Excellent point. I highly doubt if protests like this change any minds, either among the general public or among those of their stated audience such as university presidents and the Biden administration. They also obviously have no change of acheiving their stated goals by using physical violence. My guess is that if anything they have harmed the cause they are purportedly protesting for.
On a Chicago news broadcast about protests at colleges, I noticed watermelon 
images on some of the protest signs. Anyone know what that represents?
They have already. Yale and Brown succeeded in convincing the schools to review their investment policies. Columbia and UCLA show they aren’t able to manage their campuses resulting in terrorist organizations influencing the student effort. We have to hope the students return from their summer vacations better educated about reality.
They want free watermelon on Thursdays.
Thanks for the link. That’s actually inspirational. I’m glad I asked!
True, but then protesting against America sending Americans to die in some country halfway around the world that never attacked America isn’t a tough sell.
The Palestine situation is a lot more complex. I don’t support pro-Palestinian protesters beyond an abstract sense of “war is bad”. But then Hamas also went into Israel and killed a thousand people and kidnapped a hundred or so more. And that’s just part of what’s been an ongoing conflict in the region for the past 80 years (not counting the thousand years before that).
But the important thing is a bunch of spoiled Ivy League kids get to host a sit-in so they can punch their “woke” card before hopefully landing jobs at Google or Goldman Sachs.
Protestors have no right of free speech on the campuses of private universities. Any semblence of free speech given in those locations is at the grace of those in charge.
Heh. You think protesting the Vietnam War in the US wasn’t “a tough sell”? No serious opposition, Americans in general were just fine with the protests?
Actually, it was quite a tough sell for a long time.
You can’t even manage a somewhat less abstract acknowledgement that Palestinians, as human beings (no, really!), are entitled to rights and self-determination? Because that’s the core message of pro-Palestinian protests, AFAICT, rather than merely a generalized “war bad” sentiment.
One needn’t condone Hamas terrorism to recognize that Palestinians as a people have just as much right to live freely in their own ancestral homeland as Israelis do, and that their ongoing and systematic oppression and dispossession by Israel is open to criticism.
Just what the disapproving majority in the 1960’s tut-tutted about the Vietnam War protestors (modulo the differences in contemporary slang, natch).
In twenty or thirty years you’ll probably be saying “well, protesting against the indiscriminate slaughter of tens of thousands of people who are being steadily forced out of their ancestral lands and systematically denied rights and sovereignty, largely on the US’s dime, isn’t a tough sell.” And, probably, believing that you always thought so.
(deleted)
Or as one Twitter user put it;
Or maybe it will be remembered as the point at which the progressive movement destroyed itself by placing “alliances” above principles and entering a downward cycle of hatred and intolerance. We’ll see.
The point? I thought we’d been doing that to ourselves for decades now.
But this isn’t what’s happening. Shouts of “Ashkenazi-Nazis” claiming that Jews are not indigenous to the land and that Palestinians are the only people with rights to the area are repeated.
And do you imagine Hamas would then let Israel live in peace?
I’m not sure why you would presume that.
Yes, it is.
That’s happening too, in some cases, and it’s certainly not justifiable to claim that no Israelis have any right to live in Israel.
But that’s not at all the core message of any pro-Palestinian protest I’ve seen or heard of. As TriPolar put it,
The problem is, once the radicals are in control - like they are now - it doesn’t matter what the moderates think. We’ve seen that in the Republican party, and we’re seeing it again here.
If the message isn’t intended to be that “no Israelis have any right to live in Israel” they might want to rethink the phrase “From the river to the sea”. While I accept the argument that some or even many protestors are so staggeringly ignorant that they don’t even know which river or sea is under discussion, it should be clear to anyone with even a passing familiarity with the situation what exactly “freeing” all of “Palestine” from the river to the sea would mean for the existence of Israel.
Now, if the protestors’ message was “Palestinians deserve the right to self determination and to live securely in peace” then I would 100% agree and support them.
You can keep saying “well just because there are some anti-Semitic elements doesn’t ruin the overall point that the protestors are making”. Sorry, but it absolutely does discredit their point. I’m not gonna take a protestor who starts from the position that I’m an evil settler-colonizer just because I am a homeless leech Jew who must be removed seriously, just like I’m not gonna take the Charlottesville protestors seriously when they start the conversation by screaming that Jews will not replace them - even if they were to eventually point out some legitimate injusticies in our economic system, the way they went about pointing it out completely discredits them.
Really? The core message is not that Israel is an evil colonial settler state that must be destroyed so that Palestine can be free from the river to the sea?
They’ve got a very funny way of communicating their core message, then.
What’s that got to do with it? Israel doesn’t live in peace now, despite all its decades of unjustifiably denying Palestinian people rights and sovereignty in its efforts to maintain territorial control and guarantee its security.
There’s no way to ever guarantee Israel complete freedom from terrorism linked to historical resentment over Israel’s having dispossessed Palestinians of large chunks of their ancestral homeland. But that can’t be used as an excuse to go on perpetually denying Palestinians full rights and sovereignty in at least some of their ancestral homeland.
You can’t simultaneously maintain that Israel has a right to exist, and that Israel’s safety requires indefinitely continuing to deny Palestine’s right to exist. The existence of Hamas terrorism, as evil and unjustifiable as it is, does not nullify the right of Palestinians as a whole to have rights and sovereignty in their ancestral lands.
“…their ancestral lands”.
Where are those, exactly?
Same place the Israelis’ are.