Open Thread for College Campus Protests
I am not writing about the Israel-Hamas war, or as of yet, the protests on college campuses. But I know everyone has strong feelings about the protests. And many readers do want to discuss them. So here's an open thread for those of you who do want to discuss these topics.
Keep in mind TalkLeft is not the government and what you consider free speech may differ from my interpretation of acceptable speech. And since this is my site, my interpretation prevails. [More...]
As a related side-note, I still follow the Twitter feeds of several ISIS/Syria researchers, most of whom are now covering ISIS in Africa. One who has a different focus is Aymenn J. Al-Tamimi, who writes primarily about Syria, but may be best known for his multi-lingual abilities, and his translation of an encyclopedic amount of ISIS-created documents from Arabic into English.
He doesn't usually offer political opinions, he considers himself a researcher, not a journalist or pundit. The other day, he wrote a column about the pro-Palestinian campus protests and the concept of Cognitive Egocentrism, which I recommend as thoughtful reading.
The term ‘cognitive egocentrism’ was long ago coined by Richard Landes to describe the phenomenon of projecting one’s own assumptions and ideals about the world onto others.
...Leaving aside questions of rights and wrongs, it seems to me that any political cause needs to be understood and dealt with according to the realities on the ground, and not on the basis of wishful thinking on the part of outsiders. Thus, the Palestinian cause and what represents it are defined principally by the Palestinians themselves who are on the ground in the Palestinian territories and the Palestinian factions that represent them.
When this point is borne in mind, it becomes apparent that some of the discourse about the Palestinian cause in the pro-Palestine protests and wider advocacy in Western countries is well out of touch with those realities, and instead projects its own intellectual fantasies and ideals onto the Palestinian cause.
After providing a lot of examples of the intellecutal fantasies of outsiders, including ones he personally experienced during time he spent there, he concludes:
None of the above should be read as advocacy for one side or the other in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It is simply an analysis of how some activism and advocacy for the Palestinian cause in the West reflects cognitive egocentrism described by Landes so long ago, as some project their idealised perceptions and pet causes onto the Palestinian cause in a way that is divorced from sober ground truths. In other words, there is an emotional and romanticised identification with the cause, but not one that has been well thought through.
On yet another different but related topic, you will not find me comparing the 1968 Vietnam War protests at Columbia and other colleges, or the actions of SDS and the Weather Underground or the 1970 Kent State tragedy, when members of the U.S. National Guard who had been called in to stop a campus protest killed four protesting students, to today's campus protests.
The 1960's were unique. No amount of magical thinking will resurrect them. Those of us who were fortunate to have lived in the midst of events of the decade, know that there will never be another Woodstock, another Richard Nixon, or another Hunter Thompson (RIP Hunter). There will never be another peaceful war protest with 500,000 college kids like the one at the Washington Monument, scenes from which are in the movie Forest Gump.
The 1960's were about peace, love, drugs, sex and freedom. What will always be missing from the current protests and future protests is love. Dissidence is the voice of the decade, not peace, hugs, or drugs that make you happy.
That said, there well may be another Altamont, which brought the 60's era to a crashing end.
From what I can tell, today's protests are rooted in hate and being run by professional groups of outside agitators who know all too well how to attract disaffected and naive college students, who care mostly about being socially accepted by their peers, and are not about to do any research on the underlying topic. They are fine picking up the phrase of the day they hear coming from a bullhorn.
Today's protests don't represent a free speech condundrum to me. All public speech has limitations, one of which is that you cannot call for the death, assault or banishment by force of any specific group within society.
If you wandered in here by accident, please read our comment policy. TalkLeft is a junkyard for you to dump your most hateful thoughts. Understand that any comment I view as anti-semitic will be deleted. And that in my view, a comment doesn't lose its anti-semitic character by substituting the word "Zionist" for "Israeli" or "Jewish person".
Hate, insults, personal attacks, name-calling, and calls for violence against any individual or group, will be deleted -- this includes referring to the Israeli-Hamas war as a genocide or a holocaust, which I personally find offensive.
If you take five minutes, you will find that you can express your position quite clearly without using profanity or emotionally charged accusations.
Please keep your comments in this thread related to the pro-Palestinian campus protests, the responses by the colleges, and the involvement of our police and military and comparisons to protests of other eras.
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