I'm sure many readers have noticed that the campus riots against Israel have many common features. Many demonstrators all have the same type and color of tents in their "protest camps", often arranged in similar grid patterns. They have professionally printed protest signs, delivered in their hundreds, rather than spontaneously-drawn hand-made signs.
Does that remind you, perhaps, of those strategically-placed and anonymously-delivered pallets of bricks that accompanied street riots in many American cities during 2020, and the unrest that led up to the Presidential election that year? It sure does me . . .
There's also the presence of professional agitators and activists to organize the otherwise clueless students.
Mayor Eric Adams warned Wednesday that “outside agitators” had descended on Columbia University’s campus to radicalize students ... Hizzoner blamed the on-campus chaos on insurgents who have a “history of escalating situations and trying to create chaos” instead of protesting peacefully.
“There were individuals on the campus who should not have been there. They were people who are professionals and we saw evidence of training,” Adams said.
“I know that there are those who attempting to say, ‘Well, the majority of people may have been students.’ You don’t have to be the majority to influence and co-op an operation. That is what this about.
. . .
Adams said the NYPD was brought in Tuesday night to quell the unrest at Columbia after the administration acknowledged outside influencers “were on their grounds training and really co-opting this movement.”
There's more at the link.
The U.K. Telegraph provided this pen-portrait of one of the better-known radical organizers in New York City.
When Eric Adams, the New York mayor, issued a warning about “outside agitators” infiltrating the pro-Palestinian demonstrations at Columbia University, his words were accompanied by video of students dutifully obeying orders from a grey-haired woman.
She was identified as Lisa Fithian, a New Yorker living in Texas, yet the 63-year-old would have needed no introduction to law enforcement officers involved with policing protests in the US for more than half a century.
Described by Mother Jones as “the nation’s best-known protest consultant”, Ms Fithian has supported a plethora of movements over the decades including opposing the Iraq war, fighting for Louisiana communities following Hurricane Katrina, Extinction Rebellion and Occupy Wall Street.
She has been arrested between 80 and 100 times yet unions and activist groups hold her rabble-rousing skills in such high regard they have paid her $300 (£240) a day to run demonstrations and teach them tactics for taking over the streets.
Video released by New York police at Mayor Adams’ briefing on Tuesday showed Ms Fithian instructing a mob of pro-Palestinian protesters as they took over an academic building at Columbia University.
. . .
After attending Skidmore college in New York, she cut her teeth as a political activist with the Washington Peace Center campaign group in the 1980s, organising demonstrations locally and nationally with a focus on anti-racism issues.
By the time she took a key role in Occupy, a social justice movement that targeted leading financial institutions, she was a revered figure among fellow campaigners.
As Occupy took over the parks of New York and Los Angeles in 2012, she was reported to have been handing out advice to younger activists on tactics ranging from proper tear gas attire to long-term protest strategies.
“When there is some conflict, or things aren’t going the way that we want them to go, or people don’t have a good long-term plan,” a twenty-something protester told Mother Jones, “I have heard others and myself say, ‘Damn it, where is Lisa Fithian?’”
Max Berger, another Occupy campaigner, said: “Nobody is going to say that what Lisa does is not badass so she is in a very strategically important position of teaching kids who want to be badass to be smart.”
Again, more at the link. She was far from the only such organizer there.
Also, intriguingly, we find that many of the "migrants" who recently poured across our southern border, with the help of the Biden administration, may be involved in the campus riots.
The modern version of Rent-A-Mob, perhaps?
Perhaps most intriguing from my point of view, the "fact-checking" sources that almost unanimously debunked the placement of bricks during the 2020 riots, denouncing them as mere "construction debris", are also working flat-out to deny that outside agitators are at work in these campus riots. A simple Internet search reveals the common guidelines they've been given. They're all marching to the beat of the same drummer, suggesting that their "fact-checking" is itself nothing more than political propaganda.
Put all that together, and the "demonstrations" begin to look more and more like the George Floyd protests of 2020: a technique for political intimidation, rather than a "spontaneous" outburst. These riots are far too well organized and coordinated across the country for that.
I think I have a solution, though. Let's gather up every organizer we can find, plus the "student leaders" who are looking to them for guidance, and drop them all into the middle of the biggest concentration of Hamas terrorists we can find in Gaza. Let them discuss solidarity and fellow-feeling all they like, while the rest of us watch. It might make for a sell-out pay-per-view experience.
Peter
