If this is protesting, then I am a full-time protester (no, just a camper).
There has been a lot of misunderstanding about recent protests at college campuses. Some "media" outlets linked to Hamas are portraying brave protesters being assaulted by the Police for no reason at all. Even "mainstream" media outlets are lying-by-omission by implying the protesters are being arrested for protesting.
They are not. They are being arrested for camping out on private property. Camping is not protesting!
We saw this almost two decades ago with the "Occupy Wall Street" crowd, who set up a drug-fueled orgy campsite in Manhattan. People were assaulted, not by the cops, but by fellow "protesters" - many of whom were just there for the party or were, in fact, homeless drug-addicts. The same effect happened in Seattle and Portland, when protesters declared "cop-free zones" and people were killed, beaten up, and raped, not by the Police, but by fellow protesters.
Similar tactics have been engaged by self-proclaimed climate protesters who chain themselves to roadways or glue their hands to the pavement. They are more than just protesting, they are blocking the highway for other people to use.
That is not protesting, it is just trespassing.
It has long been held by the Supreme Court that the first amendment is not absolute. The government can control the time and place of protests, require permits, security, and so on. The first amendment does not apply to private spaces, such as a college campus (whether or not a State University is "public" space is a good question, however). Occupying the Dean's Office was all the rage in the 1960's and 1970's, but it was, in fact, illegal trespassing.
And what colleges learned since then - or should have learned - is that if you allow people to "camp out" as part of their protest, things will get severely out of hand, very quickly. I wrote before how Cornell, in the heart of ultra-liberal Ithaca, New York ("10 square miles surrounded by reality" - according to bumper stickers that liberals put on their Subarus) had major protests in the 1960s, where Black Panthers occupied the Dean's Office, demanding a "separate but equal" black dorm. Irony much?
Anyway, fast-forward to the 2000's and the school wants to bulldoze a forest to built a parking lot. Students chain themselves to trees, and one even climbs up and lives in a tree for weeks. The school curtly informs them that unless they leave, they will not get their diplomas, or even transcripts if they want to transfer to another school. The protest collapsed and today, the forest is a parking lot.
At Syracuse, one of the Deans told me, "We learned something since the 1960's - students graduate every four years! We can wait them out!" So often they put up with these protests - up to a point - knowing that the students are a four-year blip on an institution that is over 100 years old. They can play the long game.
Like I said, up to a point. When tents start going up and people from off-campus start loitering around, hoping for some tender co-ed pussy or a bong hit, well, it is time to shut things down. The party can quickly get out of control.
This happened to my brother, whose politically correct puppet extravaganza started attracting dead-heads to their commune every summer. Nearby farmers were happy to rent out space for the drug-fueled orgy and it quickly got out of hand with traffic jams, drug overdoses, assaults, and eventually, a murder. These sort of encampments are not self-policing and what little self-policing there is, tends to sweep crimes under the rug - as we saw after rapes at "Occupy Wall Street."
The reality of these arrests is that the protesters are not being arrested for protesting, but for trespassing. You are free to hold a sign and hand out flyers and even chant your slogans (sans megaphone, please!) on the public sidewalk, provided you are not blocking it or harassing pedestrians.
You are NOT free to protest on private property or pitch a tent on public property. And THAT is what these "protesters" are being arrested for.
Sadly, I think a lot of these protesters are what they used to call, "useful idiots" as many of them are chanting slogans calling for "Death to Israel" or in support of Hamas, which is a terrorist group. They make any legitimate protest look ridiculous, and no doubt the Republicans are eating this up - and using these protests on Fox Fear News to get the oldsters in The Villages to vote GOP (like they wouldn't already). Vote for Trump or next they will be pitching tents in front of the Applebees! Right where all the prime golf cart parking is!
The first casualty in war is the truth. Most Americans discovered, only years after the Vietnam war ended, that we were propping up an unpopular dictatorship in South Vietnam - so unpopular that people were willing to gamble with Communism instead. Today, many Americans still don't get it - and argue "we coulda won" if only we dropped even more bombs - after dropping more bombs in Vietnam than we did in all of World War II.
In Ukraine, it is hard for the average American to see what is going on. We see videos of Russian tanks being blow sky-high and assume Ukraine is winning. I am sure Russians are seeing videos of Ukrainian tanks being blown up, instead. Propaganda is always suspect.
In the current conflict in Gaza, Hamas has used the media to good effect. They are touting casualty numbers that are not really backed up by hard data. The UN blindly agrees to these numbers, but the people touting this are clearly biased. The UN is hardly value-neutral. Stories of atrocities abound, but I doubt we will know what really took place until years from now.
What is really going on? Well, it is a proxy war between Iran (Shi'ite) and Saudi Arabia (Sunni) over control of the middle-east. We lost in Iraq and the Iranians are expanding their influence there. They are arming the Houthi rebels with anti-ship missiles. The Iranian "Navy" is even kidnapping ships and holding them for ransom. And of course, those thousands of missiles that Hamas has fired at Israel over the years were smuggled in from Iran (No, the Palestinians didn't make them out of old water pipes!). This is just another bloody chapter in middle-east politics and citizens on both sides of the conflict are caught in the middle.
That is the messy, dirty reality that no one wants to confront. Israel wants to wipe out Hamas, but to do so means wiping out a portion of the population of Gaza. Iran hoped to rally the rest of the Arab world against Israel with this latest war, but like Russia in the Ukraine, they have found themselves in a bit of a pickle - perhaps over-extending themselves too far. The rest of the Arab world seems uninterested in helping Gazans, or even allowing refugees into their country. Maybe there is a reason for this.
If you can't win on the battlefield, win in the arena of public opinion. Russia hoped to do this with their trolling wars about Ukraine and Hunter Biden - a "scandal" that even Republicans, after years of "investigations" and even impeachment hearings, have conceded were made-up stories planted by Russian agents. They did manage to get their hooks into one Presidential Candidate, though. Wonder what they have on him, other than financial blackmail?
The current protests are, I believed, part and parcel of this sort of public opinion campaign. Useful idiots are out protesting for a terrorist organization that would kill every last one of them, given the opportunity. You have to remember the people of Gaza overwhelmingly voted for Hamas. It is akin to feeling sorry for Germans who were killed in American bombing raids during World War II. Innocent civilians? When they voted for Hitler, put the Nazi flag on their house, sent husbands and sons to war, and worked in war industries?
I noted before this is a tough question, and modern insurgent warfare is based on the idea that there are no "innocent civilians." Terrorists set off bombs or gun down people in restaurants, discos, theaters, railroad stations, airports, airplanes, and even cruise ships. Some sympathizers will even excuse these murders as "acts of war." But military retaliation? That's out of bounds, buddy!
The asymmetrical response is what the terrorists are hoping for, so they can be the victims on the world stage.
Yea, I get it. Some small child crushed in the rubble of Gaza City or Dresden or Hiroshima is an innocent who was blameless in those conflicts. On the other hand, calls for "cease-fire" are little more than calls for surrender. And quite frankly, Hamas does not desire any cease-fire, as each dead baby is money in the bank for them. They know the value of good propaganda, and Israel is charging up their bank account quite nicely.
That's the problem with war - the people running it, on either side, really don't give a damn about the real victims of war. And in a way, they can't. A General who worries about casualties - military or civilian - cannot achieve military objectives.
Some clever wanker posted today that Napoleon spent two decades at war, but never suffered from PTSD. Well, duh, he was a General, ordering others to their death, not his own.
But getting back to "encampments" - no, we cannot allow that. It is not protest, it is trespassing and intimidation. We have learned over the last two decades that allowing people to camp out as part of a protest, never ends well. These folks are not being "terrorized by the police" but arrested for trespassing. The first amendment doesn't apply here.
Camping is not protesting!
UPDATE: I am losing no sleep over the Police evicting protesters from occupied buildings and encampments. Trespassing is illegal and not a legitimate form of protest. The protesters have undercut their cause by such actions. One wonders if they are even false-flag operations fueled by outside agitators to discredit the protests, as these occupations are so over-the-top.
Ditto for "climate protesters" who block off highways. But then again we don't truck in conspiracy theories here!
