Kat Rosenfield
Unherd, Apr. 26, 2024
“You can see what animates them in this moment, and it isn’t the cause.”
This week, amid widespread US campus protests against the war in Gaza, a video emerged of a confrontation on the Columbia quad. A slender young black man in a keffiyeh and a pair of florid pink Crocs paces through the crowd, shouting an urgent warning: “We have a Zionist at the entrance of our encampment!”
“Repeat after me!” he calls, and the crowd of students — there are at least a hundred of them — begin to chant as instructed.
“We have Zionists!”
“We have Zionists!”
“Who have entered the camp!”
“Who have entered the camp!”
“We are going to create a human chain—”
“We are going to create a human chain—”
“Where I am standing—”
“Where I am standing—”
“So that—”
“So that—”
“They do not pass this point!”
“They do not pass this point!”
“And infringe upon our privacy!”
“And infringe upon our privacy!”
“And try to disrupt our community!”
“And try to disrupt our community!”
The students link arms, moving as one. “One step forward!” the leader calls, and they duly obey as a hundred voices echo: “One step forward!”
I have no normative judgement to hand down on the protests themselves. This is America, the students are engaged in the protected exercise of their first amendment rights, and it is their prerogative to continue doing it within the parameters of the law, whether or not this will have any impact whatsoever on the thing they’re protesting. (It won’t.) I certainly don’t agree with Columbia’s president’s decision to send in the NYPD to arrest participants; this was excessive, and also wildly counterproductive, given how it has obviously fuelled the group’s sense of heroic victimhood and caused their ranks to swell exponentially.
But the video is worth discussing. The robotic chanting, the lockstep conformity, the way the ringleader in the pink Crocs simpers and giggles as his group advances on the two students who he’s identified, for reasons unknown, as Zionists. “Have you got enough video?” he coos. “Cause I look very pretty.”
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