Al Aqsa totally disrespecting the Arabs who were there praying. Hamas literally named the operation "Al Aqsa Flood" for this very reason. And let's not forget about the nightly raids in the West Bank and illegal Settler killings of beduoins.
Israel is and has been doing most of the "provoking" in this conflict. Because the more you keep the violence going, the less time you have to negotiate over the land you're stealing.