Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
Our photo tank is running low, so while I’m gone for the next week you might consider putting together a batch of photos for posting here. Thanks!
Here is part 2 of Ephraim Heller’s survey of the birds of Bhutan (part 1, with an introduction, is here). His captions and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.
Here is installment #2 of photos from my April 2024 birding tour of Bhutan. We begin with a photo of the Paro valley, including the Paro dzong. Paro is the site of Bhutan’s only international airport, as it is the only valley near the capital of Thimpu wide and flat enough for commercial passenger jets. Consequently, most international visitors enter Bhutan here.
Today I post my photos of Phasianidae (pheasants, grouse, and allies) and Columbidae (pigeons and doves). Descriptions of the species below are taken from Wikipedia.
Blood Pheasant (Ithaginis cruentus) male and female. Blood pheasants live in the mountains of Bhutan, Nepal, Sikkim, northern Myanmar, Tibet and central and south-central China, where they prefer coniferous or mixed forests and scrub areas near the snowline. They move their range depending on the season, and are found at higher elevations during the summer. With snow increasing in fall and winter, they move to lower elevations.
Male:
Female:
An Himalayan Monal (Lophophorus impejanus) female. These are native to Himalayan forests and shrublands at elevations of 2,100–4,500 m (6,900–14,800 ft). It is the state bird of Nepal. The male has spectacular colors, but I was able only to photograph the female, which is darn pretty.
A Spotted Dove (Spilopelia chinensis). While native to Asia, the species has become established in many areas outside its native range including Hawaii, southern California, Mauritius, Australia, and New Zealand:
Equipment: All animal photos were shot using a Nikon Z9 camera and Nikkor Z 400mm f/2.8 TC VR S lens. Landscape and architectural photos were shot either with a Nikon Z9 and Nikkor Z 70-200mm f/2.8 VR S lens or with an iPhone 11.
The golden spike (also known as The Last Spike) is the ceremonial 17.6-karat gold final spike driven by Leland Stanford to join the rails of the first transcontinental railroad across the United States connecting the Central Pacific Railroad from Sacramento and the Union Pacific Railroad from Omaha on May 10, 1869, at Promontory Summit, Utah Territory. The term last spike has been used to refer to one driven at the usually ceremonial completion of any new railroad construction projects, particularly those in which construction is undertaken from two disparate origins towards a common meeting point. The spike is now displayed in the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University.
Here’s a photo:
Andrew J. Russell, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
A threat by US President Joe Biden that some arms shipments will be frozen if Israel launches a planned offensive in Rafah was met with swift denunciation from government figures in Jerusalem on Thursday, who indicated that the military would push ahead regardless.
The comments from Biden also sparked harsh criticism against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu by chief opposition rival Yair Lapid for what he said was the government’s “failed management” of ties with Washington.
In the US, some American Jewish groups and US lawmakers spoke out against the move and others indicated it was unlikely to go beyond words. Former US president Donald Trump accused Biden of siding with terrorists.
Keep Watching
What if00:00/00:09
A threat by US President Joe Biden that some arms shipments will be frozen if Israel launches a planned offensive in Rafah was met with swift denunciation from government figures in Jerusalem on Thursday, who indicated that the military would push ahead regardless.
The comments from Biden also sparked harsh criticism against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu by chief opposition rival Yair Lapid for what he said was the government’s “failed management” of ties with Washington.
In the US, some American Jewish groups and US lawmakers spoke out against the move and others indicated it was unlikely to go beyond words. Former US president Donald Trump accused Biden of siding with terrorists.
Bomb shelters make good neighborsKeep Watching
In what appeared to be a response to Biden’s decision to suspend key weapons shipments to Israel and his threat that more could follow, Netanyahu on Thursday shared footage of his speech at Yad Vashem earlier this week, in which he said that Israel will stand alone against Hamas if it must.
“Today, we again confront enemies bent on our destruction,” Netanyahu said in the clip posted on X, formerly Twitter, from a Holocaust Remembrance Day event in Jerusalem. “I say to the leaders of the world — no amount of pressure, no decision from any international forum, will stop Israel from defending itself.”
A threat by US President Joe Biden that some arms shipments will be frozen if Israel launches a planned offensive in Rafah was met with swift denunciation from government figures in Jerusalem on Thursday, who indicated that the military would push ahead regardless.
The comments from Biden also sparked harsh criticism against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu by chief opposition rival Yair Lapid for what he said was the government’s “failed management” of ties with Washington.
In the US, some American Jewish groups and US lawmakers spoke out against the move and others indicated it was unlikely to go beyond words. Former US president Donald Trump accused Biden of siding with terrorists.
Bomb shelters make good neighborsKeep Watching
In what appeared to be a response to Biden’s decision to suspend key weapons shipments to Israel and his threat that more could follow, Netanyahu on Thursday shared footage of his speech at Yad Vashem earlier this week, in which he said that Israel will stand alone against Hamas if it must.
“Today, we again confront enemies bent on our destruction,” Netanyahu said in the clip posted on X, formerly Twitter, from a Holocaust Remembrance Day event in Jerusalem. “I say to the leaders of the world — no amount of pressure, no decision from any international forum, will stop Israel from defending itself.”
A threat by US President Joe Biden that some arms shipments will be frozen if Israel launches a planned offensive in Rafah was met with swift denunciation from government figures in Jerusalem on Thursday, who indicated that the military would push ahead regardless.
The comments from Biden also sparked harsh criticism against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu by chief opposition rival Yair Lapid for what he said was the government’s “failed management” of ties with Washington.
In the US, some American Jewish groups and US lawmakers spoke out against the move and others indicated it was unlikely to go beyond words. Former US president Donald Trump accused Biden of siding with terrorists.
Bomb shelters make good neighborsKeep Watching
In what appeared to be a response to Biden’s decision to suspend key weapons shipments to Israel and his threat that more could follow, Netanyahu on Thursday shared footage of his speech at Yad Vashem earlier this week, in which he said that Israel will stand alone against Hamas if it must.
“Today, we again confront enemies bent on our destruction,” Netanyahu said in the clip posted on X, formerly Twitter, from a Holocaust Remembrance Day event in Jerusalem. “I say to the leaders of the world — no amount of pressure, no decision from any international forum, will stop Israel from defending itself.”
A threat by US President Joe Biden that some arms shipments will be frozen if Israel launches a planned offensive in Rafah was met with swift denunciation from government figures in Jerusalem on Thursday, who indicated that the military would push ahead regardless.
The comments from Biden also sparked harsh criticism against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu by chief opposition rival Yair Lapid for what he said was the government’s “failed management” of ties with Washington.
In the US, some American Jewish groups and US lawmakers spoke out against the move and others indicated it was unlikely to go beyond words. Former US president Donald Trump accused Biden of siding with terrorists.
Bomb shelters make good neighborsKeep Watching
In what appeared to be a response to Biden’s decision to suspend key weapons shipments to Israel and his threat that more could follow, Netanyahu on Thursday shared footage of his speech at Yad Vashem earlier this week, in which he said that Israel will stand alone against Hamas if it must.
“Today, we again confront enemies bent on our destruction,” Netanyahu said in the clip posted on X, formerly Twitter, from a Holocaust Remembrance Day event in Jerusalem. “I say to the leaders of the world — no amount of pressure, no decision from any international forum, will stop Israel from defending itself.”
In what appeared to be a response to Biden’s decision to suspend key weapons shipments to Israel and his threat that more could follow, Netanyahu on Thursday shared footage of his speech at Yad Vashem earlier this week, in which he said that Israel will stand alone against Hamas if it must.
“Today, we again confront enemies bent on our destruction,” Netanyahu said in the clip posted on X, formerly Twitter, from a Holocaust Remembrance Day event in Jerusalem. “I say to the leaders of the world — no amount of pressure, no decision from any international forum, will stop Israel from defending itself.”
“If Israel is forced to stand alone, Israel will stand alone,” he pledged, adding, “We will defeat our genocidal enemies. Never again is now.”
What game is the U.S. playing here? Do they want Hamas to stay in power? For that’s what will happen if Biden gets his way. And, as the U.S. demanded, the IDF is providing safe passage of those in southern Gaza to a refuge near Khan Younis. I can only imagine that Biden is either afraid of being defeated by Trump if he doesn’t look like he’s hard on Israel, or he’s got some crazy plan about keeping a balance of power in the Middle East by catering to Iran. It’s getting harder for me to be resolute about voting for Biden, though of course I’d never vote for Trump. Maybe I wouldn’t vote for any Presidential candidate. If I lived in a swing state, which I don’t (Illinois is solidly Democratic), I’d vote for Biden, but my vote doesn’t really count here.
*Stormy Daniels finished her testimony against Trump yesterday, and apparently it was quite seamy, though I’d prefer not to hear the details. There’s little doubt they had a liaison, but Trump’s accused not of philandering, but of hiding the hush money. Some details:
During more than seven hours of searing testimony spread over two days, Stormy Daniels recounted a one-night sexual encounter she said she’d had with Donald J. Trump, described taking a $130,000 payment in return for her silence, and swung between defiance and vulnerability in the face of combative questions from his lawyers.
“You made all this up, right?” a lawyer for Mr. Trump asked, to which Ms. Daniels responded with a forceful “No.” And when the lawyer suggested that Ms. Daniels, a porn star, had experience with “phony stories about sex,” she responded that the sex in such films is “very much real, just like what happened to me in that room.”
Yes, porn is “phony stories about sex,” but nobody is going to be fooled by that lawyer’s implications. Whether Daniels’ reply was a good one is unclear, for if it was as real as porn, that seems to say that Daniels wasn’t really into it as sex qua sex. But there’s more:
Ms. Daniels was at times defiant during her testimony, including when the defense attacked her for hawking merchandise to supporters and she responded by likening it to Mr. Trump’s own merchandising. But at other times, Ms. Daniels spoke quietly, seemingly on the verge of tears. Asked by a prosecutor after cross-examination about the effect these events had on her life, Ms. Daniels said she had to hire security, move a couple of times and take extra precautions because of her daughter. Asked if publicly telling the truth has been a net positive or net negative, she responded, “Negative.”
The 34 felony counts of falsifying business records against Mr. Trump stem from his repayment of Mr. Cohen after he became president, and the recording of the checks as “legal expenses” at the Trump Organization. Mr. Trump, 77, has denied any wrongdoing. If convicted, he could face prison or probation.
. . . . During her first day on the stand on Tuesday, Ms. Daniels described — sometimes nervously, sometimes graphically and often hastily — having a liaison with Mr. Trump in 2006, which Mr. Trump denies. She testified that she met Mr. Trump at a celebrity golf tournament in Lake Tahoe, Nev., and accepted an invitation for dinner that led to sex in his penthouse suite. “I didn’t know how I got there,” she recalled thinking as she lay on the bed with him. “I was trying to think about anything other than what was happening there.”
* Here’s an op-ed the NYT arguing that divestment demands by college students are ineffectual and performative ( Sernovitz is identified as “a managing director of Lime Rock Management, a private equity firm that invests in oil and gas and clean energy companies and whose investors include colleges and universities.” The article is called Elite colleges walked into the Israel divestment trap.”
College endowment managers no doubt feel beleaguered that pressing moral questions regularly end up on their desks. For that desk is already covered with spreadsheets on another question: how to generate returns for universities that are nonprofits, unfathomably expensive, and desperate to not be just finishing schools for the rich. Last fiscal year, endowments over $5 billion provided 17.7 percent of their university’s budgets. This school year, Williams College charged $81,200 in tuition and fees. But spending per student was $135,600. The endowment helps make up the difference.
Yet activists view endowments with a sense of ownership. They are part of a community that owns this money. They also go after endowments because they lack better targets. It says something about the authority of ideas in our age that students lobby institutions dedicated to the advancement and propagation of knowledge mainly over what they do with their excess cash.
Sernovitz then mentions that the anti-apartheid divestments may have been successful (it’s still debated), but the same isn’t true in his area:
Unlike the effects of the South Africa movement, the early impact of oil and gas divestment by colleges and others has been negligible, or even counterproductive: Oil and gas companies have needed little external financial capital, and hostility to the divestment movement has led Republican-led states such as Florida to restrict E.S.G. investing, which focuses on environmental, social and governance factors. (Note that Florida’s State Board of Administration manages almost exactly the same amount of money as the 10 largest private college endowments combined.)
What the fossil fuel divestiture did establish, however, was that university leaders can be made to concede that their endowments will, in certain circumstances, be guided by the school’s collective values, and that current students can shape those values. And by getting endowments to not invest in the sector in some way, the protesters hardened an abstract moral judgment: that the oil and gas business, and the faceless bureaucrats who work for it, are wrong. Divestment champions hope the symbolic removal of an industry’s “social license” can take on its own power, emboldening government policymakers to regulate that industry or dissuading students from seeking jobs in it.
. . . and there are yet more problems with divesting from Israel:
University leaders could follow the same playbook as they did on fossil fuels and find ways to symbolically divest without disrupting their endowments in any notable way. Based on the size of G.D.P., not investing is Israel directly would be like not investing in Colorado. And despite the chants that charge otherwise, many endowments appear to have little to no direct exposure to Israel or to many of the American companies protesters want to blacklist.
But there’s a key difference between avoiding fossil fuels and shunning Israel. The institutions that divested from oil and gas made sure to describe it as financially prudent, albeit sometimes with shallow investment logic. This time, Israel’s social license is the only thing that is on the table. And if Israel is on the table, what other countries should lose their social license? How many years must pass since what some believe to be a country’s settler colonialist period or messy wars that kill innocent civilians to make it investable?
And if divestment against Israel is carried out, when should it end? Oil and gas divesting is meant never to end; oil and gas consumption is meant to end. Divestment from South Africa ended with apartheid. So university leaders will be forced to ask an often heterogeneous group of students what would earn Israel its social license back. A cease-fire? A new Israeli government? A two-state solution? The end of Israel as a Jewish state?
. . .Listen to the protesters on divestment. They will not stop. They will not rest.
But neither will the markets. They open every morning, Monday through Friday, and university budgets’ demands on endowments never go away. Tuitions are rising. Costs always go up. Colleges should debate deep moral issues and discuss the hard compromises to solve the world’s ills. But we should move those efforts to the lecture halls, away from the investment offices. Divesting is an easy chant. Investing is hard enough as it is.
Well, that’s not entirely convincing. My opposition to divesting in Israel is that it’s performative, and, most of all, wrong, for Hamas is on the wrong side of this war. Nevertheless, the cry is for more investment in Palestine, even those the vast majority of Palestinians back Hamas. As my friend in Berlin wrote (see below), “These are crazy times.”
Heather Miconi has seven weeks to come up with $2,000 to pay for surgery her daughter needs to breathe more easily.
Merritt Island Surgery Center in Merritt Island, Fla., billed Miconi in advance of the adenoid and tonsil surgery. If she can’t pay for the surgery before it is scheduled to take place next month, the procedure will be put off.
Miconi, whose insurance won’t cover the cost because she has a high deductible, works three jobs and doesn’t have savings to cover the cost. She is now appealing to strangers through a GoFundMe campaign for help.
For years, hospitals and surgery centers waited to perform procedures before sending bills to patients. That often left them chasing after patients for payment, repeatedly sending invoices and enlisting debt collectors.
Now, more hospitals and surgery centers are demanding patients pay in advance.
Advance billing helps the facilities avoid hounding patients to settle up. Yet it is distressing patients who must come up with thousands of dollars while struggling with serious conditions.
Those who can’t come up with the sums have been forced to put off procedures. Some who paid up discovered later they were overcharged, then had to fight for refunds.
Among the procedures that hospitals and surgery centers are seeking prepayments for are knee replacements, CT scans and births.
Yes, I can understand why hospitals are concerned with repayment, but to endanger patients who can’t pay up at the moment? That’s mean-spirited. I’m actually surprised because some hospitals, despite the law requiring it, refuse to specify charges for procedures, preventing comparison shopping. I’m surprised they don’t ask for tips after it’s all over! Would you go to a restaurant that made you pay upfront before serving you any food?
A prominent Berlin politician was violently assaulted and suffered injuries to her head and neck, police said Wednesday, in the latest attack on elected officials that raises concern over rising political violence in Germany.
Franziska Giffey, the city’s top economic official, a former mayor and an ex-federal minister, was attacked at an event in a Berlin library on Tuesday by a man who approached her from behind and hit her with a bag containing a hard device, police said.
Giffey was taken to a hospital and treated for head and neck pain, police said. A 74-year-old man was detained and police searched his home, police said. They said the suspect was known to police, but did not give any indication for a motive.
Police detained four suspects, aged between 17 and 18, and said that the same group had apparently attacked a Greens party worker minutes before they attacked Matthias Ecke. At least one of the teens is said to be linked to far-right groups, security officials said.
Also on Tuesday, a 47-year-old Green Party politician was attacked by two people while putting up election posters in Dresden, dpa reported.
The incidents have raised political tensions in Germany.
Both government and opposition parties say their members and supporters have faced a wave of physical and verbal attacks in recent months, and have called on police to step up protection for politicians and election rallies.
In February, the German Parliament said in a report there were a total of 2,790 attacks on elected representatives in 2023. Representatives of The Greens were disproportionally affected in 1,219 cases, those from the far-right Alternative for Germany party, or AfD, in 478 cases and representatives of the SPD in 420 cases.
The country’s vice chancellor, Robert Habeck, who is a member of The Greens, was prevented from disembarking a ferry for hours by a group of angry farmers in January, and the vice president of the German Parliament, Katrin Goering-Eckardt, also from The Greens, was prevented from leaving an event in the state of Brandenburg last week when an angry crowd blocked her car.
The causes? Many are suggested: Scholz’s government isn’t popular in the eastern part of the country, neo-Nazis are making trouble, and there is a lot of anti-immigration sentiment. Here’s a self portrait she took in Berlin yesterday, which at least expresses a reasonable sentiment. Yes, what’s written on the sidewalk is “F*ck Hamas.”
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, the two cat friends are on the prowl:
From Masih: Justin Trudeau has a decision to make:
Justin Trudeau: Which Side of History Will You Choose? The people or the terrorists? We Iranians welcome the Canadian Parliament’s historic decision to designate the Revolutionary Guards as a terrorist organization. I hope other parliaments across democracies follow this path.… pic.twitter.com/OjFieh3rFn
Scientific American, once subscribed-to by high school students, of which I was one, seems to have deteriorated into something other than a journal about science & new discoveries; covering issues of the sort written about constantly, nonstop, opinionated commentary on trending… https://t.co/T06S7WtIXm
— Joyce Carol Oates (@JoyceCarolOates) May 8, 2024
Speaking of ideology corrupting science, Colin Wright tells us how Yale’s medical students are fed lies. Be sure to click “show more” as it’s a long and disheartening tale. (h/t Luana).
These are the last 6 slides from a BIOL 104: Principles of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology lecture at Yale, a required course for all pre-med students.
The slides attempt to obfuscate what males and females are by asserting that the binary concept of sex is "essentialist" and… pic.twitter.com/xlTGuUUgZy
On Saturday I’m leaving for Amsterdam for eight days, at least two of which will be devoted to work (a lecture on science and religion on May 16 at Tilburg University and, the next day, a group discussion of ideology’s incursion into science at the Science Department at the University of Amsterdam). There may be interviews or podcasts, but I don’t yet know.
This means that posting will be very light during that time, as not only do I have work, but I want to see more of this beautiful city. Of course I have to return to the Van Gogh Museum, but will ferret out other things to do. I will post as often as time permits.
Please keep emails to me to a minimum during this period, and please don’t send readers’ wildlife, as it may get lost. Matthew will be putting up the Hili Dialogue every day, and, as always, I’ll do my best.
In honor of this trip, here’s an old song that nobody but me recalls:
I’m hoping that the era of campus unrest is coming to an end, and with it the bogus claim that the protestors are engaged in civil disobedience because of an “unjust act” (Israel’s war in Gaza). Today I have two readings for you before I’m off to Amsterdam on Saturday.
In the article below in The Volokh Conspiracy by Ilya Somin (an author and professor of law at George Mason University), the author argues that there’s no parallel between pro-Palestinian protestors, on or off campus, and the civil rights protestors of the Sixties, who were breaking unjust laws—and taking the punishment. Click below the read. I’ll post a few highlights, which are indented:
Illegal actions can indeed be justified in some situations. But the tactics used by many anti-Israel protestors fail any plausible criteria for such. The laws they are violating are not unjust. The victims of the violations are almost entirely innocent people. The violations are highly unlikely to lead to improvements in government policy. And, finally, the protestors’ objectives are themselves unjust.
Moreover, people who violate unjust laws don’t necessarily have a duty to accept punishment for doing so. For example, members of the Underground Railroad who helped escaped slaves evade the Fugitive Slave Act had no moral obligation to turn themselves in to the authorities. Ditto for dissidents resisting oppressive dictatorships.
I suppose the difference between letting yourself get arrested (as in the Civil Rights Movement), and being morally ok with avoiding arrest is that in the latter case, as above, you can effect more moral change if you remain out there and keep violating an unjust law. At any rate, Somin says none of this applies to the anti-Israel protesters:
This argument obviously doesn’t help lawbreaking anti-Israel protestors. Laws banning campus building takeovers and encampments, and protecting the freedom of movement of students are not unjust. Even most supporters of the protestors readily recognize this in other contexts. For example, they would likely agree that pro-life activists are not justified in occupying buildings in order to try to force the university to divest from businesses that profit from abortion, or that Trump backers cannot do so to force the university to endorse claims that the 2020 election was “stolen” from Trump.
One can argue that violating otherwise just laws is permissible in order to target people who are themselves perpetrators of injustice. For example, perhaps anti-slavery activists would have been justified in occupying the property of slaveowners in order to pressure them to free their slaves. But the main victims of campus building takeovers, encampments, and coercive restrictions on movement, are students, faculty, and others who have no meaningful responsibility for any injustices occurring in the Israel-Palestinian conflict.
Merely investing in firms with a presence in Israel is nowhere near enough to justify targeting people. The protestors themselves implicitly recognize that, since they do not use such tactics to demand divestment from businesses that operate in China, Saudi Arabia, and other countries with far worse human rights records than Israel. And, to repeat, the main victims of illegal protest activities are not university officials who control investments but students and faculty (who generally have little or no such control).
Perhaps harming innocent people could still be defended if doing so were the only way to achieve some greater good. But that argument doesn’t help the anti-Israel protestors either. It is highly unlikely their actions will lead to any improvement in either US or Israel policy. Even if some universities divest from Israel as a result (which itself is highly questionable), that isn’t going to lead to any beneficial changes in Israeli or US policy. Moreover, the protestors’ behavior is likely to damage their cause more than it aids it. Polls indicate most of the public condemns these types of actions. One survey found that 71% support calling in the police to arrest protestors who occupy buildings or block other people from using parts of the campus.
It goes on, but the point is that the people targeted by the protests, or at least those who are inconvenienced, are not those perpetrating the war. They are simply the inconvenienced and harangued students. “Well,” you could respond, “maybe the protests will change their minds, just as seeing black protestors attacked with dogs and fire hoses in Alabama brought on the Civil Rights Acts.” But that won’t fly, either, for as the article notes, most Americans not only don’t respond to the protests, but also condemn them, and favor as well calling in cops when the protests are illegal (as whey were at my school). Finally, you could argue that the protests are meant to affect Israel by getting universities to divest from that country. But while that may have worked during the apartheid era, when I too engaged in civil disobedience, it won’t work in America. I don’t know of a single school that’s divested, and there was never a chance that the University of Chicago would divest. It never has and it never will, for our policy is to keep our investing separated from politics.
So what can the protesters do to reach their goals? They won’t like Somin’s answer:
There are many demands the protestors could make that would help Palestinians without endorsing the evil agenda of Hamas and other similar groups. Most obviously, they could demand that Hamas release its hostages and surrender. That would immediately end the war, stop the suffering of the hostages, and free Gaza Palestinians from a brutal dictatorship. In addition, it would help forestall further conflict, which would otherwise be virtually inevitable so long as Hamas remains in power (since they have promised to “repeat October 7 again and again” if given the opportunity to do so).
But of course these things won’t fly, either. Those actions would indeed help Palestinians (setting aside the fact that most Palestinians like Hamas, favoring it over the Palestinian Authority, even in the West Bank), and, further, they wouldn’t result in what the protesters really want: the end of Israel.
The second article, below, is from Tablet (click headline to read), and argues that not are most of the college protests not independent, but rely on central organizations whose funding is nearly impossible to unravel.
It’s a long piece, but centers the organization of protests on three groups; I’ve put them in bold below:
The “movement,” in turn, while it recruits from among students and other self-motivated radicals willing to put their bodies on the line, relies heavily on the funding of progressive donors and nonprofits connected to the upper reaches of the Democratic Party. Take the epicenter of the nationwide protest movement, Columbia University. According to reporting in the New York Post, the Columbia encampment was principally organized by three groups: Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), and Within Our Lifetime (WOL). Let’s take each in turn.
To see the tangled web that is the funding of these organizations, I’ll show the text for just one: Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), which is one of the main pro-Palestinian organizations on our campus, and is largely responsible for the illegal and disruptive protests we’ve had—including the one over the last week. You can see how convoluted the financial setup is, and of course that’s done on purpose to hide where the money comes from. Here’s the bit on SJP, which may have some tangential connections to antisemitism and terrorism.
SJP, by contrast, is an outgrowth of the Islamist networks dissolved during the U.S. government’s prosecution of the Holy Land Foundation (HLF) and related charities for fundraising for Hamas. SJP is a subsidiary of an organization called American Muslims for Palestine (AMP); SJP in fact has no “formal corporate structure of its own but operates as AMP’s campus brand,” according to a lawsuit filed last week against AJP Educational Fund, the parent nonprofit of AMP. Both AMP and SJP were founded by the same man, Hatem Bazian, a Palestinian academic who formerly fundraised for KindHearts, an Islamic charity dissolved in 2012 pursuant to a settlement with the U.S. Treasury, which froze the group’s assets for fundraising for Hamas (KindHearts did not admit wrongdoing in the settlement). And several of AMP’s senior leaders are former fundraisers for HLF and related charities, according to November congressional testimony from former U.S. Treasury official Jonathan Schanzer. An ongoing federal lawsuit by the family of David Boim, an American teenager killed in a Hamas terrorist attack in 1996, goes so far as to allege that AMP is a “disguised continuance” and “legal alter-ego” of the Islamic Association for Palestine, was founded with startup money from current Hamas official Musa Abu Marzook and dissolved alongside HLF. AMP has denied it is a continuation of IAP.
Today, however, National SJP is legally a “fiscal sponsorship” of another nonprofit: a White Plains, New York, 501(c)(3) called the WESPAC Foundation. A fiscal sponsorship is a legal arrangement in which a larger nonprofit “sponsors” a smaller group, essentially lending it the sponsor’s tax-exempt status and providing back-office support in exchange for fees and influence over the sponsorship’s operations. For legal and tax purposes, the sponsor and the sponsorship are the same entity, meaning that the sponsorship is relieved of the requirement to independently disclose its donors or file a Form 990 with the IRS. This makes fiscal sponsorships a “convenient way to mask links between donors and controversial causes,” according to the Capital Research Center. Donors, in other words, can effectively use nonprofits such as WESPAC to obscure their direct connections to controversial causes.
Something of the sort appears to be happening with WESPAC. Run by the market researcher Howard Horowitz, WESPAC reveals very little about its donors, although scattered reporting and public disclosures suggest that the group is used as a pass-through between larger institutions and pro-Palestinian radicals. Since 2006, for instance, WESPAC has received more than half a million in donations from the Elias Foundation, a family foundation run by the private equity investor James Mann and his wife. WESPAC has also received smaller amounts from Grassroots International (an “environmental” group heavily funded by Thousand Currents), the Sparkplug Foundation (a far-left group funded by the Wall Street fortune of Felice and Yoram Gelman), and the Bafrayung Fund, run by Rachel Gelman, an heir to the Levi Strauss fortune. (A self-described “abolitionist,” Gelman was featured in a 2020 New York Times feature on “The Rich Kids Who Want to Tear Down Capitalism.”) In 2022, WESPAC also received $97,000 from the Tides Foundation, the grant-making arm of the Tides Nexus.
WESPAC, however, is not merely the fiscal sponsor of the Hamas-linked SJP but also the fiscal sponsor of the third group involved in organizing the Columbia protests, Within Our Lifetime (WOL), formerly known as New York City SJP. Founded by the Palestinian American lawyer Nerdeen Kiswani, a former activist with the Hunter College and CUNY chapters of SJP, WOL has emerged over the past seven months as perhaps the most notorious antisemitic group in the country, and has been banned from Facebook and Instagram for glorifying Hamas. A full list of the group’s provocations would take thousands of words, but it has been the central organizing force in the series of “Flood”-themed protests in New York City since Oct. 7, including multiple bridge and highway blockades, a November riot at Grand Central Station, the vandalism of the New York Public Library, and protests at the Rockefeller Center Christmas-tree lighting. In addition to their confrontational tactics, WOL-led protests tend to have a few other hallmarks. These include eliminationist rhetoric directed at the Jewish state—such as Arabic chants of “strike, strike, Tel Aviv”; the prominent display of Hezbollah flags and other insignia of explicitly Islamist resistance; the presence of masked Arab street muscle; and the antisemitic intimidation of counterprotesters by said masked Arab street muscle.
I know that people are trying to untangle this financial skein right now, and good luck to them. But it’s clear from the similarities of strategy (given in the article) and even of equipment, that these protests are more than just copycat demonstrations or individual decisions of college groups: they appear to be coordinated by large and well-funded agencies.
Today we have some bird photos by ecologist Susan Harrison. Her captions are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them. (And send in yours.)
Dry Tortugas and the perils of migration
The Dry Tortugas are the westernmost of the Florida Keys, lying just over 100 miles from the mainland. These tiny sandy islands, or cays, are uninhabited by people but essential to bird life. They support breeding colonies of some unusual seabirds, and they are the North American landfall for many spring-migrating songbirds.
Dry Tortugas National Park was created to protect these birds, and human visitors can go to only one island: Garden Cay, which supports Fort Jefferson, a huge crumbling installation begun in 1846 and abandoned in 1906. The fort saw use as a Civil War prison, a quarantine, and a coaling station, but its war-worn look is an illusion. Somehow the engineers of the day did not realize that iron fittings exposed to salt water would expand and tear apart its brick walls.
Fort Jefferson:
Wandering about the fort’s grounds in late April, avian migrants are seen resting in the shrubby Seagrape (Coccoloba uvifera) and Buttonwood (Conocarpus erectus) trees and drinking at the tiny brick birdbath that provides the only water for many miles around.
The fort is hardly a safe refuge for these tired flyers, however. Bird-eating raptors circle the grounds constantly and we saw several luckless songbirds get caught.
Lastly, here are three bird species that within the US are only seen in southernmost Florida; I saw the first one on Garden Cay and all of them in Key West.
Welcome to Thursday, May 9, 2024, and National Butterscotch Brownies Day, also known as “Blondies”. Those are okay, but chocolate is better. Here’s a photo of a a blondie from Wikipedia. They’d be good with morning coffee (pies, cinnamon rolls, and other such treats are underrated as breakfast foods).
Judge Aileen Cannon has indefinitely postponed former President Donald Trump’s classified documents trial in Florida, citing significant issues around classified evidence that would need to be worked out before the federal criminal case goes to a jury.
In an order Tuesday, Cannon cancelled the May trial date and did not set a new date. While Trump was in criminal court Tuesday for his hush money trial in New York, Cannon’s move means there are no trial dates currently set for the other three criminal cases against him.
By indefinitely postponing the classified documents trial, Cannon’s order pushes it closer to the 2024 election – and potentially afterward
Ha! If Trump wins they’ll delay it another four years, for who is going to put a sitting President on trial. The article continues:
The judge’s new schedule lays out all the legal disputes that Cannon must decide before a jury could hear the case. Cannon said that process will take at least until late July of this year.
Cannon noted in her Tuesday order that there are eight substantive pending motions she has yet to decide. She also reiterated that she believes the national security mishandling allegations in the case “present novel and difficult questions.”
Though all parties agreed that the case wouldn’t be ready to go before a jury in May, prosecutors still pushed for a July trial date, while Trump and his co-defendants proposed dates in August and September. Although Trump’s attorneys have continuously asserted in court filings that a pre-election trial would be “unfair.”
The further delayed trial also could put Trump’s two federal cases on a collision course.
In Washington, DC, the former president is charged with alleged crimes he committed during his presidency to reverse the 2020 election results. That case, also brought by special counsel Jack Smith’s team, has been on pause while the Supreme Court considers Trump’s claims of sweeping immunity. A decision from the high court is expected by July.
Trump is charged in the Florida case with mishandling classified documents and with working with two co-defendants, Walt Nauta and Carlos De Oliveira, to obstruct the Justice Department’s investigation. All three have pleaded not guilty.
Cannon said in her new scheduling order that she will hold a hearing on what had been considered Trump’s longshot request for records from the Biden administration.
Crikey, the only trial proceeding is the Stormy Daniels hush-money trial, in which, if convicted, Trump would probably get probation. He’s Teflon, I tell you!
On Tuesday night, more than a day after Hamas claimed to have approved what it said was the Egyptian and Qatari mediators’ proposal “regarding a ceasefire agreement,” the US State Department spokesman Matthew Miller finally declared publicly, “That is not what they did.”
Rather, said Miller, “They responded with amendments or a counterproposal.” The US, he said, was “working through the details of that now.”
On Tuesday night, more than a day after Hamas claimed to have approved what it said was the Egyptian and Qatari mediators’ proposal “regarding a ceasefire agreement,” the US State Department spokesman Matthew Miller finally declared publicly, “That is not what they did.”
Rather, said Miller, “They responded with amendments or a counterproposal.” The US, he said, was “working through the details of that now.”
In fact, close examination of the Hamas document, as issued (Arabic) by the terror group itself, shows that far from containing “amendments” or a remotely viable counterproposal, it is constructed with incendiary sophistication to ensure that Hamas survives the war and regains control over the entire Gaza Strip. (Quotations from the Hamas text in this piece are from a translation by the Qatari-owned Al Jazeera website.)
But that’s far from all.
It is also calculated to ensure that Hamas secures further key, immensely far-reaching goals without having to meet the prime Israeli requirement for a deal: the release of all the hostages. In fact, Hamas can abrogate the deal, with all of its key goals achieved and then some, while continuing to hold almost all of the hostages.
Among those goals is one of the most central Hamas objectives since it invaded Israel on October 7 — seeing its declared war of destruction against the Jewish state expand to the West Bank. By extension, the terms of the document are also designed to destroy US President Joe Biden’s grand vision of Saudi normalization and a wider Middle East coalition against Iran.
Much has been made of the fact that, whereas Israel has repeatedly insisted it will not end the war as a condition for the release of the hostages, Hamas, in the opening paragraphs of its own sinister alternate proposal, specifies that one “aim” of the deal is “a return to a sustainable calm that leads to a permanent ceasefire.” But relatively speaking, that’s splitting hairs: The proposal conveyed by the mediators to Hamas late last month, and described by US Secretary of State Antony Blinken as an “extraordinarily generous” Israeli offer, reportedly provides for an “arrangement to restore sustainable calm” — which sounds like a near-euphemism for a permanent ceasefire.
Let’s face it: Israel is going to take Rafah and destroy any power that Hamas has, and a “permanent ceasefire” is not in the cards. Further, the U.S. to punish Israel for not running the way the way Biden wanted, has suspended shipments of heavy bombs to Israel. That’s a big mistake, as I believe the “heavy bombs” are more useful for penetrating Hamas’s tunnels than the ones Israel has to use now. UPDATE: The U.S., which apparently wants Hamas to win, has suspended weapons sales to Israel. This will only lead to the death of more Palestinian civilians since U.S. weapons enable more accurate strikes. Biden, desperate to win the election, is using Israel as a political pawn. It’s reprehensible. Does he know that the ratio of Gazan civilians killed to terrorists killed is a bit more than 1:1: much lower than, say, the U.S. achieved in its war against ISIS? And that the deaths of Gazan civilians can be largely placed at the door of Hamas, who uses them as shields.
My problem is that I am a hardheaded pragmatist who lived in Beirut and Jerusalem, cares about people on all sides and knows one thing above all from my decades in the region: The only just and workable solution to this issue is two nation-states for two indigenous people.
If you are for that, whatever your religion, nationality or politics, you’re part of the solution. If you are not for that, you’re part of the problem.
And from everything I have read and watched, too many of these protests have become part of the problem — for three key reasons.
First, they are virtually all about stopping Israel’s shameful behavior in killing so many Palestinian civilians in its pursuit of Hamas fighters, while giving a free pass to Hamas’s shameful breaking of the cease-fire that existed on Oct. 7. On that morning, Hamas launched an invasion in which it murdered Israeli parents in front of their children, children in front of their parents — documenting it on GoPro cameras — raped Israeli women and kidnapped or killed everyone they could get their hands on, from little kids to sick grandparents.
Again, you can be — and should be — appalled at Israel’s response: bombing everything in its path in Gaza so disproportionately that thousands of children have been killed, maimed and orphaned. But if you refuse to acknowledge what Hamas did to trigger this — not to justify what Israel has done, but to explain how the Jewish state could inflict so much suffering on Palestinian men, women and children in reverse — you’re just another partisan throwing another partisan log on the fire. By giving Hamas a pass, the protests have put the onus on Israel to such a degree that its very existence is a target for some students, while Hamas’s murderous behavior is passed off as a praiseworthy adventure in decolonization.
Second, when people chant slogans like “liberate Palestine” and “from the river to the sea,” they are essentially calling for the erasure of the state of Israel, not a two-state solution. They are arguing that the Jewish people have no right to self-determination or self-defense. I don’t believe that about Jews, and I don’t believe that about Palestinians. I believe in a two-state solution in which Israel, in return for security guarantees, withdraws from the West Bank, Gaza Strip and Arab areas of East Jerusalem, and a demilitarized Palestinian state that accepts the principle of two states for two people is established in those territories occupied in 1967.
. . .The third reason that these protests have become part of the problem is that they ignore the view of many Palestinians in Gaza who detest Hamas’s autocracy. These Palestinians are enraged by precisely what these student demonstrations ignore: Hamas launched this war without permission from the Gazan population and without preparation for Gazans to protect themselves when Hamas knew that a brutal Israeli response would follow. In fact, a Hamas official said at the start of the war that its tunnels were for only its fighters, not civilians.
That is not to excuse Israel in the least for its excesses, but, again, it is also not to give Hamas a pass for inviting them.
My view: Hamas was ready to sacrifice thousands of Gazan civilians to win the support of the next global generation on TikTok. And it worked. But one reason it worked was a lack of critical thinking by too many in that generation — the result of a campus culture that has become way too much about what to think and not how to think.
Apparently Friedman wants to educate a new generation of Palestinian from the PA in peace and love, and then that new generation can forge the two states. But doesn’t he know that the young generation of Palestinians already want to kill Jews and eliminate Israel? And that he thinks it will take just a single generation before the Palestinian Authority, which already promotes and funds terrorism (remember the “Pay for Slay” program?) becomes tame and loving. The man is a moron.
Malgorzata’s comment when I sent her this story: ” Poor fool. He obviously has some trouble with Hamas and seems not to notice that the vast majority of Palestinians support Hamas. And he didn’t notice the antisemitism on campuses. He is only disappointed that they didn’t shout for a ‘two-states solution'”.
*Fending off a Congressional hearing, the mayor and police of Washington D.C. ordered a clearing of an encampment of George Washington University, arresting 33.
D.C. police arrested 33 people as they began clearing a pro-Palestinian encampment at George Washington University early Wednesday, authorities said, hours before the mayor and police chief were set to testify on Capitol Hill about why they had previously declined to take action.
Police Chief Pamela A. Smith said that starting Thursday, authorities “began to see an escalation in the volatility of the protests” at the school a few blocks west of the White House. She said that a university police officer and a counterdemonstrator were assaulted. On Tuesday night, demonstrators marched to the university president’s residence.
Police moved in shortly after 3 a.m. Authorities said demonstrators clashed with police at least once, and police deployed pepper spray on a public street just outside the encampment. As of about 8:30 a.m., police were still removing tents and had blocked the entrances to University Yard. It could not be determined how many of those arrested were GWU students.
Smith said the decision to clear the encampment was made Monday. She said police had evidence that demonstrators were preparing to occupy a campus building and had amassed items that could be used as weapons. She said they believed counterdemonstrators had infiltrated the camp, and that people from outside the D.C. area were planning to join the group. Police have yet to release the identities of those arrested, and Smith did not immediately reveal what evidence police had to support those beliefs.
The police chief said officers issued six warnings to disperse from the encampment on private property, and many people did. Smith said 30 people remaining in the encampment were then arrested, 29 on charges of unlawful entry and one on a charge of assaulting a police officer.
Smith said a second group of demonstrators from outside the encampment tried to reach the people being arrested, and officers used pepper spray three timeson those who were pushing or punching officers. Three people in that group were arrested and charged with assaulting police, authorities said.
Action was imperative here, as the presence of weapons, clashes with cops, and plans to occupy a building were even more serious than the issues we faced at Chicago. To paraphrase Johnnie Cochrane, “If you put up a tent, to jail you’ll be sent.”
Surprise fees are widely hated, but they are still sneaking onto the bottom of bills for everything from concert tickets to dinners out.
More companies are unbundling the cost of their goods and services, retail analysts say, tacking on 3% for swiping a credit card or adding a little extra for gas. With Live Nation Entertainment facing scrutiny over its ticketing process, singer Maggie Rogers recently urged her fans to buy tickets to her next show at the box office “like it’s 1965” to avoid fees, even showing up at one herself. The Cure’s Robert Smith, meanwhile, convinced Live Nation Entertainment subsidiary Ticketmaster to offer some fee refunds.
The upshot is that prices we see, whether on a restaurant menu or flight-booking site, are rarely the ones we end up paying.
Business owners say fees are needed to cover costs and show customers where their money is going. But retail analysts and advocates like the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) say secondary fees diminish people’s ability to shop around. CFPB data also show fees cause people to pay more overall because businesses can charge more than what the market will let them get away with in the sticker price.
. . . So widespread is the tactic that President Biden is making a fee crackdown one of his administrative priorities. His administration estimates that Americans pay more than a collective $90 billion in what the president has dubbed “junk fees” each year, including those for credit cards, food delivery, bank overdrafts and event tickets.
Noelle Weaver and Bradley Walker say they now base their hotel and rental-car selections upon whichever companies will give them one flat, upfront price.
“I just want to know what it’s going to cost instead of feeling the bitterness of getting upcharged at every turn,” says Walker, a 51-year-old creative director for an ad agency.
Their approach follows a series of off-putting experiences, including a New Orleans hotel they say was more focused on “getting every dollar they can” than on ensuring they would want to return. What they thought would be a $719, four-night stay became nearly $1,000 after their receipt shows they paid an additional $235 in taxes and fees. The hotel also charged $50 for early check-in. They declined to pay to use the gym.
“They wanted us to pay an upcharge for all the things that are actually free to the hotel,” says Walker, who lives in Greenwood Lake, N.Y.
What bothers me are rental car fees, hotel add-ons, and especially when you’re buying some quick take-out food, like a coffee or a baguette, and they ask you how much you want to tip. I’m not a tipper in that situation; call me cheap.
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, a lovely reflection photo with Editor Hili ensuring that all is well with Listy:
From Masih; more nonsense about hijabs. How can a principal ATTACK a student for not wearing a hijab?
an Iranian schoolgirl being physically attacked by the principal for not wearing hijab. In response, students unite, remove their hijabs, disable cameras, and chant against discriminatory rules.
This is only one bit of what our protesters were demanding!
‼️This is the contract that was on the table that @UChicago offered students. Students had only 4 edits they wanted & @UChicago refused to negotiate in good faith. They wanted specific language and accountability measures to protect and uplift Palestinian (Gazan) students and… pic.twitter.com/ZgGsgFpyVY
— Chicago Progressive Staffers (@312Staffers) May 7, 2024
The letter mentioned below is here; it’s sad and moving.
Hundreds of Jewish students at @Columbia just published one of the most incredible student letters I have ever read.
It's not only magnificently written, but it also clearly articulates their experiences on campus for the past six months.
David Attenborough is 98 years old today! In his honor, here’s one of the videos he narrated for BBC Earth. It shows a mother Siberian flying squirrel (Pteromys volans), gliding around and then returning to her nest to suckle her two babies. Soon the babies are ready for their first “flight,” though one is a bit timorous.
The YouTube notes:
A Siberian squirrel mother feeds her babies to build their strength throughout the winter. But once Spring arrives, these youngsters must take to the skies themselves.
Sir David has turned many of us on to nature, and is one of the great biology educators of our time.
John Cairns, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Caption to the photo: “Sir David Attenborough at the official opening of the Weston Library, Oxford, England, in March 2015. Ovenden awarded the Bodley Medal to Hawking and Attenborough as part of the ceremony. See “Oxford University’s Weston Library reopens”, BBC News
In yesterday’s Wall Street Journal, Paul Alivisatos, the President of the University of Chicago, explained why he ordered the University cops to dismantle our encampment of pro-Palestinian protestors after eight days. There are good parts and not so good parts, but it’s clear that the basis for dismantling the enclave was to uphold our principle of institutional neutrality—the Kalven principle).
Click screenshot below to read the short piece or find it archived here.
A few quotes first:
Some universities have chosen to block encampments from forming at all or ended them within an hour or so. We had the means to do so. Immediate intervention is consistent with enforcing reasonable regulations on the time, place and manner of speech, and it has the advantage of minimizing disruption. Yet strict adherence to every policy—the suppression of discord to promote harmony—comes at a cost. Discord is almost required for the truth-seeking function of a university to be genuine.
Protest is a strongly protected form of speech in the University of Chicago culture, enshrined in the Chicago Principles for a reason. In times of discord, protest serves as a mechanism for democratic societies, and places of reason like universities, to find a way back toward dialogue and compromise. This has value even if protests result in disruption or violate the rules—up to a point. When a protest substantially interferes with the learning, research and operations of the university, when it meaningfully diminishes the free-expression rights of others—as happened with this encampment—then it must come to an end, through dialogue or intervention.
Therefore, it was a crucial decision whether to seek a dialogue to resolve a disruptive protest. Some will argue that the moral hazard of even holding such discussions is so severe that they should never be undertaken at all—that no agreement could possibly be legitimate if it originated from these circumstances. Others will say such dialogue should always be sought. I believe dialogue may be appropriate under certain circumstances, provided that protesters come to it openly with an understanding that the consequences of their policy violations will be reviewed evenhandedly. The same applies to discipline now that the encampment has ended.
The principle that decided the final action:
Why then didn’t we reach a resolution? Because at the core of the demands was what I believe is a deep disagreement about a principle, one that can’t be papered over with carefully crafted words, creative adjustments to programming, or any other negotiable remedy.
The disagreement revolves around institutional neutrality—a foundational value to the University of Chicago. It is a principle animated by the idea that authority can’t establish truth for an entire institution dedicated to truth-seeking; rather, it is the imperative of individuals to seek truth without being limited by authority. Institutional neutrality vests freedom of inquiry and speech directly in faculty and students, where it belongs.
Underpinning the demands was a call for the university to diminish ties with Israel and increase ties with the Palestinians in Gaza. In short, the protesters were determined that the university should take sides in the conflict in Israel and Gaza. Other demands would have led to having political goals guide core aspects of the university’s institutional approaches, from how we invest our endowment to when and how I make statements. Faculty members and students are more than free to engage in advocacy on one side or the other. But if the university did so as an institution, it would no longer be much of a university.
That sounds good, and is meant to uphold our free speech principles, but I’m not completely satisfied with this response for several reasons.
a.) I don’t think the President should have tried to bargain with the protestors. That never works, and winds up heartening them to erect encampments elsewhere to achieve their aims.
b.) We were never told that the administration was secretly trying to bargain with encampers. That distressed many of us, who, though we didn’t need to know what items were on the table, believe that you should never bargain with such a group of zealots. And believe me, the encampers were zealots.
c.) The President should simply have had the encampment removed the moment the first tent was hammered into the ground. Why? Because, as Alivisatos admitted in his first letter to the University, the encampment violated University “time, place, and manner” regulations in multiple ways. From the outset it was a big violation, not a minor one. And it only got bigger over time, exacerbating the problem.
d.) Bargaining with UCUP and SJP is a futile effort, because the University has had to deal with their disruptions repeatedly (this is the fifth time), they have never really punished the students, and the protesters are determined to continue their disruptions until they get everything they want. That includes the University divesting from Israel, something that will never happen here. Thus negotiations were doomed at the outset.
e.) Alivisatos implies that he let the encampment stand as a sign of our university’s tolerance of free speech, but, as I said, it was never a sign of free speech, but rather an illegal violation of principles that themselves were designed to promote free speech. Yes, let the protesters act legally, holding permitted demonstrations, giving speeches, and so on. But it’s not tolerating free speech to let people block access to parts of the university, harass their opponents, and disrupt University life by constant loud and illegal shouting and chanting on megaphones. One of my colleagues criticized the letter for implying that ending the protest too early would have been a violation of free speech, but allowing it to go on longer would have been caving in to pressure. That is, pulling the switch after a week was, to the President, the perfect solution. I disagree. Letting the encampment stay up from the outset is caving in to pressure, and other schools, like Dartmouth, have ended encampments very early without suffering any damage. On the other hand, Northwestern, which did strike a deal with protestors to give student scholarships and jobs to Palestinians, has suffered a loss in reputation for what is very possibly an illegal compromise.
The silver lining in this egregious encampment, and in the administration having allowed it to remain for a long time, is that the protesters, including University of Chicago United for Palestine (UCUP) and Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) have shown themselves for who they are: a pack of hateful bullies unwilling to even discuss their aim, which is to push for the elimination of Israel and make the University of Chicago a refuge for Palestinian protest. Protest is fine, but the way the Jewish students have been treated here, by both the administration (which won’t answer their letters and only lightly punishes SJP for deplatforming them) and by the encampers (who tear down the Jewish banners every day and won’t permit “Zionists” in their encampment) has created a climate of anti-Semitism that justifies a Title VI lawsuit, as is happening at Northwestern. If the administration is to enforce institutional neutrality, it cannot allow it to go on so visibly for a week without any strong pushback. We must at all costs maintain our neutrality, and our time, place and manner regulations of speech, even in the face of hateful bullying.
Oh, and do you think any of the protesters will be punished? The University mentions internal sanctions, but that’s meant only for students and so far hasn’t even been applied to those who sat in in a building last October. Were students’ names taken? They won’t let us know. And as for the many non-students who joined the encampment—probably a majority of the protesters— they’ll face no punishment at all, as no arrests were made.
This lack of punishment means that our free-speech policies are toothless, for we have no meaningful deterrence for violating them.
