WRFH/Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM - The Social Mediators: College Pro-Palestine Protests

Episode Date: May 3, 2024

This week we discuss the ongoing pro-Palestine protests profilerating across college campuses. Tune in to hear about why these protests are happening (and why people are getting arrested), a non-exhaustive list of campuses involved, and (potentially) the new up-and-coming profession for our current moment.  

This is the social mediators on Radio Free Hillsdale, 101.7 FM, where we examine the truth disparity between what's on social media and what's actually true. I'm Julian Parks. And I'm Garrett Gulesby. And today we are talking about some of the student protests, or maybe all of them. I don't know how broad Garrett's getting. It would take a long time to talk about all of them. I just know about the mainstream ones. We're going to talk about student protests on college campuses, which are not a rare thing, but right now they've gotten. And definitely like more of a to do than other protests on other campuses. And it's spreading. I will say that the reason I offered up this episode idea this week was because we drove past George Washington University. And we saw a bunch of tents like covering a part of their campus. And I would like look at one of the people I was driving with. And I was like, what?

It's just a lot of homeless people living on George Washington University's campus. And they're like, no, this is the past. Palestine protests. And I was just genuinely like, I mean, three more minutes of common sense thinking. And I probably would have figured out what they were trying to do. But my initial reaction was like, what is that doing? Like sitting in a tent. But then I remembered, you know, history. So yes. Let's get into what I know about these things. I will say that if I really was super entrenched in the Israel-Palestine conflict, social media could probably give you a perfect view of what's going on here, which is never really the point of the show. The point of the show is never to like

exhaust the information that exists on social media. It's to get like a general vibe of the narrative. But there is a lot on this. Like a lot of people individually posting, a lot of people going to these protests to do like Man on the Street style interviews. I'm sure there's a lot of articles about it. So there should be a lot of information here. Very possibly I'm missing something big, but I can give you the rundown. First of all, it seems to be, I mean, all of these protests, I should say, are pro-Palestine. None of them seem to be pro-Israel. I saw one video of a pro-Israel protest, but I didn't know where it was. I don't know who was doing it. I'm pretty sure it wasn't a college campus. Another distinction that's important to make is these are

like a lot, mostly pretty prestigious colleges. Prestigious is a word that I would use lightly, but prestigious in the realm of like mainstream media. So we're looking at like NYU, UCLA, Columbia, Yale, Harvard, and then a bunch of others, but those are the ones that are really, in my opinion, causing waves on social media. A lot of people are camping out in tents. I know on Columbia's campus, part of what they got in trouble for was not renting out the designated protest space. I don't understand that much that there's a designated protest space and that they're, like only allowed to use certain areas, probably because it expanded, but it seemed to be a lot of people that were in that area. And a lot of people did get interim suspended, which I guess is not suspended, suspended, but just interim suspended. To kick it up a notch, there was a day. I think it was

maybe last Thursday or two Thursdays ago or something. Over 100 people on Columbia's campus got arrested. Here's the part of social media that I find a little bit confusing. They're not saying why these students were arrested. If anything, it really looks like policemen are coming in and just arresting students for maybe loitering charges of just like sitting around. However, in some of the speeches that come up from different politicians and police officers that have been interviewed, there seems to be a more violent strand of these protests that are not being advertised in social media. If there's any sort of violent strand that's being advertised, it's like the NYPD grabbing people and putting them into a truck.

Like that's what's happening in terms of the actual action. If you see the protesters, all of the media coverage, at least via social media, is looking like a bunch of people sitting there and then being like, why are you taking me? What did I do? I was just standing here. And then being arrested, which I know is untrue because that's how. social media works. And because Joe Biden himself was like, you have the right to peaceful protest, but you don't have the right to violent protests. You don't have the right to break windows and to occupy

private buildings. And the big one to make Jewish students feel unsafe. Feel unsafe is a pretty vague set of terms. I don't really know what that looks like, except for I did see one video using some pretty harsh language I won't repeat here of a pro-Palestinian. protest or yelling at somebody who is wearing the star of David and just calling them all sorts of terrible names. And I don't know how the video started. Like, I don't know what happened before that video. And I don't know what happened after that video. Like, I don't have enough of the context to understand what's going on. But I know that there's definitely, I mean, if you're on social media, you should have the, like, awareness to know that people are not tolerant of Jewish people.

Like it's completely anti-Semitic. Everything that they push out is like, if you are Israeli, you're a Zionist. And if you're a Zionist, you're a terrible person and you need to be killed. Like it is pretty, it's pretty extreme, the links that people will go to. And this is not like in protest. This is like in comment sections on regular TikTok and Instagram posts. I think we did talk about this in the war in Palestine and Israel episode we did a couple, maybe months back. But like the discourse on social media is not tolerant.

And the discourse on social media is not like finding common ground at all. It's very much like both sides in a lot of ways. But the louder side being the pro-Palestinian movement and both sides being rather aggressive and intolerant, which is, I mean, indicative of their history that shouldn't be shocking if you know anything about how things have been going over the past many, many years. It seems like the aim of these protests is either on one level, they want their universities to cut ties with any corporations that are benefiting from Israel existing as a country. So I would guess that means just Israeli companies or companies that have plants in Israel or have certain outsourced parts of their company existing there. But it also seems to me that like that's not everybody's goal. It seems to me like a lot of people are doing this with the express purpose of making it clear that the elites and the bureaucracy of America are not in line with the people of America. And that the people of America want Palestine to occupy the space.

occupied, take over Israel, all the things that come with that. It seems like it is an awareness thing, and it seems like it is like a kind of an intimidation tactic in its own way against Jewish students to be like, if you believe that this country should exist, like look at how many people are against you. But that's more of me just examining not only the amount of people that are participating, but also the kinds of campuses that are participating in this, because that seems pretty standard. One last thing that I will say before I hand it over to you is that it seems like the people that are counter-protesting

aren't going to the university. It seems like people that are involved in counter-protests are people from the surrounding area, like living. Like in UCLA, for example, like people that were counter protesting pro-Israel were not students. They were people from that area. Interesting. Which I think is interesting and I don't know. But yeah, it's pretty intense stuff.

I'm excited to see maybe what you found outside of the realm of social media. For those of you who are just tuning in, this is the social mediators on Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM. I'm Gillian Parks. And I'm Garrett Gouldsby. And we are talking about the student protests, pro-Palestine protests on college campuses across America right now. So I think the thing that stuck out to me the most is you pointed out that this seems to be isolated to the kind of big name universities, the Ivy League schools. It is actually spread to way more campuses than originally than I thought. And then I would imagine are even being portrayed on social media.

I'm going to read off some names of universities that have had the worst protests. Columbia City College of New York, Harvard, USC, UCLA, Yale, Emory, Ohio State, North Carolina, Chapel Hill, U.T. Austin, Virginia Tech, ASU, and a whole laundry list of others. University of Georgia, basically every big public state university practically. And then a ton of small, like very prestigious and expensive East Coast schools. So this is all over the place. I will say the protests at Cornell, I saw some videos. As far as protests go, it kind of looks like they're having a good time. I know that's...

Oh, okay. You know, this has nothing to do with my opinion on why they're protesting or not. But they were like in a big circle, arm in arm, and they were doing a fun little dance. And I was like, you know, if I was going to attend one of these, that would be the one I would pick. Because at least it looks like they're having a good time. Everybody else just seems pretty angry. Okay. Let's talk about why this started, how we got here, what's going on, and what they're trying to accomplish.

So this started at Columbia University, just some students that are part of basically a pro-Palestine student organization on campus, got together and said that they were going to protest what's going on over in Gaza. So they basically camped out on a university property in the middle of the middle of the campus. And it just grew and grew and grew. and it was very pretty peaceful at first actually. There weren't a whole lot of problems, but it's a little bit ambiguous as to what stirred the pot, but it appears to be that there were people from outside of the university who are basically considered professional protesters,

people that do this kind of stir up trouble for a living, if you will, if you can call it a living, that incited a lot of this violence at Columbia to occur. So these are young people, that are coming in and getting everybody all riled up. And from the introduction of these people, and of course there are students that are taking part in this, right? But the NYPD came out and has said that a lot of the problems are being caused

by these like professional agitators, basically. So these groups have come in and stirred up trouble on campus. And then now the students are involved in all the craziness, and it's hard to tell who's who. But Columbia, the protests at Columbia specifically have escalated into their occupying classroom buildings. There's a video of some body cam footage from a cop that just came out where basically they're trying to take down this barricade. The students had barricaded themselves inside one of the classroom buildings and were vandalizing things and throwing things and chanting free Palestine things and destroying, basically destroying the building.

It's an old historic building. So the cops came in, took down the barricade, and began arresting people. and the image that you, the optics that you get when you just watched the video with no context is you see the police storming in and there's a roomful of people, some of whom kind of say like, oh, you know, what do you do? Like they kind of push back in a semi-violent way, but most of whom are sitting there with their hands up going, oh, no, like, what are you doing? How could you be arresting me?

I didn't do anything wrong. You have to remember those people are sitting there because they broke into the building and destroyed things. And actually, the barricade itself was made of like torn apart bits of the building and tables and chairs that had just been mangled and destroyed to create a huge pile of debris for the police to have to get through. So the people that are getting arrested, you ask, okay, well, why are they getting arrested? It seems like a lot of people are not doing anything specifically wrong.

They're getting arrested for a couple of different reasons. The big one is destruction of property. You cannot go on a college campus, break windows, spray paint the building, and then say that you are peacefully protesting and exercising your right to free speech. That's illegal. It doesn't matter what you're protesting. Even if you're protesting, I don't know, death itself. And you're like, death is bad. You still have to be arrested for what you're protesting in that instance. So that's the main thing is destruction of property. And there's been a lot of it. But the second thing is that some of these protests have started to get violent towards the cops. There's been a few, I think the most notable

ones have been at UCLA and USC where the crowd started mixing it up, pretty good with the cops, started throwing things at them, fire extinguishers, bottles, you know, you name it, fireworks, all kinds of stuff. So it's gotten pretty ugly. It doesn't sound like, I couldn't find any evidence that any cops had been hurt. But just for context, there has been over a thousand arrests from these protests across the nation. Oh my gosh. Yes. That is way more than I thought there were. Holy cow. I think 100 or so at Columbia alone. So a bunch of them have been there. And, yeah, really it's a very, it's a very thorny situation because on one hand,

you have people that just sort of seem to be sucked in by the gravity of it and are there because, okay, you know, maybe all their friends are there. And, you know, this is the thing that they're doing. And it seems like maybe a good idea to protest this war is going on because, you know, the war itself, you know, who knows if it's good or bad? It doesn't, lots of people are dying. So that seems bad. And then there are the people that are there that are openly anti-sense,

Semetic and that are causing a lot of problems for Jewish students and Jewish people in general. There is one particular, he seems, I couldn't get a name. They didn't really say a name, but one particular student at Columbia that seems to sort of be the nexus of a lot of these issues who, he's the leader of the student organization that is pro-Palestine, and he openly said, no Zionists deserve to live. And he got arrested for that and is going to be in jail for that, you know, basically making death threats against Jewish students, things like that. And then I saw one particular news newsreel where there were some Jewish students walking along

a sidewalk and this huge mob of people just shouting and screaming at them all kinds of obscene things as they walk by. So hundreds of Jewish students have filed complaints about what's going on. They don't feel safe. They don't feel like they can go to class. Jewish professors as well. There's lots of Jews in academia. So this is kind of a scary time for them.

And I think what's also very interesting is that it's not isolated to students. There are also professors that are participating in all of these protests. And obviously for more, I haven't found an instance where it seemed like faculty members got particularly violent. But some of them have been fired for the things that they've said, and the things that they've done by the university. Because once you start participating in something that gets violent, it's pretty hard to say, well, my hands are clean. I didn't take part in that. Another big, I guess people are talking a lot on the news about the punishments that are being

handed down to students. Even those that don't get arrested, a lot of them have been suspended, put on some kind of probation, put on, you know, kicked out of the school, any varying degrees of levels of punishment have been seen. The worst one is that there was a whole USC graduation block canceled. The students were essentially told you do not get to graduate from this university because of what you've done. Wait, so is it that the ceremony is canceled or that they don't get to graduate like with a degree? Both and. Oh, wow. Yes. Now that's not all, it's not the whole graduating class, right? But there were some students that were essentially told you do not deserve to receive a diploma from this university because of the way that you've carried yourself. Most of those people

that have received that kind of punishment have been pretty obviously engaged in acts of violence and vandalism and all of those things. So I think the universities don't feel a whole lot of sympathy for them. But I think who you really have to feel sympathy for is those students that were maybe only mildly part

of the protest, if even at all, and had their graduation canceled because this senior class is the same class that had their graduation canceled because of COVID. So there are some kids where... Yeah, I saw a couple. Yeah, missing two graduates. Yeah, people were talking about that one a lot, which is,

there was quite a few seniors that were like not and all involved in the protest and were just reacting and saying like, just punish the students that didn't, that were the problem. But the issue with that is that it's like, it's just an unsafe situation in general. And so gathering a bunch of people together for a huge graduation somewhere at like UCLA is like, it's kind of a ticking time bomb with a lot of people who have a lot of pent up anger and, seem to be willing to do violent things. Like it is kind of a, I understand where this decision comes from,

but I also understand being like completely disappointed by it. Yes. And then so the other, I guess, big question is what are they demanding? What are they protesting? That's kind of the point of protests, which I think some people are kind of forgetting. It seems like there are some university campuses that are in protest and there seems to be very little understanding about, okay, we're protesting because we want something, okay, not just to be angry. So the general demands

are that universities cut all ties with Israel and Israeli organizations. So that looks like a lot of different things and is a pretty complicated demand. These universities, especially you're talking Harvard, Columbia, Yale, have huge endowments that are invested in a ton of different places all around the world. And inevitably, they have ties to Israeli companies. and individuals in Israel. They have financial supporters that are Jews. You have to remember, there was a time when a lot of Jewish students, I mean, this is the case now, but even more so in the past,

tons of Jewish students attended these Ivy League universities because stereotypically tend to be very successful, yada, yada, yada, you want to go get good education and things like that. So a lot of these universities have very heavy Jewish ties, whether it be with business people or individual donors, whatnot. Basically, the students that are protesting are saying, we don't want our universities to have any association with Israel. And the other part of that is academic association. So University of Tel Aviv, and then I think it's called the University of Jerusalem. I'm not exactly sure that that's the wording of it. But two big universities in Israel that produce a lot of research, a lot of just academic volume of different nature.

So these students are demanding that their universities essentially stop engaging academically with Israeli universities. And don't share research, don't share data, don't collaborate on experiments, don't do anything like that. They want complete cutting of ties between their university and the state of Israel. That is a steep ask. It is a steep ask. And it also would take, I mean, theoretically, let's say a university said, okay, we'll give you everything that you want. it would probably take years to make that happen. And my guess, my hope is that the war between Israel and Hamas will be over in that time span.

I could be wrong. I don't know. And on the other side of this, there was actually, I don't know why, but I did find this a little bit amusing. There was a video put out on the news where some members of Hamas spray painted, I think it was directed towards Columbia University, but they said thank you students for the protesting that you're doing. So Hamas is aware of what's going on, and they approve.

They're psyched about it. All right. Well, that probably says that all we need to say about that. Yeah. That very act just sums it on up for us. Are we ready to give social media a grade? I think so. Okay.

three, two, one, C. Oh, I didn't, okay. Why did you say C? I felt like it did a fine job, but I didn't get any of that information about professional protesters. That didn't exist on social media, which I don't know how important that is to this story, but it does kind of show the degree to which protesting has become kind of a lifestyle. And like social activism has kind of woven its way. into, I don't know, the professional industry.

Like, that's so interesting to me. And social media shows a bunch of, like, grassroots kids, protesting, something they don't agree with. But I guess the information is there. Like, the big campuses are getting the news coverage. People are talking about it, which is exactly what they wanted to happen. And it seems to be happening in real time on social media. Yeah, I gave it a B plus kind of, for all of those reasons.

They got a lot of things right. a couple of little things that that weren't included but other than that I felt like it did a pretty good job. All right. I mean, as good of a job as it can do was it being social media. Yeah, exactly. It passed.

I agree. It passed. Thank you so much to everybody who tuned in to our episode of the social mediators on Radio Free Hillsdale 101.1.1.7 FM. I'm Julian Parks. And I'm Gary Woolspey. And we're going to talk to you next week.