Tag: protests

New Columbia Wrinkle: Police Takedown Facilitated By Faculty Member Who Serves On NYPD Anti-Terror Squad…Conspiracists Cry Foul

The recent ousting of students and professional agitators from a Columbia University building was led in part by a Columbia adjunct professor who is also the civilian Deputy Commissioner for Intelligence and Counterterrorism for the NYPD.

The story is from The Grayzone, a media project headed by Max Blumenthal, Jewish blogger and former Clinton aide. That said, the article is written with a decidedly pro-Palestine bent. Author Wyatt Reed describes the Columbia uprising as a “protest model [that] has since spread to over 100 other universities in the US, and even been taken up abroad, with similar actions occurring at Leeds University in the UK and the Sorbonne in Paris”, as if it were organic, and not, in fact, funded by groups such as the Soros-backed U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights (USCPR).

Still, Reed injects some salient points into the Columbia conversation. He correctly notes that, “During the NYPD’s triumphant May 1 post-raid press conference, Weiner blamed ‘outside agitators’ for triggering the military-style police crackdown at Columbia. However, she refused to name the outsiders supposedly on the scene.”

Next, Reed asserts that Weiner falsely used the terroristic past of an elderly Columbia encampment visitor–Nahla al-Arian, 63, as preface for police intevention:

“…a brief visit to Columbia by Nahla Al-Arian, who Weiner incorrectly described as ‘the wife of somebody who had been convicted for material support to terrorism.’

‘That’s not somebody who I would want necessarily influencing my child if I were a parent of somebody at Columbia,’ Weiner commented.

Nahla’s husband, Palestinian academic Sami Al-Arian, had been indicted on flimsy terrorism charges in 2003, but a jury refused to convict him. Nevertheless, her brief stop at the Columbia encampment — where she says she did not even interact with any demonstrators — was cited by Adams during three separate media engagements to justify the police repression.”

–Ibid., editorial emphasis.

Further, Reed points out, somewhat ominously, that Weiner is the granddaughter of one of the creators of the hydrogen bomb:

“Weiner is the granddaughter of Stanislaw Ulam, the Polish Jewish mathematician who helped conceive the hydrogen bomb as part of the Manhattan Project. “I’m very proud of that legacy,” Weiner said of her grandfather’s work upon being appointed as NYPD intelligence chief.“

–Ibid.

Reed stops short of calling Weiner a Mossad asset, but he sets the table elaborately, stopping just short of lighting the dinner candles:

“The NYPD’s Counterterrorism Bureau currently maintains an office in Tel Aviv, Israel, where it coordinates with Israel’s security apparatus and maintains a department liaison. Weiner appears to serve as a bridge between the Bureau’s offices in Israel and New York.

A 2011 AP investigation revealed that a so-called ‘Demographics Unit’ operated secretly within the NYPD’s Counterterrorism and Intelligence Bureau. This shadowy outfit spied on Muslims around the New York City area, and even on students at campuses outside the state who were involved in Palestine solidarity activism. The unit was developed in tandem with the CIA, which has refused to name the former Middle East station chief it posted in the senior ranks of the NYPD’s intelligence division. 

The ‘Demographics Unit’ appears to have been inspired by Israeli intelligence as well. As a former police official told the AP, the unit attempted to ‘map the city’s human terrain’ through a program ‘modeled in part on how Israeli authorities operate in the West Bank.‘”

–Ibid., editorial emphasis.

To sum up: Rebecca Weiner is, plainly, a liaison between the NYPD and Columbia University. The police division she works for was formed as a response to 9/11, and was done so with Israeli intelligence guidance, as would seem a natural fit for a country that has dealt with Middle East terrorism for decades.

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As Peace Protests Are Violently Suppressed, CNN Paints Them as Hate Rallies

As peace activists occupied common spaces on campuses across the country, some in corporate media very clearly took sides, portraying student protesters as violent, hateful and/or stupid. CNN offered some of the most striking of these characterizations.

Dana Bash (Inside Politics, 5/1/24) stared gravely into the camera and launched into a segment on “destruction, violence and hate on college campuses across the country.” Her voice dripping with hostility toward the protests, she reported:

Many of these protests started peacefully with legitimate questions about the war, but in many cases, they lost the plot. They’re calling for a ceasefire. Well, there was a ceasefire on October 6, the day before Hamas terrorists brutally murdered more than a thousand people inside Israel and took hundreds more as hostages. This hour, I’ll speak to an American Israeli family whose son is still held captive by Hamas since that horrifying day, that brought us to this moment. You don’t hear the pro-Palestinian protesters talking about that. We will.

By Bash’s logic, once a ceasefire is broken, no one can ever call for it to be reinstated—even as the death toll in Gaza nears 35,000. But her claim that there was a ceasefire until Hamas broke it on October 7 is little more than Israeli propaganda: Hundreds of Palestinians were killed by Israeli forces and settlers in the year preceding October 7 (FAIR.org, 7/6/23).

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The May 4th Deaths: Kent State 54 Years Ago

On May 4, 1970, Ohio National Guardsmen killed four college students and wounded nine others – one of them, Dean Kahler, is paralyzed below the waist – on the campus of Kent State University. Nobody was found guilty of the bloodletting.

On that awful day, Guardsmen fired M-1 rifles, .45 pistols and a shotgun for 13 seconds, killing Allison Krause and Jeffrey Miller, ROTC student William Schroeder and Sandra Scheuer who was on her way to class, while wounding nine others. Many Americans were outraged at the shootings but the vast majority were not, apparently believing that a nation at war was threatened by “radical” challenges on college campuses and elsewhere and that a government at war was perfectly justified in spying on its dissenting citizens and sending provocateurs to disrupt antiwar opponents. (On May 14-15, 1970, in Jackson, MS., Phillip Gibbs, a Jackson State junior, and James Green, a bystander and high school student, were killed by officers called to the scene following disturbances and student protests against the Vietnam war and continuing bias against blacks. A dozen students were also wounded by gunfire. Again, no one was ever convicted. (See, for example, Tim Spofford’s Lynch Street: The May 1970 Slayings at Jackson State College Kent State University Press).

Antiwar protests in Kent erupted following Richard Nixon’s TV speech announcing on April 30 that the US had invaded Cambodia, thus expanding a war he had once pledged to bring to an end. The following day Nixon denigrated antiwar students as “bums.”

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Campus Protests: The Kids May Not Be Alright, But They Are (Mostly) Right

I’m too young to remember the campus convulsions of the 1960s, but older friends who were there tell me that the growing campus protest movement against US support for Israel’s war in Palestine bears a striking resemblance to those days.

I happen to support that movement’s goals, at least to the extent of wanting to see the US government butt out of other people’s arguments.

I’m told by some “pro-Israel” friends that the student protesters are all “anti-semites” and “supporters of Hamas,” and that if I support them I must also hate a particular ethnic group and support terrorism as a tactic.

But I don’t hate any ethnic groups, nor do I support Hamas any more than I support the Israeli Defense Forces.

I don’t doubt that SOME of the student protesters fall into the “hater” category, simply because the protests are a convenient bandwagon for “haters” to ride on. The next large political event I attend that doesn’t have a least a few weirdos hanging around, trying to grab a little unearned credibility by association, will be the first.

I just want a government that claims it works for me to stop handing out weapons and cash to other governments. Especially, though not only, to crybully regimes that constantly play the victim while also occupying territory outside their borders for decades on end, imposing apartheid regimes on the inhabitants of those occupied territories, murdering anyone who resists (along with many who don’t), etc.

To the extent that the kids on campus are seeking the same thing, they’re doing God’s work and have my full support.

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Unity: Pro-Israel and Pro-Palestine Supporters Chant “Fuck Joe Biden” in Alabama

In a heartwarming moment of unity, pro-Palestine and pro-Israel supporters at the University of Alabama both began chanting “fuck Joe Biden” simultaneously.

Nothing brings Americans together greater than hating on Biden.

Biden ran his campaign on uniting America, and it seems that at least in one way he’s accomplished that.

Indeed, it seems the sentiment is spreading across the country, with pro-Gazans and frat bros in Arizona also sharing the chant.

As we highlighted yesterday, Biden’s support for Israel is causing so many young leftists to abandon the Democrats, it could even cost him the election.

A recent poll showed that 81 percent of voters aged 18 to 35 disapprove of Biden’s handling of the conflict in the Middle East.

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Tin Soldiers and Nixon Coming…

Student action on university campuses against US involvement in Israel’s slaughter of Gaza has exploded across the country. Suddenly there is the distinct feel in the air of the anti-Vietnam war protests once they finally caught on in 1968 and soon thereafter changed the course of US history.

Both protest movements were fully demonized by the same forces of the mainstream Left/Right regime and what libertarian writer Jacob Hornberger rightly calls the “National Security State.” I would add the mainstream media from Fox to MSNBC. But these days there is relatively more freedom of expression available to Americans via some of the social media outlets. The US government war on one of these outlets – TikTok – may also be fueling protests, as this outlet is particularly popular among younger Americans and has become the platform for them to hear more objective and independent views on what is happening in Gaza. It should not be considered a coincidence that not long after Anti-Defamation League’s Jonathan Greenblat was caught on tape panicking over the shift in opinion away from fealty to Israel among the younger generation, a big PR operation about “Chinese infiltration” of the platform emerged as did calls to ban the popular application.

“We have a major, major, major generational (TikTok) problem,” Greenblat said. This past week both Houses of Congress voted to ban TikTok. Problem solved? Not exactly.

So back to the protests.

Tens of thousands of students from New York’s Columbia University to the University of Southern California have risen up to demand an end to US support for Israel’s 200 day – and counting – total demolition of Gaza in retribution for the October 7th Hamas bloody incursion into Israeli territory.

To date, more than 35,000 Palestinian civilians in Gaza have been killed including an estimated 15,000 children. Hamas, by contrast, is reportedly not significantly degraded and its massive tunnel system remains intact. Former Israeli Defense Forces General Yitzhak Brick told Israeli newspaper Maariv that Israel has already lost the war against Hamas and must admit it.

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Crackdowns on Protests Are Exposing Higher Ed’s Complicity in Israel’s Genocide

As the Palestinian death toll in Gaza and the West Bank mounts daily, campus protests against Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza continue to spread across the U.S., where students and faculty often face police crackdowns. Student activists from Pomona Divest from Apartheid in southern California, The Coalition for Mutual Liberation at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, and Resist WashU in St. Louis, Missouri, told Truthout the blows landing hardest are the ones from their own chancellors and deans. The activists say university administrators are waging an asymmetrical campaign of enforcement against students demanding an end to their schools’ complicity in the slaughter of Palestinians.

“We see Pomona for what it is: serving capital and empire. And we know the way to win our demands is to disrupt their flow of cash, disrupt their reputation,” said Amanda Dym, a 21-year-old humanities student at Scripps College, one of the five colleges in the Pomona consortium. “We won’t allow our administrators who facilitate and defend investments in an apartheid state to go about their work undisturbed.”

Dym was among 20 students arrested by cops in riot gear during a sit-in outside Pomona President G. Gabrielle Starr’s office on April 5.

“A televised genocide live-streamed on our phones is obviously unlike anything that’s happened in our lifetimes,” she said. That’s why Dym and others were moved to demonstrate, but she says when Starr called in the riot police, the president put them in a whole other category of risk.

“Obviously, it was a scary day, to watch 30-plus riot cops from three cities come in and start bringing my comrades out, one by one,” Dym told Truthout. “The cops were in full gear with automatic weapons, bigger guns than some of us had ever seen. They were yanking students up off the ground, zip-tying their hands so tightly they were losing circulation.”

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College Activists Postpone Anti-Israel Encampment Because Students Are Too White

Students at the University of Washington postponed an anti-Israel demonstration planned for Thursday because too many of the students who signed up are white.

According to MyNorthwest, a Washington-based radio station, the University of Washington’s Progressive Student Union (UWPSU) opted to delay an encampment in solidarity with Palestinian terrorists “to make sure this encampment is a better reflection of the UW community, and having even greater unity with Muslim, Palestinian and Arab students.”

“We want to be part of a much larger coalition of groups and make no mistake, WE WILL HAVE A UW ENCAMPMENT! We want to make sure everyone’s voice is included and this action is as safe, secure, and strong as possible,” read a statement from the far-left student union published by MyNorthwest.

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Japan Fights Back Against WHO Pandemic Treaty and Deadly Shots

The Japanese are normally not inclined to protest. But thousands of them are now marching together in protest of the deadly experimental shots and the W.H.O. Pandemic Treaty. They are being ignored by their government and media, and they deserve our recognition and support.

They are launching a class action lawsuit for the families who lost loved ones to the deadly shots. And for those whose lives have been destroyed. And the plaintiffs are being heard as they share their painful stories.

“And then came the autopsy, a time when my son, once full of life, lay alone in a cold dark room, in a silver aluminum box waiting to be autopsied for an entire day. That image refuses to leave my mind, I can’t forget it. Don’t look away from reality. Why is vaccination not halted? How long will this situation be ignored?”
~ Plaintiff Number 7

Medical professor of Osaka City University School, Masayasu Inoue, has recently delivered a warning to the world that Japan has contracted with the W.H.O. to develop a new vaccine for disease X. Which is expected to be deployed worldwide later this year.

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Freedom of Speech and Freedom of Religion Die in America: Zionism is Now the Only Religion Allowed in the U.S.

Protests against the genocide happening in Gaza have continued to increase across America, with thousands of students in American universities and colleges protesting against the daily mass murders of innocent civilians and children happening in Israel.

Last week, over 100 students were arrested at Columbia University in New York, with many students at other campuses all across the nation joining them in protest this past weekend.

The arrests of over 100 students at Columbia University last week came one day after Columbia University President Nemat Shafik appeared before a U.S. Federal Congressional hearing on “Antisemitism”.

She was specifically asked by Congresswoman Lisa McClain if the phrase “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” was antisemitic or not.

Dr. Shafik had obviously prepared for this question, because it was an answer to this question that resulted in the resignations of the President of Harvard University and the President of the University of Pennsylvania just a few months earlier.

Perhaps guessing that Dr. Shafik had prepared for this question, Congresswoman McClain added a new twist to the question: “or long live the intifada“, which is a completely different statement.

If Dr. Shafik had been allowed time to fully address both questions, perhaps she would have differentiated between the two, but as you will hear, she had no opportunity to fully answer the question, and was restricted to either a “yes” or “no” response.

(Also, what is that medallion that the Congresswoman is wearing around her neck that she clearly wants to display to everyone??)

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