ArchitectGuy on Israel

AXIOS
Exclusive poll: Most college students shrug at nationwide protests
Sareen Habeshian
May 7, 2024

College protests against Israel’s war in Gaza are dominating headlines. But only a sliver of students are participating or view it as a top issue, according to a new Generation Lab survey shared exclusively with Axios. The poll hints that the war — and the accompanying protests — might not hurt President Biden’s election prospects among young voters as much as previously thought. Only a small minority (8%) of college students have participated in either side of the protests, the survey of 1,250 college students found. Students ranked the conflict in the Middle East as the least important issue facing them out of nine options. It landed behind health care reform, racial justice and civil rights, economic fairness and opportunity, education funding and access, and climate change. READ MORE

CITY JOURNAL
Hysterics for Hamas
Heather Mac Donald
May 9, 2024

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. The female tilt among anti-Israel student protesters is an underappreciated aspect of the pro-Hamas campus hysteria. READ MORE

WSJ
Activist Groups Trained Students for Months Before Campus Protests
Tawnell D. Hobbs, Valerie Bauerlein and Dan Frosch
May 3, 2024

The recent wave of pro-Palestinian protests on college campuses came on suddenly and shocked people across the nation. But the political tactics underlying some of the demonstrations were the result of months of training, planning and encouragement by longtime activists and left-wing groups. At Columbia University, in the weeks and months before police took down encampments at the New York City campus and removed demonstrators occupying an academic building, student organizers began consulting with groups such as the National Students for Justice in Palestine, veterans of campus protests and former Black Panthers. READ MORE

POLITICO Pro-Palestinian protesters are backed by a surprising source: Biden’s biggest donors Some of the most outspoken groups against Biden and Israel get funding from foundations attached to some of the biggest names in Democratic circles.

TABLET MAG The People Setting America on Fire As in the “mostly peaceful” Black Lives Matter protests of the summer of 2020, “outside agitators”—professional radicals and organizers, black bloc antifa thugs, Marxist-Leninist revolutionaries, and Palestinian and Islamist radicals—have played a central role in organizing and escalating the campus protests, just as they have organized and escalated the wider anti-Israel protest campaign that began almost immediately after Oct. 7. This largely decentralized network of agitators is, in turn, politically and financially supported by a vast web of progressive nonprofits, NGOs, foundations, and dark-money groups ultimately backed by big-money donors aligned with the Democratic Party.