AG Report 5.9.2024
Media Failures Lead to Mob Violence
The national press has played an active role in mislabeling and obscuring the nature of the anti-Israel protests at several universities. The reason is obvious: the media is dominated by leftists who view the protestors as ideological allies and therefore don’t want them to be negatively portrayed or punished.
To sell the narrative that these protests are “mostly peaceful” and that it’s wrong for universities to take action against them despite their rule violations, outlets have resorted to ignoring what the protestors both say and do. This type of one-sided coverage has real consequences, which is what we saw play out at UCLA last week.
The press ignored a week’s worth of violent, criminal behavior from the anti-Israel crowd at UCLA, which included multiple assaults, restricting “Zionists” and Jews from parts of campus, and mobbish attempts to intimidate students and journalists. The encampment crowd was even actively gearing up for a fight with police. These events should have been all over the news and created widespread outrage, but the media simply ignored them.
UCLA did nothing because there was more media pressure on them to ignore the mob than dissolve it. This only emboldened the protestors by creating the mostly accurate perception that UCLA and local authorities would not enforce campus rules. If you adopt mob rule on campus, it’s only a matter of time before the people who are being targeted fight back. That’s exactly what happened at UCLA.
By ignoring the incidents that led up to it, the press became complicit in creating the circumstances that made escalating violence inevitable. The same people demanding that police and university officials allow the anti-Israel mob to have free rein are also complaining that those same authorities didn’t do more to protect them from the counter-mob.
Now we are seeing similar menacing and criminal behavior at other campuses. Once again, the press is overwhelmingly ignoring and downplaying it. The universities are letting it go. The inevitable outcome will be more clashes and violence, which news organizations will blame on those responding. But that won’t change the reality of the choice that exists: We either have rules/laws that are fairly enforced or mob rule. If it’s the latter, it won’t be limited to the mobs you like and agree with. Those who demand exemptions for the mobs they like will be the first to demand enforcement against those they don’t like.
The most amazing part is that the demands that police not intervene at places like Columbia came after it was apparent that at least a portion of those participating were non-students with lengthy criminal records. I can’t think of any other context in which criminals would be allowed to threaten students and faculty without condemnation from the media.
Among those arrested last weekend during the NYPD actions at Columbia and CUNY was pro-Hamas activist Rudy Martinez. I previously wrote about him as an example of how the anti-Israel protests were being run by professional agitators. Part of the problem in places like New York City is they simply don’t enforce many of their laws.
Martinez has been arrested at least 4 or 5 times over the last 4-5 months, yet he continues to be released to commit similar acts again and again. It’s also the reason New York City has a problem with the same perpetrators committing repeated attacks in the subway system. That’s a progressive policy choice and the harm it does to New York City residents is obvious.
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