“Oct 7 2023”

Why have young women been so prominent in the recent campus chaos?

The female voices rose high-pitched and shrill above the crowd:

“Five, six, seven, eight, Israel is a terrorist state.”

“We don’t want no Zionists here, say it loud, say it clear.”

“Resistance is justified when people are occupied.”

The voices that answered them were also overwhelmingly female, emanating from hundreds of students chanting and marching around tents pitched in front of Columbia University’s neoclassical Butler Library, part of an effort in late April to prevent the university from uprooting the encampment.

After several arrests at a pro-Palestinian campus protest, Canada’s minister of diversity, inclusion and persons with disabilities, Kamal Khera, says it’s time “to bring the temperature down in this country.”

“As a government, we will always protect the Charter of Rights, freedom of expression and peaceful protest and assembly. But that must not cross the line,” Khera told Mercedes Stephenson in an interview on The West Block.

This looks like the right kind of response.

University of Alberta (Edmonton) police brutality. From u/CDNZimmy pic.twitter.com/h62hMLzVc3

— r/Hasan_Piker (unofficial) (@redditHasan) May 12, 2024

Israel faced international backlash on Saturday over the IDF operation in Rafah and its seizure last week of the Palestinian side of the Rafah crossing.

“We think an offensive on Rafah would be irresponsible. We warn against it,” German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said at a webcast event organized by the German newspaper group RND.

“We don’t believe that there is any approach that would not lead in the end to the incredible loss of human life of innocent civilians,” Scholz said, adding that he had told this to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

What the protesters are really calling for.

In February I wrote about the seemingly strange bedfellows of the red-green alliance – red for progressivism and green for Islam – whose values on many issues seem so diametrically opposed and yet they are united in their determination to dismantle the Western civilization they both see as the obstacle to erecting their differing visions of utopian societies.

In his First Inaugural Address, Abraham Lincoln famously appealed to the “better angels of our nature” as the country descended into civil war. Lincoln’s words expressed a last hope. In the end, it took four bitter years of conflict to create, at Appomattox, the silence in which our better angels could finally be heard. Still, President Lincoln never stopped listening, even in the darkest moments of the conflict, to his own better angels. When it comes to Israel and anti-Semitism, either Joe Biden’s better angels are silent, or he is too deaf to hear them.

Democrats again indulge their activist fringe as another Chicago convention looms.

Campus unrest and a threatened mass protest at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago are summoning flashbacks to 1968, touching off the irresistible urge to predict a rerun of that year’s Democratic disaster this November. Cooler heads, like Willis Sparks at Gzero Media, note several distinctions between our moment and those that precipitated the late-sixties clash. Which perspective is right? Both are.

A protest encampment set up on the University of Alberta campus was cleared early Saturday morning by Edmonton police.

In an update issued early Saturday, police sad the action “follows repeated notice to encampment participants by the university that their activities violate university policy and its Trespass to Premises Act.

This is what happening right now. This is going to have lasting impacts on University of Alberta as people around the world watch the brutality you inflicted on your students by sending riot cops on them. pic.twitter.com/C8rPWTqstb https://t.co/PrriNXMDp9

— Terrill Tailfeathers (@Terrilltf) May 11, 2024