Culture, Mishegas

Media Mishegaas

For your weekend pleasure, interesting stories in the media:

  • Rep. Barney Frank talks about the Foley scandal
  • Review of Encounter Point, a documentary film about Israelis and Palestinians
  • Stifling debate? The Jewish week reviews challenges to discussing Israel and Palestine
  • Poll sites in churches–Orthodox Jews call for changes
  • Penises dominating politics
  • We had abortions
  • White blight
  • Dismantling childcare
  • Columbia students protest an appearance by Jim Gilchrist, founder of the Minuteman Project, the racist and xenophobic border vigilante group–more here
[Update] The students are facing heat from Columbia’s administration, including potential disciplinary charges. You can support them by signing the online petition. The students are also soliciting letters of support and solidarity, which can be sent to them at [email protected].
Statement of the Student Protestors:
We celebrate free speech: for that reason we allowed the Minutemen to speak, and for that same reason we peacefully occupied the stage and spoke ourselves. Our peaceful protest was violently attacked by members of the College Republicans and their supporters, who are the very same people who invited the Minutemen to our campus in the first place. The Minutemen are not a legitimate voice in the debate on immigration. They are a racist, armed militia who have declared open hunting season on immigrants, causing countless hate crimes and over 3000 deaths on the border. Why should exploitative corporations have free passes between nations, but individual people not? No human being is illegal.
-Those who occupied the stage
crossposted from JVoices

8 thoughts on “Media Mishegaas

  1. re: the minutemen fracas
    dear jewschool readers,
    i am a columbia student. this event has been quite shocking to then entire community. first off, to invite this group to campus is a shanda. the above commentor believes firebrands like o’reilly and hannity on fox news who claim that the protestors did not give the speakers a chance to speak. that is false: they spoke for around 45 minutes. in truth, it was the actions of the minutemen that ended the possibility of dialogue.
    now: everyone deserves their say, and to stifle speech is not the best way to combat the hate the minutemen were spewing. so, the shouting down was wrong.
    however, a group of students unfurled a banner on stage as a form of civil disobedience, expecting to get escorted off the stage. what ended up happening was MINUTEMEN BEGAN KICKING AND PUNCHING STUDENTS AND GRABBING THEIR BANNER. the speech could have proceeded after the interruption, but the horrible, violent, inexcusable actions of the minutemen precluded that from happening.
    sinceerely,
    ~disgusted columbia student

  2. The minuteman wouldn’t exist if the government simply did it’s job.
    This is what happens when you leave a vacuum.

  3. I was wondering what criteria makes the Minuteman Project “neo-fascist”? They are certainly nativists and xenophobes but fascists? I don’t think so. Instead of accurately describing the negative aspects of the ideology of the Minutemen Project, this sort of sloppy language makes me wary of taking these activists seriously. The language reminds me of Rush Limbaugh’s nonsense about “Feminazis” and Indymedia anti-Zionists ranting about “Zionazis”. Sadly, the term fascist is another form of ideological shorthand to denigrate those we disagree with as opposed to a term with a specific historical and political meaning.

  4. True–I took the language from another site and should have been more mindful…in fact i’ll edit it now 🙂

  5. I watched the video of the scene at Columbia, and it triggered memories of my student activist days.
    I despise the strident self righteousness of the students as they shut down an event. This is a disgrace not for Columbia, or the pro-illegal immigration side of the debate, but rather for all far leftie student activists. Shame on you for acting like drunken frat boys at a wet T-shirt contest.
    Were I a campus administrator, I would allow ANYONE to speak and organize on campus, and severely punish anyone who violated the rules on this. And by that I mean, YES to David Duke, Yes to Farrakhan, Yes to Khalid Mohammed, Yes to Nathan Sharansky, Yes to Adam Shapiro. Yes, yes, and yes to all speech, and no tolerance for the intolerant.

  6. I don’t care who did the kicking and punching. You don’t interrupt an invited guest’s peaceful speech by jumping on stage in the middle of it. Hold protests outside. Fill the room with students wearing t-shirts carrying slogans opposing the speaker. Stand in the back of the hall with your banner. Plant dozens of students with hard questions for the Q&A at the end. But don’t rush the stage. Rushing the stage is not “peaceful protest.” And when somebody else physically rushes the stage, don’t jump up and down cheering on the mayhem like a bunch of children at a playground fistfight.
    O’Reilly and his friends on the Right may have some of the facts wrong about this incident, but they are correct that there is a smug attitude among a large segment of the Left that America’s elite universities are Leftist strongholds and that others don’t belong there. This incident only goes to prove their point.
    I consider myself left-of-center in most of my opinions, but I strongly believe that there is something to be learned in listening to what your political opponents have to say rather than simply shouting them down and calling them fascists/communists/racists/antisemites/etc. The Right may be wrong, but you won’t really know why if you refuse to even hear what they have to say.
    To say that the Minutemen “are not a legitimate voice in the debate on immigration” is simply stupid. Being racist does not disqualify someone from having a legitimate opinion. “Those Who Occupied the Stage” are idiots if they think they are furthering their professed value of “celebrating” free speech by interrupting someone else’s talk.

  7. I strongly agree with themichah on this. I was especially turned off by the statement of the student protesters: “We celebrate free speech: for that reason we allowed the Minutemen to speak…”
    They *allowed* it? Really, how utterly magnanimous of them, especially in their position as the arbiters of all that is “legitimate” or not in the debate on illegal immigration. I have no sympathy with the Minutemen, I can assure you. But I am MUCH more afraid of those on the left, even on Jewschool, who would censor, or even ask for the banishment of some among us who propose ideas which make us uncomfortable.

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