Student Protests Grow Across Country Over Israel-Hamas War

Voices across the spectrum are reflecting on the student protests taking place on college campuses across the country in response to the Israel-Hamas conflict. 

“Intifada-Meets-Woodstock”: A writer in The Atlantic (Left bias) described the “Liberated Zone” where protesters are gathered at Columbia University as “intifada-meets-Woodstock,” determining that the demonstrators “seemed less likely to persuade than to give collective voice to righteous anger. A genuine sympathy for the suffering of Gazans mixed with a fervor and a politics that could border on the oppressive.” The writer concluded, “too many at this elite university, even as they hoped to ease the plight of imperiled civilians, had allowed the intoxicating language of liberation to blind them to an ugliness encoded within that struggle.”

“Woefully Misled and Vaguely Menacing”: Noah Rothman (Lean Right bias) pushed back on the notion that the student’s youth gives them an “untainted” perspective on the conflict and affords them heightened sympathy for the Palestinian people. Connecting the student protests to historic youth movements in America, Rothman concluded, “The woefully misled and vaguely menacing students glutting the quads of their formerly respected institutions fancy themselves the authors of a revolutionary power reversal, but that is self-deception. They’re merely acting out in service to the interests of the already powerful, whose primary goal is the acquisition of even more power. Of the many tragedies in this ongoing spectacle, the degree to which its participants have been tricked into tarnishing their personal and professional reputations is one of the saddest.”