Liberated Zone IV

Useful idiots

This is the fourth in a series of dispatches from the Columbia campus. You can read the first here, and the second here, and the third here.

I started writing these dispatches because, with campus closed to the press and the distortion machine of social media whirring, I thought it might help readers to get an honest perspective from the inside. I have been a part of enough political campaigns to know that they are all imperfect in some way, and that it is always better to be transparent about those deficiencies than sweep them under the carpet. And I’ve learned that smear tactics, hysteria, and disinformation are the most effective tools the powerful have against any popular movement. These movements seek popular sympathy; delegitimisation is designed to foreclose it.

That is the best lens to understand the massive anti-protest backlash seen in the media over the last 48 hours. In an attempt delegitimise the student protestors, a range of voices have coalesced to push a narrative to the effect that Columbia is now controlled by a mob of violent antisemites. I can only describe reports like these as instances of journalistic malpractice.

Unlike the panicked talking heads on television, I have actually been here, onsite, reporting what I see, and I worked hard on Sunday to give a frank and fair view of antisemitism in and around the protest. In light of the smear campaign, I feel driven to say more.

Though I have not myself witnessed any concrete instances of antisemitism in the last week, I have witnessed scores of Jews protesting alongside Muslims in the Liberated Zone. I have watched Shabbat service and Passover Seder observed among the tents. I have seen more Jews inside the encampment than Jews counterprotesting the encampment. Campus has been largely peaceful, quiet, and calm. I can see no reason why any person should feel unsafe, and I have heard from many Jews who laugh at the suggestion that they ought to. One of them, Jonathan Ben-Menachem, was able to place a good piece this afternoon with Mehdi Hasan’s new publication Zeteo, titled ‘I Am a Jewish Student at Columbia. Don’t Believe What You’re Being Told About ‘Campus Antisemitism’.

‘Here’s what you are not being told,’ he writes:

The most pressing threats to our safety as Jewish students do not come from tents on campus. Instead, they come from the Columbia administration inviting police onto campus, certain faculty members, and third-party organizations that dox undergraduates. Frankly, I regret the fact that writing to confirm the safety of Jewish Ivy League students feels justified in the first place. I have not seen many pundits hand-wringing over the safety of my Palestinian colleagues mourning the deaths of family members, or the destruction of Gaza’s cherished universities. 

None of this is widely reported. It is only because Hasan, a heterodox voice, has set up his own publication that Ben-Menachem is being heard at all. It is clear that many elements of our culture do not want to hear from people like him. The erasure of anti-Zionist Jews—an erasure that often amounts to the suggestion that such people are not Jews—is actively and atrociously antisemitic, and those who participate in their marginalisation should feel ashamed.

Panics of this sort are driven by bad faith from vested interests, but they depend on a whole infrastructure of cynics and useful idiots to propagate them. Beyond the usual culprits in the media, who depend on sensationalism and base reaction for clicks, are this time a range of public figures trying to play politics. Jake Tapper, Eric Adams, Kirsten Gillibrand, and even the White House have each rushed to attack “virulent antisemitism” on campus. These superficially-virtuous condemnations of antisemitism, by warping and inflating the reality of the problem, serve to direct attention away from the new possibilities offered by the protest movement and the horrors it asks us to confront. That, of course, is the point.

But if the attempt to delegitimise the protests fails, the smears of antisemitism will have another purpose. They exist to help justify the possibility of violent military force. Take the fact that, hours after New York Magazine’s Jonathan Chaidt added to the hysteria with his piece ‘Why Anti-Israel Protesters Won’t Stop Harassing Jews’, police arrested 128 students, faculty, and supporters at NYU. I was not on scene, but footage shows what happened: scores of faculty, in an act of genuine bravery, linked arms in a circle to protect their students. Then the police arrested them all.

For lovers of state violence, the police are not sufficient. The military is called for. Shai Davidai was the first to call for the arrival National Guard. Jonathan Greenblatt, head of the Anti-Defamation League, soon followed. These men were joined by their unholy bedfellows on the American evangelical hard right, like Tom Cotton and Josh Hawley, who last called for the military to put down BLM protestors. Hawley, for his part, egged on insurrectionists at the violent January 6 riots.

I woke this morning to see that the University of Sydney, my alma mater, has now joined the long and growing list of campuses hosting their own Liberated Zones. That, in turn, brought to mind my time at Tsinghua University in Beijing, just down the road from Peking University.

Campus activism is more or less absent in Beijing these days, except in the most surreptitious of forms, but on 15 April 1989, nearly 35 years ago to the day, those universities gave birth to perhaps the most significant student protest in human history. The students knew something was very wrong with the world and were ready to camp in a public place to demand change. By doing so they challenged the powers-that-be. Then the CCP brought in the police, and then the military, and put them down.