Simone Zimmerman, founder of IfNotNowOrg:
“I genuinely don’t know how anyone who is seriously committed to the safety and well-being of Jews can see a single decision made by people in power this week as doing anything but deeply endangering Jewish people at Columbia and beyond🧵
The crisis at Columbia is a direct result of university leadership’s caving to pressure from bad actors- whose goal is to deepen the repression of pro Palestinian activism and speech and to undermine academic freedom and dismantle universities. Period.
After a deeply Orwellian show trial in Congress, calling the NYPD to arrest over a hundred peaceful student protesters, suspending them, locking them out of their dorms, dining, campus, is so deeply cruel. How is anyone made safer by a decision like this?
As the White House, Jake Tapper, ADL, AJC etc release alarmist statements abt Jewish students, they made no mention of the Jews who were made homeless this week by Columbia, left out in the cold literally & figuratively on Shabbat and now on Passover because of their politics
And again none of these people express a drop of care or concern for the safety of Palestinian, Arab, Muslim, Black and brown students arrested by NYPD at Columbia’s request. And harassed, surveilled, doxxed nonstop for the last six months on campus. As people are dying in Gaza.
Wielding undemocratic power in the name of keeping Jews safe will not ensure that ANYONE who has engaged in antisemitic behaviors or speech will change. It will instead reinforce for them and their peers, the idea that Jews have disproportionate power — a core antisemitic belief.
Jewish students are safe from discrimination when all students are safe from discrimination.
When Jewish students are singled out — either for protection or for discrimination — they are made less safe. Period.
It is beyond maddening and heartbreaking to see that people hate Palestinians so much that they’re willing to to anything- incl endanger Jewish people around the world- as they do everything possible to protect Israel’s impunity and killing machine in Gaza.
Let’s talk about safety on university campuses. Let’s talk about how Israel bombed every university in Gaza. Let’s talk about how right now, in Gaza, families are uncovering the remains of their loved ones’ rotting corpses, their massacres a joint project of Israel and America.
This is why American college students are protesting. They are watching these massacres and they refuse to be silent. And now they are rising up even more to protest not just this country’s institutions’ investment in genocide but also the assault on their freedoms here at home.”