Columbia seems to think there’s something to ‘negotiate’ here with pro-Hamas protestors

Pro-Hamas protestors, not all of whom are students, have creating a living nightmare for Columbia University’s students and the working element of its faculty and administration.

Jewish students have been targeted and threatened. University pathways have been blocked. Smelly tent cities not up to anyone’s code have gone up. Trash is visible. The university lawn has been trampled. Classes have moved to Zoom for the remainder of the semester, making Columbia the world’s priciest online school. And yes, there is a public relations price for the school to pay for this mayhem, the school’s name stinks.

Students who go to Columbia to study and faculty and researchers who work at Columbia to increase knowledge can’t do what they need to do. But no matter.

While about a hundred of them from the Barnard College branch of the school have been suspended, including Rep. Ilhan Omar’s whiny “P.C. police” daughter, the rest of the baying pro-Hamas campers remain.

The school needs to finish its job and shut this crap down.

Instead, they’re negotiating with the “students” as New York Police Department riot police stand in the background and it’s not going well.

According to the New York Post:

Columbia University will continue discussions with anti-Israel student protesters to reach an agreement on a plan to dismantle their encampment “for the next 48 hours” after a midnight deadline passed without a resolution, according to a report.

Riot police were seen assembling overnight as a University spokesperson said university administrators made “important progress with representatives of the student encampment,” the Columbia Spectator reported.

University President Minouche Shafik initially set a midnight deadline on Wednesday for them to clear out before the school would “consider alternative options” to remove the tent city.

However, just past midnight, the Students for Justice in Palestine, Columbia University Apartheid Divest posted on X that they had left talks with the school “until there is a written commitment that the administration will not be unleashing the NYPD or the National Guard on its students.”

What’s to negotiate here? They protested, they made a mess, now it’s time to get out and go home. No go, well, here come the cops. Punto.

The idea of negotiating with these fools is ridiculous, because the school is the one in charge and responsible for the safety and functioning of the university. The university isn’t functioning much, many of the kids are unsafe, the university holds all the cards here, yet these protestors have got the university administrators wrapped around their little finger, doing like Hamas does, by extending, and extending, and extending the deadline to buy time until reinforcements come.

It’s a wasted chance, and probably will make matters worse. Why the university is afraid instead of resolute is beyond understanding. I doubt that polls would show much public sympathy for the protestors, particularly after the antisemitic videos have emerged of them, even among Democrats.

The self-centered, self-righteous pro-Hamas protestors are buying time because they want to shut the entire school down until it divests its endowment of Israeli goods, which is frankly impossible, given that you can’t open a refrigerator door without encountering Israeli parts, and shutting down Google for the school or telling the medical center it can’t implant artificial hearts anymore isn’t going to happen. Israeli goods and the products of Israeli brainpower are absolutely all over the doings of the civilized world, so the demands are pie-in-the-sky gibberish, the kinds of outrageous things terrorists in the 1970s used to demand.

But that’s the nominal cause for negotiation here, the real cause is to make the school hostile territory for Jewish students, put Hamas’s propaganda out front as ‘settled science,’ and force the rest of the school into its dhimmitude. The protestors cite the “heritage” of the school, its 1968 protests, as some kind of justification for their takeover. I got news for them: That takeover was not good for the school, either.

All of this is good reason for Columbia to tell the protestors to cut the crap, get the heck out, and then resume normal operations at the university. The great Ronald Reagan once made a political name for himself when as governor in 1969, he sent the cops in after the hippies who were ‘occupying’ a strip of University of California – Berkeley land known as People’s Park. He got that job done and eventually went on to become president, succeeding the weakling Jimmy Carter.

Columbia thus far is not so lucky. Instead of a tough stance on antisemitism, we see “negotiations” with supporters of terrorists. This is complete cowardice. The university needs to make its deadlines to these menacing squatters as tough as its admissions deadlines and send the cops in immediately.

As for People’s Park, the leftist U.C. Berkeley has finally figured out that this year was time to get rid of the “park” because it was such a plague, chopping it up for parking lots and student housing.

Columbia should wise up and rather than hem and haw with these clowns, Be Like Berkeley. There’s nothing to negotiate here.

Image: Screen shot from Forbes Breaking News video, via YouTube