College response to terrorism in Israel

So the organization gets suspended, but none of the students?

They need to suspend the students not just revoke the organization’s privileges.

Sally’s letter says:

“The suspension will remain in force until the Committee on Discipline makes a formal determination – our usual process in such cases. Individual cases referred to the COD will also come with interim restrictions.”

Because individual cases are protected records, specifics won’t be publicly shared, but it sounds like there will be some consequences for at least some students.

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If the organizers of this latest disruption are to be believed, 13 of them are being individually sanctioned.

Here’s hoping MIT doesn’t back down and gets them off campus permanently.

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I read that they are being “threatened”, but that can be a long way from actual sanctions. A threat could just be, ‘hey, if you folks don’t’ disperse, we can take action against you personally which can include expulsion.’ (which is what Stanford has done so far)

It is my hope that Sally meant what she said when she said that “individual cases referred to the COD will also come with interim restrictions.”

I know she knows her survival as President depends on order being restored quickly and decisively.

From the looks of it, there were about a few dozen people participating in this latest disruption.

As Otto von Bismarck said, “only a fool learns from his own mistakes. The wise man learns from the mistakes of others.”

MIT students are a smart bunch, for the most part. If a dozen of fools gets expelled, the rest will hopefully get the message.

I like Sally, I know her heart is in the right place, and it must be hard for her personally as a fellow Jew, but if this situation is not firmly under control by the time my youngest is attending campus preview weekend in April, I will expect her to step aside, because it will clearly mean she is not up to the task.

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A great article on the subject of campus antisemitism in The Atlantic.

"The problem was not that Jewish students on American university campuses didn’t want free speech, or that they didn’t want to hear criticism of Israel. Instead, they didn’t want people vandalizing Jewish student organizations’ buildings, or breaking or urinating on the buildings’ windows. They didn’t want people tearing their mezuzahs down from their dorm-room doors. They didn’t want their college instructors spouting anti-Semitic lies and humiliating them in class. They didn’t want their posters defaced with Hitler caricatures, or their dorm windows plastered with ■■■■ jews. They didn’t want people punching them in the face, or beating them with a stick, or threatening them with death for being Jewish. At world-class American colleges and universities, all of this happened and more.

I was not merely an observer of this spectacle. I’d been serving on now–former Harvard President Claudine Gay’s anti-Semitism advisory committee, convened after the October 7 Hamas massacre in Israel and amid student responses to it. I was asked to participate because I am a Harvard alumna who wrote a book about anti-Semitism called People Love Dead Jews. As soon as my participation became public, I was inundated with messages from Jewish students seeking help. They approached me with their stories after having already tried many other avenues—bewildered not only by what they’d experienced, but also by how many people dismissed or denied those experiences.


DEI efforts are designed to combat the effects of social prejudice by insisting on equity: Some people in our society have too much power and too much privilege, and are overrepresented, so justice requires leveling the playing field. But anti-Semitism isn’t primarily a social prejudice. It is a conspiracy theory: the big lie that Jews are supervillains manipulating others. The righteous fight for justice therefore does not require protecting Jews as a vulnerable minority. Instead it requires taking Jews down.


In an April 2023 lecture, David Nirenberg, the historian, presented the example of an activist with a large following whose boundary-pushing rhetoric met with accusations of anti-Semitism. The activist pointed out, as Nirenberg put it, that anti-Semitism “was merely an accusation that Jews used to silence criticism and squash free speech.” He brought libel lawsuits against newspapers that accused him of anti-Semitism, and won them. It is unfortunate for those making this argument today that this activist was named Adolf Hitler."

Full text: https://archive.is/OAjEg

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This author, Dara Horn, is my college classmate. I hope that she’ll be speaking at our upcoming reunion this spring. I didn’t know she was on the anti-semitism task force, and I have a higher opinion of that project knowing that she’s involved.

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On that, she writes:

“It was during this ongoing nightmare that Harvard administrators recruited me for advice on the anti-Semitism problem on campus. Against my better judgment, I agreed to join the committee.


Out of respect for Gay’s request that our committee’s discussions with administrators remain private, I won’t share here anything that we talked about in our many meetings. But I will say that one thing we did not discuss was Gay’s congressional testimony on this topic, for which she and other administrators never asked for the advisory committee’s advice. Instead, they consulted lawyers, a choice that backfired on national television.”

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Somehow, this perfectly understandable view has been morphed by the political narrative machine as an example of conservative double standard as it pertains to the issue of tolerating speakers on campus with whom we disagree or whose views we find offensive and reprehensible. Sure, same thing.

I won’t say that this was news to me, but I have been stunned by how quickly people in my general circle who are known to me as strong DEI advocates have fallen for this conspiracy theory, or at the very least seem pretty close to it. It’s generally been a trope for right wing conservatives, but the last few months has shown that Jew-hating is alive and well across the political spectrum, as it has really always been.

Of course, there is a distinction to be made between being antisemitic and critical of Israel. Sure. But what I have seen, by way of facts on the ground having attended a few of these rallies/protests and having engaged with scores of people on the topic, is that the two often overlap with criticism of Israel melding into something along the lines of Jewish skepticism, for lack of a better term. And you can hear it plainly at the rallies. Anyone who chants “from the river to the sea” is either purposefully uninformed (Google it) or revealing a little of what I’m perceiving in many people who have taken a hard line on Israel.

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Another quote from the article:

"Criticism of Israel is not anti-Semitic: Jews are now required to recite this humiliatingly obvious sentence, over and over, as the price of admission to public discourse about their own demonization, in “debates” with people who are often unable to name the relevant river or sea.

The many legitimate concerns about Israel’s policies toward Palestinians, and the many legitimate concerns about Israel’s current war in Gaza, cannot explain these eliminationist chants and slogans, the glee with which they are delivered, the lawlessness that has accompanied them, or the open assaults on Jews.

The timing alone laid the game bare: This mass exhilaration first emerged not in response to Israel’s war to take down Hamas and rescue its kidnapped citizens, but exactly in response to, and explicitly in support of, the most lethal and sadistic barbarity against Jews since the Holocaust, complete with rape and decapitation and the abduction of infants, committed by a regime that aims to eviscerate not only Jews, but also all hopes of Palestinian flourishing, coexistence, or peace."

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Developing news at the University of Oklahoma. A suspicious package is found next to a sign that says “Ignore this if you do genocide. 28,000 and counting. Silence is complicity.” The number likely refers to the number of Palestinians reported to be killed in Gaza since October last year.

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Are there even any Jews at the University of Oklahoma to harass?

Apparently, barely enough, about 1% of the student body.

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Anyone who can “inadvertently” post an image like the one described is an antisemite. No one with a shred of decency could mistake the meaning of the image.

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Lots of verbal condemnation and outrage but none of the faculty will lose their jobs, no students will be dismissed and no group disbanded in connection with this disgusting and contemptuous behavior. When there’s no concrete penalties exacted there is no deterrence. Sad and disgusting from students and faculty at one of the supposed top universities in the US. The war has really pulled back the veil.

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Meanwhile, at the historic home of the free speech movement, Protests shut down event with Israeli attorney Ran Bar-Yoshafat

Just another day in California. Just another day at a supposedly elite university. :face_vomiting:

Well, the university itself is pretty great. But the protests have been awful. My kid thought this one was scary, it felt to him like an angry mob that was trying to hunt down and kill the guy.

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I stepped away from this thread for what I thought was a month ago and now it seems as though @roycroftmom was right in her prediction: things have gotten worse now that students have returned to campus (and parenthetically, the war continues.)

EDIT: It turns out I misquoted @roycroftmom (and it was Thanksgiving break, not January Break she was referring to):

Moreover, it’s clear the lion’s share of concern nationally continues to be with Harvard, Columbia and MIT.

Ah I was wondering what all the WarnMes were about. Someone on BerkeleySide said the event was a performance by the dance department about Chinese immigration, so I was definitely confused about what was going on. I asked D and she said it was a Palestine protest but didn’t know anything about the event that had prompted it. Thanks for the more accurate update! I wish there were a better way to get info about what’s going on on campus.