To demand that universities take an institutional stand on issues of the day is to misunderstand their role.
By Eliot A. Cohen
This year, the protests have taken an uglier turn, as encampments have sprouted up. The demonstrators—most of them students, many not, often masked—are calling for divestment by their universities from companies based in or doing business with Israel. Some of the protesters see this goal as an interim step toward the destruction of the state of Israel.
Incredibly cowardly opening paragraph
Ctrl+f “genocide” 0/0 results hmmmmm
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I always goggle these authors when they have dogshit opinions like this. If they’re over 40, adults well before internet became integrated into life fully, there’s like 90% chance they’re a dipshit Zionist with extremely reactionary opinions towards “young” (anyway under 40) people and Arabs, broadly speaking.
This is biographical from the first line in his wiki entry:
Eliot Asher Cohen (born April 3, 1956, in [Boston, Massachusetts] is an American [political scientist]. He was a counselor in the [United States Department of State] under [Condoleezza Rice] from 2007 to 2009.
Boomer ✅ Masshole ✅ Worked for the FUCKING BUSH ADMIN ✅
This guy is 1000% disqualified from having a valid opinion on anything in the MENA region, especially Israel related.
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This guy is such a dweeb that even 2000’s era Tucker Carlson would have stuffed him in a locker.
The amnesty and investment reviews are attempts to buy off protesters, in the hope that by the time the university committees do their work, the war in Gaza will be over,
what will the conclusion of the “war in Gaza” look like? I wonder if any Israeli officials have commented
in any case the divestment decisions (almost assuredly negative, because the alternative would open up an equally ugly can of worms) can be made this summer or next,
The universities unfortunately have a fiduciary duty to support Zionism, nothing we can do sorry
while the kids are backpacking in Mongolia.
The problem is that the appearance of caving is caving. If you tacitly tell students that violating university rules will bring no sanctions, they will do it again
They are children, and you can NEVER let the children win. Gives them the wrong idea
The brute fact is that many American universities and colleges, including some of the best, have seen a surge in anti-Semitism, including protesters mobbing students wearing kippahs and shouting that Zionists—that is, people who believe that the Jews deserve a state of their own—deserve death. Many Jewish students, as a result, feel unsafe and unwelcome, and university leaders have only rarely denounced anti-Semitic outbursts without reference to other forms of bias, thereby skirting the core problem.
Administrators are diplomatically paying lip service to the real grievances of the protestors at same time as my fake intellectually dishonest grievances, and this makes me very mad! Pick a side (my side) 😡
Universities cannot claim and do not deserve some special status as arbiters of a moral foreign policy. After all, they are not, and have never been, paragons of moral virtue.
(Insert Pol pot emoji that I can’t find) Correct
Nineteen-year-olds make good soldiers, but not good generals, judges, corporate executives, or bishops, for the excellent reason that their emotions and passions, noble or ignoble, have yet to be tamed by wisdom and good judgment
Time and time again, brash 19yo soldiers go to war against the good and wise judgement of the elder peacenik generals commanding them. Who put those 19yo soldiers in charge??
Today’s students are no better or worse than their predecessors. They are, as befits their age, morally selective to a fault: Can anyone recall a demonstration against Pernod Ricard for failing to fully halt exports of Absolut Vodka to Russia until about a year ago?
This is a very serious matter
Presumably, students come to a university for an education, which implies that they need to be educated, which means that they are not, in fact, ready to make the deeper judgments on which society depend
The students attending our most prestigious schools don’t actually know anything at all, all of them, in equal measure. That diaspora student who lost half of their relatives to idf bombs? They simply are not educated enough to know that this is actually deeply good for society, like I do.
It’s simple really: the children are stupid and cannot be trusted
Can anyone recall a demonstration against Pernod Ricard for failing to fully halt exports of Absolut Vodka to Russia until about a year ago?
Yes, who can forget that time Russia caused an excess of 30,000 civilian casualties by leveling a city with Absolut. Our collective failure to hold Pernod Ricard to account for its role in that will haunt us for years to come.
Keep publishing condescending editorials from clueless gerontocrats, news media, I’m sure that’ll start arresting your freefall any day now.
The amnesty and investment reviews are attempts to buy off protesters, in the hope that by the time the university committees do their work, the war in Gaza will be over, and in any case the divestment decisions (almost assuredly negative, because the alternative would open up an equally ugly can of worms) can be made this summer or next, while the kids are backpacking in Mongolia.
Imagine being such a smug, paternalistic jackass about kids actually caring about other people
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Might as well put the triple parentheses. It’s his politics that’s the problem, not his ancestry
Just saying, your 🤔 is a bit strong for a literal hasbara propagandist