Evidence shows the ‘Free Palestine’ Movement is a Repackaged BLM Initiative

It wasn’t too long ago that Columbia University, like pretty much every school in the country, shut down in-person classes because of COVID.

In fact, when Columbia’s current class of seniors began attending the school as freshmen four years ago, they had to log in to virtual classes — for their entire freshmen year. Supposedly, this was a once-in-a-lifetime event. Extreme times require extreme measures, those students were told. Never mind that those measures were pointless and did far more harm than good, of course.

Now, just a couple of years later, extreme times are back, and once again, lockdown measures are apparently required. Columbia has just shut down in-person classes yet again, in favor of mandatory “virtual learning,” for the last week of the semester. And those same Columbia seniors who had to attend online classes as freshmen are now being told to do it again as seniors.

But this time around, the reason that on-campus classes are suspended is that Columbia has been overrun by a mob of anti-Israel protesters who have occupied the lawn on campus and, in some cases, were captured on camera harassing and even explicitly threatening Jewish students with violence.

The people occupying the lawn — most of them students — say they won’t leave until Columbia divests from “anything related to Israel.” And for some reason, Columbia didn’t immediately have these students arrested and expelled, which would have been very easy to do, and should have been done. It wasn’t, so the debacle continues. Other schools like NYU, the University of Mexico — and even “Cal Poly Humboldt” have seen similar protests.

At this rate, it seems unlikely that Columbia University’s campus will even exist in a few years. The university will probably become an online program like the University of Phoenix. The quad will transform into CHAZ 2.0, run by some theater student posing as a warlord, that’s where this is headed. The people running Columbia, like the rest of the Ivy League, very clearly don’t have any strong interest in teaching students. They’ve made it extremely clear that they’re easy to walk all over, so of course, this will keep happening.

At the same time — regardless of whether these administrators are cowards or simply incompetent or both — it’s clear that these protests serve a purpose that’s much bigger than Columbia University.

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The disruption, it just so happens, is dominating the national news cycle right on schedule: in the spring before a presidential election. Usually we see a race riot right around this time — and as I’ve discussed before, there’s been no shortage of attempts by the media this year to incite them. But those attempts have all failed. And now, instead of race riots, right on cue, we have this insurgent movement to “Free Palestine.” Which is really just a race riot, repackaged, and draped in a green, black, and white flag.

These students, for the most part, don’t necessarily see this as a BLM reboot, but that’s what it is, and that’s what political forces much more powerful than the students are determined to turn it into. Those forces see an opportunity that really has very little to do with Israel or Gaza. And if they succeed, there will be a lot of violence and disruption this year that extends far beyond Columbia and Morningside Heights.

If you look around, it’s not hard to find hints that this is what’s going on. For example, take a look at what happened last night to pro-Hamas protesters who gathered outside the home of Chuck Schumer, the Senate Majority Leader. These are protesters who, for the most part, have had a free run of the campus of one of the top universities in the United States for several days. But watch what happens the moment they get near Schumer’s house:

What’s amazing about this footage is that, as you might remember, Left-wing activists recently gathered outside the home of Supreme Court justices — including Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett — for weeks on end. That was part of an overt effort to intimidate the justices ahead of the Dobbs decision. But at no point were the demonstrators arrested for picketing in front of the justices’ homes, even though it was a violation of federal law. The Biden administration refused to do anything about it. It was like a scene out of a third-world country.

The only guy they arrested literally called 911 and told them he wanted to murder Kavanaugh. That’s what it took to get some kind of police response.

But with Schumer, the rules are different. Hamas sympathizers and anti-Israel protesters can do what they want at NYU and Columbia and the University of Mexico and Cal Poly. The one thing they can’t do is disturb Chuck Schumer. So there are still rules, even amid all the anarchy. They just benefit the members of one political party.

As it happens, that’s not the only indication that what we’re seeing here is a kind of political operation. The Washington Examiner recently published a deep-dive into the groups that have played a major role in promoting these Columbia protests. One of these groups is called “Jewish Voice for Peace” or JVP, which is a pro-Palestinian organization. They’ve helped with pro-Palestinian protests that have occurred not only at Columbia, but also at Harvard, UNC Chapel Hill, Ohio State, and Boston University. And, as the Examiner reports, JVP is “supported by far-left George Soros’s Open Society Network, and since 2016 has hauled in at least $650,000 from Soros-connected groups.”

Well, that’s interesting, especially if you were told that the protests at Columbia were entirely spontaneous — and entirely student-run, student-funded and student-organized. Now we’re learning that Soros-linked money is somehow involved in what’s happening at Columbia. As you probably remember, Soros-affiliated entities famously poured millions of dollars into so-called “racial justice initiatives” beginning four years ago, the last time we had national riots. These entities also helped elect quite a few D.A.s all over the country who promised to further BLM’s agenda by refusing to prosecute criminals. Now, according to the Examiner, Soros’ Open Society Network is indirectly bankrolling some of what’s happening at Columbia, or at least the organizations involved in it.

And it gets worse. Democrats like Cori Bush and Ilhan Omar have blamed the physical violence and threatening rhetoric at these protests on so-called outside agitators. These are sitting members of Congress in the Democratic Party making that claim. They’re asserting that these agitators have nothing to do with the actual protest. But as the journalist Park MacDougald has pointed out, one of the other key organizers of the Columbia protest — Students for Justice in Palestine, or SJP — is a subsidiary of the same nonprofit as one of these alleged “outside agitators,” a group called Within our Lifetimes, or WOL. The nonprofit is called the WESPAC Foundation.  In other words, there’s no daylight here between the “outside agitators” and the protesters. They are one and the same. And who funds the WESPAC Foundation, you ask? As MacDougald points out, WESPAC takes a lot of money from the Tides Foundation, which in turn, has also received significant funding from the one and only George Soros.

As always, all roads lead back to Soros.

So this is starting to look like more than an isolated protest. It’s looking more like a broader and more general astroturfed effort to destabilize the country and stoke racial resentment, with the full endorsement of the Democratic Party.

There are some pretty clear signs that some of these students understand that, too.

Take the group called “Columbia University Apartheid Divest,” or CUAD. That’s a large coalition of more than 116 groups — including JVP — that are organizing the occupation at Columba Right now. Some of those groups include the “Columbia University Black Pre-Professional Society,” and “White Coats 4 Black Lives.”

You might be wondering why exactly a group of med students and other “pre-professionals” who support BLM also happen to be in lockstep in opposition to Israel and in support of Hamas. How exactly are these interests so perfectly aligned?

If you ask these students, they’ll probably tell you what Ilhan Omar’s daughter would tell you. She’s a student at Columbia who was just arrested for participating in this illegal encampment, and she’s also an avowed BLM activist. They would all say that they’re just really interested in defending allegedly marginalized people, wherever they may be — here or in Gaza. And that probably is what many of these students believe. They see anyone who’s non-white as a marginalized person. They see this as conflict between “whiteness” and marginalized people of color. For them, this is a struggle against white power structures and systemic racism and colonialism. Whiteness is the real villain here. Ask them and they will tell you this.

In reality does the war in Israel having anything to do with whiteness or systemic racism or anything like that? Of course not. But that’s how they see it. If they didn’t, they wouldn’t care. At least they certainly wouldn’t care as much as they do. There was no occupation of university campuses over the Ukraine invasion. That’s because, though leftist’s like to pretend they care about Ukraine, when it comes down to it both parties are equally white. There’s only so much sympathy they can really have for white people, even the ones in Ukraine.

But things start to get a little confusing when you look at other groups that have signed onto this collective at Columbia. They include the “Columbia Queer Alliance,” the “Queer Graduate Collective,” and my personal favorite, the “Student Organization of Latines” — or “SOL.” Those are groups that, if they stepped foot in Gaza, would immediately be stoned to death. Hamas doesn’t exactly take kindly to the sorts of people who call themselves queer. So it’s a little harder to explain their membership in this coalition. But it becomes less difficult if you see these protests as many Democratic Party leaders see them — which is yet another opportunity for the Democratic Party and their various activist groups to terrorize millions of people and derail the national conversation in an election year.

It’s not exactly surprising that colleges, once again, are ground-zero for this effort. Universities have been fomenting this kind of radicalism for decades, and now they’re reaping exactly what they’ve been sowing. None of these universities deserve our sympathy. And for that matter, none of them deserve the benefit of student loan forgiveness programs, either. If anyone should pay for these students’ loans, it’s the endowments of these schools, which are now so dysfunctional that it borders on comical.

Here for example are protesters late last night at Columbia, talking about dispersing into platoons so they’ll be harder to arrest:

They’re comrades in arms, ready to fight for whatever the cause of the day is. As Aaron Sibarium points out, these protesters want to make it as difficult as possible for the police to remove them — so that when they are removed, they can claim to be victims. That is their overriding motivation here.

What they may not know, although it’s pretty obvious at this point, is that they’re not simply idiots. In an election year, they’re useful idiots. And in the next few months, the party that controls the government right now is going to take full advantage of them.