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Brandeis bans student group it says 'openly supports Hamas'

The Jewish Journal reports on Brandeis's decision, which came yesterday, hours before Students for Justice in Palestine was to hold a rally at the school.

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How many seconds did that decision take? Two? Three? Did these (expletives) think they'd actually wander onto the grounds of a private Jewish business, and openly endorse the terrorists who seek to eliminate them?

Justice for Palestine is a wonderful conceit. Kidnapping old ladies is not.

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But so is avenging the old ladies with indiscriminate bombing of civilians.

I have to wonder about all the fetus worshipping religionists in this country screaming KILL KILL KILL.

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The year was 1675; the place: right here in Massachusetts.

That was the year when native Americans raided some Massachusetts towns and committed unspeakable atrocities against residents, torturing and killing men, women, and children while taking a few back with them as hostages.

The Massachusetts Bay Colony responded with all-out war. The war would expand beyond the boundaries of Massachusetts, dragging in the neighboring Plymouth colony and Rhode Island. It ended with the virtual extermination of the Wampanoags and Narragansetts;many of the surviving Native Americans were shipped off to slavery in the West Indies.

The Hamas war will end much as King Philip's War did. The only question is whether Israel might be more magnanimous toward its defeated enemies than my ancestors were.

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Israel (it's people and government) is not interested in eliminating the Palestinian people.

A better analogy would be as if the leadership of Brookline wanted everyone in Boston dead and Boston responded by blockading Brookline. Newton agrees to block the border between the two towns so Brookline residents couldn't leave. Instead of both sides agreeing to peace, Brookline keeps launching rockets into Allston and takes a bunch of BPS kids hostage. Boston responded by cutting off the utilities and destroying the nearby homes across the border, displacing thousands of people. Despite the bloodshed, both sides kept digging in planning even more bloody retaliation.

Meanwhile Weston decides to align with Brookline and send them money and arms. Quincy tries to use the war to enact unrelated concessions. (They'll support Boston if Boston agrees to drop the plans for the Long Island bridge.)

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In your analogy, most of the people of Brookline were placed there after being violently ejected from their own houses and penned up in prison camps and ghettos in Brookline under the watchful eye of the occupying force of Boston police, then not allowed free travel within much of that territory or anywhere else. Even in town, Brookline's existence is grim and subject to the whims of the apartheid overlords of Boston, always vulnerable to the further provocation of the people of Boston coming in with guns to force them from their homes.

Israel may not be literally eliminating the Palestinian people, but they are absolutely interested in stealing the land from the Palestinian people, as has been ongoing under Netanyahu's disastrous regime for decades and has intensified after the Gaza attack.

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Israel (it's people and government) is not interested in eliminating the Palestinian people.

They have a funny way of showing it.

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...but it does want to keep them under permanent subjection, much as native Americans were long treated by the United States.

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I don't think this was intended but there is some irony that the town chosen to stand in for Gaza was Brookline considering the significant Jewish history and population in that town.

In all seriousness I would suggest East Boston and Charlestown as standins for Gaza and The West Bank geographic wise.

In that scenario East Boston is where Boston sends all the stuff they don't want like the airport. They would cut them off from the water right outside their doors and then Chelsea closes its border with East Boston. Meanwhile you have Charlestown connected next to Somerville and Everett with some connections to the rest of the city but is also being infiltrated by people from the North End and other parts of Boston proper.

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Israel (it's people and government) is not interested in eliminating the Palestinian people.

Israel must, should, and is absolutely right to defend itself.
The Israeli government/military leadership, however, is doing a bad job of convincing anyone that they give a flying **** about the Palestinian people or any other noncombatants near the people (Hamas) that they do want to eliminate.

Nor does Hamas care about the Palestinian people. They appear to view them as "they can sign up, they can be shields/ involuntary martyrs/ cannon fodder/
P.R. objects/etc..., or they can rot"

Getting back to Bibi and Israeli leadership... The 'magnanimous' advice ahead of the increasing IDF attacks to "leave Gaza City" was disingenuous - cynically so. Leave - and go where? Closed border on three sides, closed sea on the fourth side. Leave the primary target to sit as refugees with even less infrastructure and support, in what will likely be the secondary target?

Cheney and Rumsfeld ought to send Bibi a fruit basket or a floral arrangement as a thank you. He's really knocked them down the rank charts on "recent failures of judicious war targeting"

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I can't want to see conservative free-speech absolutists start complaining about this obviously abusive example of cancel culture.

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Or do they simply criticize the government of Israel and its policies toward Palestinians?

There is a huge difference between believing that Palestinians have human rights and supporting a brutal terrorist group.

Waiting for the NYT Bedbug et al to decry the failures of academia regarding free speech ... https://www.vox.com/2019/8/27/20834957/bret-stephens-bedbug-meltdown-dav...

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There are people who rightly speak loudly in opposition to Israel's policies but are silent or claim Hamas is justified for their own human right's abuses.

These people see everything in black and white: Israel = Bad, Others = Good. It's a foolish, ignorant way to view the situation and helps nothing.

There are a lot (probably a majority) of people in America's Jewish community who are disgusted by the current leadership in Israel and the nation's overall approach to Palestinian areas. But we're not going to accept that terrorism against Israel or Jews in general is acceptable either.

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There are people who rightly speak loudly in opposition to Israel's policies but are silent or claim Hamas is justified for their own human right's abuses.

So why do you give them your focus? You said yourself that they're not the majority. They're certainly not driving policy.

I'm also wary that outrage may be directed less at real live people with outrageous and objectionable views, and more at the idea that such people may hypothetically exist. I've seen too many Those People and You People pseudo-arguments to not be suspicious when I see a statement about "There are people" who do outrageous things -- not that I don't believe that, yes, there are people who do such things, but the phrase suggests that their numbers are substantial and their presence is influential. Chip Berlet, talking about about anti-immigrant policies in the early 20th century that targeted Russian immigrants because "there are people" who are bolsheviks and want to overthrow the government, said, "Were there people in the country who wanted to overthrow the government? Yes. Could you have fit them all into this room? Also yes."

I don't know what the perfect balance is, and I understand that downplaying real dangers is a bad idea. But I am also concerned that in focusing on the three people holding signs saying "Go Hamas", there are figurative forests being missed.

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…. SJP openly called the atrocities of 10/7 a victory for the Palestinian cause.

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Just proposing a fun outing for some community-building and para-gliding in the countryside

IMAGE(https://www.adl.org/sites/default/files/images/2023-10/SJP%20UPDATE_10_19_1020_2.png)

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Rape and dismemberment of civilians is not resistance.

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The vast majority of those being subjected to indiscriminate bombardment of refugee camps and populated areas are not Hamas.

Explain how many of the children in Palestine were responsible for what Hamas did. I'll wait.

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This image is gross, but it was not posted by the Brandeis SJP. I believe it came from the University of Illinois chapter. The Brandeis group should not be held responsible for what a different group of people said. Also, this image, disgusting as it may be, is neither incitement to violence nor material support for Hamas; it's just regular, distasteful, objectionable, and protected speech. A private university like Brandeis has some freedom to punish and stifle even protected speech, but as a law school of global import, they should be careful about how they exercise it.

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despite whom it is named after.

There is an entirely unrelated Brandeis School of Law at the University of Louisville, Kentucky.

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I don't think you understand the first amendment

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tell us more, please

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said anything about the First Amendment here?

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WHOOSH!

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There are so many feet involved it's hard to figure out where the shoe is this time.

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What this group did, specifically, was not pass a resolution condemning Hamas. Whether that qualifies as "supporting Hamas" is left as an exercise for the reader.

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What I don't get is why they chose to go to Brandeis in the first place. I'd be interested in hearing why they attended in the first place. And if their experience was so miserable, why didn't they change to a different school? No one is making them attend.

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...why don't they go back where they came from?"

I suspect that it's a wee bit more complicated than being able to blithely skip off to a more congenial setting. Could you imagine, for instance, that some are there because they're actively seeking to build bridges?

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If they want to build bridges at a Jewish institution, they could start by not calling for genocide of Jews.

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If they want to build bridges at a Jewish institution, they could start by not calling for genocide of Jews.

Show me where they did that. Provide receipts. Names, dates, quotes. I'll wait.

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If Harvard does this there won't be many student groups left.

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If Harvard does this there won't be many student groups left.

Would you know, o feces-agitator?

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So the group needs to rebrand itself from "National Students for Justice in Palestine" to "Brandeis Students for Justice in Palestine", then tone down the language a notch, and resume what they were doing.

Who exactly is at the center of this NSJP organization anyway? It looks like it's not a centralized organization, but rather just a bunch of separate student groups at various colleges using the same name.

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Many student organizations have some affiliation with a national organization, but I think it's rather unusual for them to be a "centralized organization" - that's the rule, not the exception.

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It wasn’t a rally it was a vigil for Palestinians killed and after weeks of everyone publicly mourning Israelis, that this is deemed unacceptable only reflects the complete dehumanization of Palestinians.

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It's a clunky word but gets to the point. Presentism. The belief that what is happening today is totally divorced from the past. The belief that life has never been worse.

Add an immature black and white mentality. Somebody is all bad and somebody is all good.

Hamas "army" attacks Israel. Israel responds. Civilians are killed. Welcome to war. Rules of War say no civilians should die. But those are rules and the violence of wars has not room for rules.

The cold war of the Middle East will never end as long as Palestinians make for good proxies.. Just as the hot wars of Korea and Vietnam were proxies in the Cold Wars between US and USSR and US and China, the hot war between Palestinians and Israel are the cold war between Israel and every Arab nation that salivates over the the pleasure of having a nation other than each other to attack.

Want the suffering of Palestinians to end? Stop the Arab nations that need suffering Palestinians in their proxy war.

The people who should be dying are the Arab leaders who use what is morphing into the Middle East's version of the 100 Years War between France and England and any other group the warring factions could pull in.

Want the endless war between Israel and Palestinians to end? Push the Arab leaders to do the actual fighting. Or at least make them force their people to do the actual fighting. The Qatari government would either fall in a day or it would have to make being Qatari so painful that the citizens are willing to risk dying in a war they don't want to fight.

Are Palestinians effectively the mercenaries of Arab states that fund and supply the war machine? Hell yes.

There is nothing new under this sun of missiles and iron domes. The players change; the absolute disregard for human life (by Arabs for Palestinians) is just the cost of doing business. The business of needing enemies, of needing proxies to fight wars the real thugs are too cowardly to come out and fight.

All this bloodshed so that a bunch of richer than God (but oh so religious) thugs made rich by our addiction to oil, can sit on thrones, tell their citizens what God's will is and enjoy the lusts of power and feasts that their ancestors would be shamed to see, while using people who are kept in a permanent state of poverty as cannon fodder to fight the wars they would otherwise loose.

Better to use non-citizens to fight one's wars then to use actual citizens who might say NO!

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"Rules of War say no civilians should die."

Nope. Try actually reading about rules of war, e.g the Hague Convention.

This fellow can help explain them to you:

https://www.cnn.com/2023/11/07/opinions/israel-hamas-gaza-not-war-crimes...

Basic conclusion from the chair of urban warfare studies at the Modern War Institute (MWI) at West Point: "nothing I have seen shows that the Israel Defense Forces are not following the laws of wars in Gaza"

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-evIyrrjTTY

It explains it all in a little under 4 minutes.

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But it was founded by the Jewish Community, is named after a Jewish trailblazer who was one of the best legal minds in American history, and has a student body that is more than 30 percent Jewish. If this group is sympathetic to Hamas, I don't think it's unreasonable for Brandeis to do this. If Boston College or Notre Dame wanted to ban a student chapter of Ulster Protestant loyalists, I think they'd be within their rights to do so.

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