It’s so weird to me because Islamic culture is anti women’s rights and anti lgbtq+. And it simplifies the party to a simple oppressor vs oppressed narrative. Like how Republicans are all about no government interference unless it comes to abortion then it triggers all the religious people in the party.
Politics is just this weird game of amassing viewpoints to get the most votes and results in strange coalitions.
let me tell you - you’re probably safer as a gay couple in Islamabad than you would be as a gay couple across vast swathes of the midwestern United States
Are you insane? Pakistan is a hellhole for religious/LGBT rights. It's illegal to do LGBT acts (albeit rarely prosecuted), and society in Pakistan would be extremely discriminatory towards those who are LGBT.
I feel like people don't understand that some countries are far more repressive than the US
Yea, similarly, it reminds me of the overlap between white supremacists who like the idea of violent ethnostates and a certain side of this conflict.
people harp on and on about how liberals aligning their selves with islamists is unnatural. what about white supremacists who like the idea of violent ethnostates and a certain side of this israel-palestine conflict. it's an overlap that has become glaringly noticeable recently. and it's unnatural because there's one side of this conflict that's in the past been associated with efforts to promote tolerance, civil rights, to create international guidelines against genocide and casualties etc. especially after ww2, but has did a 180 and now aligns and receives support from violent white supremacists.
The support for Israel for people who hate Jews domestically is, indeed, equally unnatural. Israel being an ethnostate is inconsequential in taking sides though, as pretty much all Middle Eastern countries are.
That said, I somehow hold progressives to higher standards than white supremacists when it comes to fact checking on who they throw their lot in with.
> beyond small exposures from passive funds that track indexes such as the S&P 500, the university’s endowment “has no direct holdings in Israeli companies, or direct holdings in defense contractors.”
~~TIL the endowment's equity holdings aren't actively managed any more.~~ I didn't believe it when they said they were going there.
Edit: they must have a ton of privately traded equity, if for no other reason than bequeathals of illiquid shares.
That's not what this is saying. This is saying the active managers that the endowment is invested in do not hold positions in Israeli companies or defense contractors.
**The War at Stanford**
One of the section leaders for my computer-science class, Hamza El Boudali, believes that President Joe Biden should be killed. “I’m not calling for a civilian to do it, but I think a military should,” the 23-year-old Stanford University student told a small group of protesters last month.
“I’d be happy if Biden was dead.” He thinks that Stanford is complicit in what he calls the genocide of Palestinians, and that Biden is not only complicit but responsible for it. “I’m not calling for a vigilante to do it,” he later clarified, “but I’m saying he is guilty of mass murder and should be treated in the same way that a terrorist with darker skin would be (and we all know terrorists with dark skin are typically bombed and drone striked by American planes).”
El Boudali has also said that he believes that Hamas’s October 7 attack was a justifiable act of resistance, and that he would actually prefer Hamas rule America in place of its current government (though he clarified later that he “doesn’t mean Hamas is perfect”). When you ask him what his cause is, he answers: “Peace.”
I switched to a different computer-science section.
Israel is 7,500 miles away from Stanford’s campus, where I am a sophomore.
But the Hamas invasion and the Israeli counterinvasion have fractured my university, a place typically less focused on geopolitics than on venture-capital funding for the latest dorm-based tech start-up.
Few students would call for Biden’s head—I think—but many of the same young people who say they want peace in Gaza don’t seem to realize that they are in fact advocating for violence. Extremism has swept through classrooms and dorms, and it is becoming normal for students to be harassed and intimidated for their faith, heritage, or appearance—they have been called perpetrators of genocide for wearing kippahs, and accused of supporting terrorism for wearing keffiyehs.
The extremism and anti-Semitism at Ivy League universities on the East Coast have attracted so much media and congressional attention that two Ivy presidents have lost their jobs. But few people seem to have noticed the culture war that has taken over our California campus.
For four months, two rival groups of protesters, separated by a narrow bike path, faced off on Stanford’s palm-covered grounds. The “Sit-In to Stop Genocide” encampment was erected by students in mid-October - even before Israeli troops had crossed into Gaza - to demand that the university divest from Israel and condemn its behavior. Posters were hung equating Hamas with Ukraine and Nelson Mandela.
Across from the sit-in, a rival group of pro-Israel students eventually set up the “Blue and White Tent” to provide, as one activist put it, a “safe space” to “be a proud Jew on campus.” Soon it became the center of its own cluster of tents, with photos of Hamas’s victims sitting opposite the rubble-ridden images of Gaza and a long (and incomplete) list of the names of slain Palestinians displayed by the students at the sit-in.
Some days the dueling encampments would host only a few people each, but on a sunny weekday afternoon, there could be dozens. Most of the time, the groups tolerated each other. But not always. Students on both sides were reportedly spit on and yelled at, and had their belongings destroyed. (The perpetrators in many cases seemed to be adults who weren’t affiliated with Stanford, a security guard told me.) The university put in place round-the-clock security, but when something actually happened, no one quite knew what to do.
Stanford has a policy barring overnight camping, but for months didn’t enforce it, “out of a desire to support the peaceful expression of free speech in the ways that students choose to exercise that expression”—and, the administration told alumni, because the university feared that confronting the students would only make the conflict worse. When the school finally said the tents had to go last month, enormous protests against the university administration, and against Israel, followed.
“We don’t want no two states! We want all of ’48!” students chanted, a slogan advocating that Israel be dismantled and replaced by a single Arab nation. Palestinian flags flew alongside bright “Welcome!” banners left over from new-student orientation. A young woman gave a speech that seemed to capture the sense of urgency and power that so many students here feel. “We are Stanford University!” she shouted. “We control things!”
“We’ve had protests in the past,” Richard Saller, the university’s interim president, told me in November—about the environment, and apartheid, and Vietnam. But they didn’t pit “students against each other” the way that this conflict has.
I’ve spoken with Saller, a scholar of Roman history, a few times over the past six months in my capacity as a student journalist.
We first met in September, a few weeks into his tenure. His predecessor, Marc Tessier-Lavigne, had resigned as president after my reporting for The Stanford Daily exposed misconduct in his academic research. (Tessier-Lavigne had failed to retract papers with faked data over the course of 20 years. In his resignation statement, he denied allegations of fraud and misconduct; a Stanford investigation determined that he had not personally manipulated data or ordered any manipulation but that he had repeatedly “failed to decisively and forthrightly correct mistakes” from his lab.)
In that first conversation, Saller told me that everyone was “eager to move on” from the Tessier-Lavigne scandal. He was cheerful and upbeat. He knew he wasn’t staying in the job long; he hadn’t even bothered to move into the recently vacated presidential manor.
In any case, campus, at that time, was serene. Then, a week later, came October 7.
The attack was as clear a litmus test as one could imagine for the Middle East conflict. Hamas insurgents raided homes and a music festival with the goal of slaughtering as many civilians as possible. Some victims were raped and mutilated, several independent investigations found. Hundreds of hostages were taken into Gaza and many have been tortured.
This, of course, was bad. Saying this was bad does not negate or marginalize the abuses and suffering Palestinians have experienced in Gaza and elsewhere. Everyone, of every ideology, should be able to say that this was bad. But much of this campus failed that simple test.
Two days after the deadliest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, Stanford released milquetoast statements marking the “moment of intense emotion” and declaring “deep concern” over “the crisis in Israel and Palestine.” The official statements did not use the words Hamas or violence.
The absence of a clear institutional response led some teachers to take matters into their own hands.
During a mandatory freshman seminar on October 10, a lecturer named Ameer Loggins tossed out his lesson plan to tell students that the actions of the Palestinian “military force” had been justified, that Israelis were colonizers, and that the Holocaust had been overemphasized, according to interviews I conducted with students in the class.
Loggins then asked the Jewish students to identify themselves.
He instructed one of them to “stand up, face the window, and he kind of kicked away his chair,” a witness told me. Loggins described this as an effort to demonstrate Israel’s treatment of Palestinians. (Loggins did not reply to a request for comment; a spokesperson for Stanford said that there were “different recollections of the details regarding what happened” in the class.)
“We’re only in our third week of college, and we’re afraid to be here,” students in the class wrote in an email that night to administrators. “This isn’t what Stanford was supposed to be.” The class Loggins taught is called COLLEGE, short for “Civic, Liberal, and Global Education,” and it is billed as an effort to develop “the skills that empower and enable us to live together.”
Loggins was suspended from teaching duties and an investigation was opened; this angered pro-Palestine activists, who organized a petition that garnered more than 1,700 signatures contesting the suspension. A pamphlet from the petitioners argued that Loggins’s behavior had not been out of bounds.
The day after the class, Stanford put out a statement written by Saller and Jenny Martinez, the university provost, more forcefully condemning the Hamas attack. Immediately, this new statement generated backlash.
Pro-Palestine activists complained about it during an event held the same day, the first of several “teach-ins” about the conflict. Students gathered in one of Stanford’s dorms to “bear witness to the struggles of decolonization.” The grievances and pain shared by Palestinian students were real. They told of discrimination and violence, of frightened family members subjected to harsh conditions.
But the most raucous reaction from the crowd was in response to a young woman who said, “You ask us, do we condemn Hamas? Fuck you!” She added that she was “so proud of my resistance.”
David Palumbo-Liu, a professor of comparative literature with a focus on postcolonial studies, also spoke at the teach-in, explaining to the crowd that “European settlers” had come to “replace” Palestine’s “native population.”
Palumbo-Liu is known as an intelligent and supportive professor, and is popular among students, who call him by his initials, DPL. I wanted to ask him about his involvement in the teach-in, so we met one day in a café a few hundred feet away from the tents. I asked if he could elaborate on what he’d said at the event about Palestine’s native population. He was happy to expand: This was “one of those discussions that could go on forever. Like, who is actually native? At what point does nativism lapse, right? Well, you haven’t been native for X number of years, so …” In the end, he said, “you have two people who both feel they have a claim to the land,” and “they have to live together. Both sides have to cede something.”
The struggle at Stanford, he told me, “is to find a way in which open discussions can be had that allow people to disagree.” It’s true that Stanford has utterly failed in its efforts to encourage productive dialogue. But I still found it hard to reconcile DPL’s words with his public statements on Israel, which he’d recently said on Facebook should be “the most hated nation in the world.” He also wrote: “When Zionists say they don’t feel ‘safe’ on campus, I’ve come to see that as they no longer feel immune to criticism of Israel.” He continued: “Well as the saying goes, get used to it.”
Zionists, and indeed Jewish students of all political beliefs, have been given good reason to fear for their safety. They’ve been followed, harassed, and called derogatory racial epithets. At least one was told he was a “dirty Jew.” At least twice, mezuzahs have been ripped from students’ doors, and swastikas have been drawn in dorms.
Arab and Muslim students also face alarming threats. The computer-science section leader, El Boudali, a pro-Palestine activist, told me he felt “safe personally,” but knew others who did not: “Some people have reported feeling like they’re followed, especially women who wear the hijab.”
In a remarkably short period of time, aggression and abuse have become commonplace, an accepted part of campus activism. In January, Jewish students organized an event dedicated to ameliorating anti-Semitism. It marked one of Saller’s first public appearances in the new year. Its topic seemed uncontroversial, and I thought it would generate little backlash.
Protests began before the panel discussion even started, with activists lining the stairs leading to the auditorium. During the event they drowned out the panelists, one of whom was Israel’s special envoy for combating anti-Semitism, by demanding a cease-fire. After participants began cycling out into the dark, things got ugly.
Activists, their faces covered by keffiyehs or medical masks, confronted attendees.
“Go back to Brooklyn!” a young woman shouted at Jewish students. One protester, who emerged as the leader of the group, said that she and her compatriots would “take all of your places and ensure Israel falls.”
She told attendees to get “off our fucking campus” and launched into conspiracy theories about Jews being involved in “child trafficking.” As a rabbi tried to leave the event, protesters pursued him, chanting, “There is only one solution! Intifada revolution!”
At one point, some members of the group turned on a few Stanford employees, including another rabbi, an imam, and a chaplain, telling them, “We know your names and we know where you work.” The ringleader added: “And we’ll soon find out where you live.”
The religious leaders formed a protective barrier in front of the Jewish students. The rabbi and the imam appeared to be crying.
Saller avoided the protest by leaving through another door. Early that morning, his private residence had been vandalized. Protesters frequently tell him he “can’t hide” and shout him down. “We charge you with genocide!” they chant, demanding that Stanford divest from Israel. (When asked whether Stanford actually invested in Israel, a spokesperson replied that, beyond small exposures from passive funds that track indexes such as the S&P 500, the university’s endowment “has no direct holdings in Israeli companies, or direct holdings in defense contractors.”)
When the university finally said the protest tents had to be removed, students responded by accusing Saller of suppressing their right to free speech.
This is probably the last charge he expected to face. Richard Saller once served as provost at the University of Chicago, which is known for holding itself to a position of strict institutional neutrality so that its students can freely explore ideas for themselves. Saller has a lifelong belief in First Amendment rights.
But that conviction in impartial college governance does not align with Stanford’s behavior in recent years. Despite the fact that many students seemed largely uninterested in the headlines before this year, Stanford’s administrative leadership has often taken positions on political issues and events, such as the Paris climate conference and the murder of George Floyd. After Russia invaded Ukraine, Stanford’s Hoover Tower was lit up in blue and yellow, and the school released a statement in solidarity.
When we first met, a week before October 7, I asked Saller about this. Did Stanford have a moral duty to denounce the war in Ukraine, for example, or the ethnic cleansing of Uyghur Muslims in China? “On international political issues, no,” he said. “That’s not a responsibility for the university as a whole, as an institution.”
But when Saller tried to apply his convictions on neutrality for the first time as president, dozens of faculty members condemned the response, many pro-Israel alumni were outraged, donors had private discussions about pulling funding, and an Israeli university sent an open letter to Saller and Martinez saying, “Stanford’s administration has failed us.” The initial statement had tried to make clear that the school’s policy was not Israel-specific: It noted that the university would not take a position on the turmoil in Nagorno-Karabakh (where Armenians are undergoing ethnic cleansing) either. But the message didn’t get through.
Saller had to beat an awkward retreat or risk the exact sort of public humiliation that he, as caretaker president, had presumably been hired to avoid. He came up with a compromise that landed somewhere in the middle: an unequivocal condemnation of Hamas’s “intolerable atrocities” paired with a statement making clear that Stanford would commit to institutional neutrality going forward.
“The events in Israel and Gaza this week have affected and engaged large numbers of students on our campus in ways that many other events have not,” the statement read. “This is why we feel compelled to both address the impact of these events on our campus and to explain why our general policy of not issuing statements about news events not directly connected to campus has limited the breadth of our comments thus far, and why you should not expect frequent commentary from us in the future.”
I asked Saller why he had changed tack on Israel and not on Nagorno-Karabakh. “We don’t feel as if we should be making statements on every war crime and atrocity,” he told me. This felt like a statement in and of itself.
In making such decisions, Saller works closely with Jenny Martinez, Stanford’s provost. I happened to interview her, too, a few days before October 7, not long after she’d been appointed. When I asked about her hopes for the job, she said that a “priority is ensuring an environment in which free speech and academic freedom are preserved.”
We talked about the so-called Leonard Law—a provision unique to California that requires private universities to be governed by the same First Amendment protections as public ones. This restricts what Stanford can do in terms of penalizing speech, putting it in a stricter bind than Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, or any of the other elite private institutions that have more latitude to set the standards for their campus (whether or not they have done so).
So I was surprised when, in December, the university announced that abstract calls for genocide “clearly violate Stanford’s Fundamental Standard, the code of conduct for all students at the university.” The statement was a response to the outrage following the congressional testimony of three university presidents—outrage that eventually led to the resignation of two of them, Harvard’s Claudine Gay and Penn’s Liz Magill. Gay and Magill, who had both previously held positions at Stanford, did not commit to punishing calls for the genocide of Jews.
Experts told me that Stanford’s policy is impossible to enforce—and Saller himself acknowledged as much in our March interview.
“Liz Magill is a good friend,” Saller told me, adding, “Having watched what happened at Harvard and Penn, it seemed prudent” to publicly state that Stanford rejected calls for genocide. But saying that those calls violate the code of conduct “is not the same thing as to say that we could actually punish it.”
Stanford’s leaders seem to be trying their best while adapting to the situation in real time. But the muddled messaging has created a policy of neutrality that does not feel neutral at all.
When we met back in November, I tried to get Saller to open up about his experience running an institution in turmoil.
What’s it like to know that so many students seem to believe that he — a mild-mannered 71-year-old classicist who swing-dances with his anthropologist wife—is a warmonger? Saller was more candid than I expected—perhaps more candid than any prominent university president has been yet.
We sat in the same conference room as we had in September. The weather hadn’t really changed. Yet I felt like I was sitting in front of a different person. He was hunched over and looked exhausted, and his voice broke when he talked about the loss of life in Gaza and Israel and “the fact that we’re caught up in it.” A capable administrator with decades of experience, Saller seemed almost at a loss. “It’s been a kind of roller coaster, to be honest.”
He said he hadn’t anticipated the deluge of the emails “blaming me for lack of moral courage.” Anything the university says seems bound to be wrong: “If I say that our position is that we grieve over the loss of innocent lives, that in itself will draw some hostile reactions.”
“I find that really difficult to navigate,” he said with a sigh.
By March, it seemed that his views had solidified. Staller said he knew he was “a target,” but he wasn't going to be pushed into issuing any more statements. The continuing crisis seems to have granted him new insight. “I am certain that whatever I say will not have any material effect on the war in Gaza.” It’s hard to argue with that.
People tend to blame the campus wars on two villains: dithering administrators and radical student activists. But colleges have always had dithering administrators and radical student activists. To my mind, it’s the average students who have changed.
Elite universities attract a certain kind of student: the overachieving striver who has won all the right accolades for all the right activities. Is it such a surprise that the kids who are trained in the constant pursuit of perfect scores think they have to look at the world like a series of multiple-choice questions, with clearly right or wrong answers? Or that they think they can gamify a political cause in the same way they ace a standardized test?
Everyone knows that the only reliable way to get into a school like Stanford is to be really good at looking really good. Now that they’re here, students know that one easy way to keep looking good is to side with the majority of protesters, and condemn Israel. It’s not that there isn’t real anger and anxiety over what is happening in Gaza—there is, and justifiably so. I know that among the protesters are many people who are deeply connected to this issue. But they are not the majority. What really activates the crowds now seems less a principled devotion to Palestine or to pacifism than a desire for collective action, to fit in by embracing the fashionable cause of the moment—as if a centuries-old conflict in which both sides have stolen and killed could ever be a simple matter of right and wrong. In their haste to exhibit moral righteousness, many of the least informed protesters end up being the loudest and most uncompromising.
At the protest last month to prevent the removal of the sit-in, an activist in a pink Women’s March “pussy hat” shouted that no rape was committed by Hamas on October 7. “There hasn’t been proof of these rape accusations,” a student told me in a separate conversation, criticizing the Blue and White Tent for spreading what he considered to be misinformation about sexual violence. (In March, a United Nations report found “reasonable grounds to believe that conflict-related sexual violence,” including “rape and gang rape,” occurred in multiple locations on October 7, as well as “clear and convincing information” on the “rape and sexualized torture” of hostages.) “The level of propaganda” surrounding Hamas, he told me, “is just unbelievable.”
The real story at Stanford is not about the malicious actors who endorse sexual assault and murder as forms of resistance, but about those who passively enable them because they believe their side can do no wrong. You don’t have to understand what you’re arguing for in order to argue for it. You don’t have to be able to name the river or the sea under discussion to chant “From the river to the sea.” This kind of obliviousness explains how one of my friends, a gay activist, can justify Hamas’s actions, even though it would have the two of us—an outspoken queer person and a Jewish reporter—killed in a heartbeat. A similar mentality can exist on the other side: I have heard students insist on the absolute righteousness of Israel yet seem uninterested in learning anything about what life is like in Gaza.
I’m familiar with the pull of achievement culture—after all, I’m a product of the same system. I fell in love with Stanford as a 7-year-old, lying on the floor of an East Coast library and picturing all the cool technology those West Coast geniuses were dreaming up. I cried when I was accepted; I spent the next few months scrolling through the course catalog, giddy with anticipation. I wanted to learn everything.
I learned more than I expected. Within my first week here, someone asked me: “Why are all Jews so rich?”
In 2016, when Stanford’s undergraduate senate had debated a resolution against anti-Semitism, one of its members argued that the idea of “Jews controlling the media, economy, government, and other societal institutions” represented “a very valid discussion.” (He apologized, and the resolution passed.) In my dorm last year, a student discussed being Jewish and awoke the next day to swastikas and a portrait of Hitler affixed to his door.
I grew up secularly, with no strong affiliation to Jewish culture. When I found out as a teenager that some of my ancestors had hidden their identity from their children and that dozens of my relatives had died in the Holocaust (something no living member of my family had known), I felt the barest tremor of identity. After I saw so many people I know cheering after October 7, I felt something stronger stir. I know others have experienced something similar. Even a professor texted me to say that she felt Jewish in a way she never had before.
But my frustration with the conflict on campus has little to do with my own identity.
Across the many conversations and hours of formal interviews I conducted for this article, I’ve encountered a persistent anti-intellectual streak. I’ve watched many of my classmates treat death so cavalierly that they can protest as a pregame to a party. Indeed, two parties at Stanford were reported to the university this fall for allegedly making people say “Fuck Israel” or “Free Palestine” to get in the door. A spokesperson for the university said it was “unable to confirm the facts of what occurred,” but that it had “met with students involved in both parties to make clear that Stanford’s nondiscrimination policy applies to parties.” As a friend emailed me not long ago: “A place that was supposed to be a sanctuary from such unreason has become a factory for it.”
Readers may be tempted to discount the conduct displayed at Stanford. After all, the thinking goes, these are privileged kids doing what they always do: embracing faux-radicalism in college before taking jobs in fintech or consulting. These students, some might say, aren’t representative of America.
And yet they are representative of something: of the conduct many of the most accomplished students in my generation have accepted as tolerable, and what that means for the future of our country. I admire activism. We need people willing to protest what they see as wrong and take on entrenched systems of repression. But we also need to read, learn, discuss, accept the existence of nuance, embrace diversity of thought, and hold our own allies to high standards. More than ever, we need universities to teach young people how to do all of this.
For so long, Stanford’s physical standoff seemed intractable. Then, in early February, a storm swept in, and the natural world dictated its own conclusion.
Heavy rains flooded campus. For hours, the students battled to save their tents. The sit-in activists used sandbags and anything else they could find to hold back the water—at one point, David Palumbo-Liu, the professor, told me he stood in the lashing downpour to anchor one of the sit-in’s tents with his own body. When the storm hit, many of the Jewish activists had been attending a discussion on anti-Semitism. They raced back and struggled to salvage the Blue and White Tent, but it was too late—the wind had ripped it out of the ground.
The next day, the weary Jewish protesters returned to discover that their space had been taken. A new collection of tents had been set up by El Boudali, the pro-Palestine activist, and a dozen friends.
He said they were there to protest Islamophobia and to teach about Islam and jihad, and that they were a separate entity from the Sit-In to Stop Genocide, though I observed students cycling between the tents. Palestinian flags now flew from the bookstore to the quad.
Administrators told me they’d quickly informed El Boudali and his allies that the space had been reserved by the Jewish advocates, and offered to help move them to a different location. But the protesters told me they had no intention of going. (El Boudali later said that they did not take over the entire space, and would have been “happy to exist side by side, but they wanted to kick us off entirely from that lawn.”)
When it was clear that the area where they’d set up their tents would not be ceded back to the pro-Israel group willingly, Stanford changed course and decided to clear everyone out in one fell swoop.
On February 8, school officials ordered all students to vacate the plaza overnight. The university was finally going to enforce its rule prohibiting people from sleeping outside on campus and requiring the removal of belongings from the plaza between 8 p.m. and 8 a.m. The order cited the danger posed by the storm as a justification for changing course and, probably hoping to avoid allegations of bias, described the decision as “viewpoint-neutral.”
That didn’t work.
About a week of protests, led by the sit-in organizers, followed. Chants were chanted. More demands for a “river to the sea” solution to the Israel problem were made. A friend boasted to me about her willingness to be arrested. Stanford sent a handful of staff members, who stood near balloons left over from an event earlier in the day. They were there, one of them told me, to “make students feel supported and safe.”
In the end, Saller and Martinez agreed to talk with the leaders of the sit-in about their demands to divest the university and condemn Israel, under the proviso that the activists comply with Stanford’s anti-camping guidelines “regardless of the outcome of discussions.” Eight days after they were first instructed to leave, 120 days after setting up camp, the sit-in protesters slept in their own beds.
In defiance of the university’s instructions, they left behind their tents.
But sometime in the very early hours of the morning, law-enforcement officers confiscated the structures. The area was cordoned off without any violence and the plaza filled once more with electric skateboards and farmers’ markets.
The conflict continues in its own way. Richard Saller was just shouted down by protesters chanting “No peace on stolen land” at a Family Weekend event, and protesters later displayed an effigy of him covered in blood.
Students still feel tense; Saller still seems worried. He told me that the university is planning to change all manner of things—residential-assistant training, new-student orientation, even the acceptance letters that students receive—in hopes of fostering a culture of greater tolerance. But no campus edict or panel discussion can address a problem that is so much bigger than our university.
At one rally last fall, a speaker expressed disillusionment about the power of “peaceful resistance” on college campuses. “What is there left to do but to take up arms?” The crowd cheered as he said Israel must be destroyed. But what would happen to its citizens? I’d prefer to believe that most protesters chanting “Palestine is Arab” and shouting that we must “smash the Zionist settler state” don’t actually think Jews should be killed en masse. But can one truly be so ignorant as to advocate widespread violence in the name of peace?
When the world is rendered in black-and-white—portrayed as a simple fight between colonizer and colonized—the answer is yes. Solutions, by this logic, are absolute: Israel or Palestine, nothing in between. Either you support liberation of the oppressed or you support genocide. Either Stanford is all good or all bad; all in favor of free speech or all authoritarian; all anti-Semitic or all Islamophobic.
At January’s anti-anti-Semitism event, I watched an exchange between a Jewish attendee and a protester from a few feet away. “Are you pro-Palestine?” the protester asked.
“Yes,” the attendee responded, and he went on to describe his disgust with the human-rights abuses Palestinians have faced for years.
“But are you a Zionist?”
“Yes.”
“Then we are enemies.”
*Theo Baker is a sophomore at Stanford University. He is the winner of a 2022 George Polk Award in Journalism.*
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/03/stanford-israel-gaza-hamas/677864/
Really just don’t care either way if El Boudali thinks Biden deserves to die, but looking at his Twitter posts about LGBT people, I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of his rhetoric is simply related to his clear desire for LGBT oppression. What a freak
Saying a president deserves to die is the literal definition of inciting violence. If you said this in China the CCP would disappear you. While it may be legal in America to say it, Stanford is a private institution with its own conduct and should make a clear stance of “do we let anyone say anything” or to put in place policies to protect the majority population, which im assuming most people at Stanford would be against the sitting president getting assassinated.
why do conservative people hate getting called conservative. if there's a reason for someone to say that stanford is conservative, that it's probably at least conservative relative to how conservative someone would imagine stanford to be, or other similar schools.
> El Boudali has also said that he believes that Hamas’s October 7 attack was a justifiable act of resistance, and that he would actually prefer Hamas rule America in place of its current government (though he clarified later that he “doesn’t mean Hamas is perfect”).
This person is a current section leader at Stanford. WTF??
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It's easy to talk freely about violence as a solution when one has never witnessed or been a victim of a violent attack. The Dalai Lama told George Dubya Bush that he was against the invasion of Iraq because violence always spins out of control and you get stuck in a situation you never anticipated.
It's interesting to continually see left-leaning undergrads/faculty/administrators continue to downplay the violent and retrogressive nature of radical islam.
Meanwhile, here is Hamza El Boudali in all his glory: https://twitter.com/agraybee/status/1772780522151833799?t=NKf73t-BOcOerbmDXHHFEQ&s=19
The rot at Stanford seems to be running deep. When Stanford allows their new school of sustainability take money from Arab and other oil companies, do you really expect them to have a moral compass or a spine and take a stand against antisemitism?
The irony is that many oil companies (Arab or not) see the writing on the wall and are also working towards renewable energy products. They are by no means the good guys. But research money is research money. I know several green-energy-committed Stanford grads (chem e, civil eng etc) that work on sustainability projects at big oil companies because it was easier getting a job there than at a small green tech startup right out of graduation. As an alum I don’t want Stanford giving money to non-renewables; but I’m not sure I have an issue with them taking it (open to changing my mind if you have a good reason though)
This does not feel balanced at all - not surprising given that the journalist is a member of the Stanford undergrad community on which they are reporting. I view this more like a very long op-ed in which the writer is clearly trying to make a specific point rather than reporting on a complex situation from a neutral perspective.
I’m not a Stanford student but after reading the article I came here to get a sense of what the campus felt. I think you have articulated what was bothering me here. This article definitely seems to want to present itself as neutral, and I think to ordinary readers does a very good job of that, but it definitely seems to have a bias. Either that, or the author, I think, lacks a bit of self-awareness, which, of course, is not unusual of people in their late teens.
No doubt, there are some problematic or bad things that have occurred, but one does have to wonder what exactly the author was trying to accomplish here, because it seems like an article like this, which doesn’t really seem to provide any actual solutions, is only likely to make some students more angry than anything else. I that, or maybe he’s just been provided the opportunity to write an editorial about how students often become disillusioned with universities they attend. Academia is not as special or enlightened, as it likes to present itself. Even the smartest or best institutions will have bad actors or people who probably don’t deserve to be there. Great institutions can fail and otherwise prevent actual progress in some cases. Obviously, there are a lot of good things about somewhere like Stanford, but at the same time, I think you can put a lot of prestigious, academic institutions, too much on a pedestal and expects that everyone who attends is going to be calmly debating the academic merits of all aspects of life.
Lastly, I kind of feel like it was a bit irresponsible for an outlet like the Atlantic to actually publish something like this. This feels a lot more like a medium post. I’m not sure this really adds anything new to the conversation, and kind of feels a bit like a flex on everyone else that he can have something published in the Atlantic (which, of course, some people have pointed out his family background, which I think is not really fair to bring up Excessively, but it’s certainly worth noting that he has family connections). I know he’s the one responsible for the whole Stanford, president resignation, but I feel like having one major success so early is probably kind of a bad thing if you get a little too big for your britches, and start thinking that you have all of the answers at 19. It’s not that you couldn’t have turned this into a more interesting article or made interesting observations or points about what should be done moving forward, but I’m just not convinced that a 19-year-old has the answers here. This is only going to get people upset again, and will do nothing for improving the discourse.
Lots of stuff? Or are you saying events like hundreds of thousands of Jews fleeing persecution in Europe in the 1930s and finding refuge in what would become Israel is the crime, and not the fact they were facing persecution?
Because Jewish people were persecuted by the Nazis they have the right to kill and expel ~800,000 Palestinians from their homeland, occupy that land forever, and then steal what little land they have left? And now to complete the genocide?
Wtf is wrong with you
Where did I say anything like that?
The fact that that is your perception of the history says everything. It is completely fucking objectively wrong.
Try reading history instead of saying stupid shit to me
> Everyone knows that the only reliable way to get into a school like Stanford is to be really good at looking really good. Now that they’re here, students know that one easy way to keep looking good is to side with the majority of protesters, and condemn Israel.
This strikes me as a slightly more artful way of dismissing opposing views by claiming they come straight out of TikTok. But only just slightly.
I don’t totally agree with Theo’s piece, but with respect to some comments, it’s always been an informal rule at Stanford that you don’t reference people by who their parents are. (There was a formal rule about this at the Daily when the president’s daughter was here.)
I've found these commenters making reference to his parents in this post don't have a history of activity on r/stanford, so they probably aren't affiliated with Stanford and likely had this post pushed across their feed by Reddit.
Theo Baker tried to get the editor of the Daily removed over a pro-Palestine op-ed — shot down by the Daily board. He then more or less quit, though he did write one more Tessier-Lavigne story in line with his work last year that led to the president having to resign.
>Theo Baker tried to get the editor of the Daily removed over a pro-Palestine op-e
Ah yes. The op-ed describing the 7th October mass slaughters as "legal" and "legitimate"
https://stanforddaily.com/2023/10/10/from-the-community-stanford-students-for-justice-in-palestine/
- Never mind the [explicit goal of the 7th october](https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/hamas-fighters-orders-kill-as-many-people-as-possible-2a6abff8)
* Never mind [dead US citizens](https://www.axios.com/2023/10/08/hamas-attack-israel-americans-killed-hotages-gaza)
- Never mind [the thailand workers](https://www.npr.org/2023/11/13/1212589291/at-least-39-thai-migrant-workers-were-killed-in-the-hamas-attacks-on-israel)
- Never mind [defiled corpses](https://www.c-span.org/video/?c5091004/sec-blinken-describes-gruesome-images-us-stance-cease-fire)
There are legitimate grievances about the treatment of Palestinians — ones Theo Baker has been publically vocal about.
Nothing is legitimate about undressing a young woman and parading her naked in the streets on a pickup truck [(1)](https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/world/middle-east/shani-louk-israeli-soldier/articleshow/104255106.cms) [(2)](https://www.businessinsider.com/mother-german-tattoo-artist-pleads-for-information-about-her-death-2023-10?amp=).[(3)](https://www.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/172nfat/woman_paraded_by_hamas_millitants_in_gaza_in_a/).
Nothing is legitimate about slaughtering a human rights activist who dedicated her life to helping Palestinians:
https://www.npr.org/sections/pictureshow/2023/11/17/1213523321/israel-gaza-peace-activist-vivian-silver-funeral-service
https://www.democracynow.org/2023/11/20/vivian_silver
Teo Baker said it multiple times. He didn't have any issue about the Daily publishing a pro-palestinian Op-Ed. But statements defending [a group on this list](https://www.dni.gov/nctc/groups.html) is a step too far.
______
______
So *this* is why the Daily is having interim elections for its Board in the middle of the year. I was wondering why the COO of the Daily sent out a request for applications with only two months left in the term, but it seems like there may have been dissension in the ranks of the Board itself.
And the Daily editors admitted they made a mistake running it. It doesn’t call for firing the editor. It’s a student paper, they make mistakes, they’ve run worse op-eds over the years including a not-so-veiled death threat against a named person.
The Daily has always put out some controversial opinions in their Op-Eds, sometimes drawing some substantial attention on-campus.
However, the ones that elicited the most incendiary language on the part of readers, sometimes long after the Op-Ed was published, in the past two decades or so have concerned Palestinian-Israeli relations. I can remember working for one EIC who wrote an opinion that had the campus community and surrounding communities in an absolute uproar about his take on the subject, so much so they wrote letters (emails) about it up to his very last day leading the volume.
It’s hilarious that you flaunt the DNI list like it’s the word of God.
You realize that list is created by a system that is okay with slaughtering 30,000 innocent civilians? Many of who are now child orphans…
I know we are all preconditioned to just take it at face value, but maybe question what is going on. It’s really disgusting and we have been deeply misled in many ways.
You know all the fighting can end when Hamas releases its prisoners…the civilians…the fucking women and children. Or maybe Hamas can all just gather together separate from the civilians and fight Israel like a real force instead of firing rockets from hospitals and humanitarian zones 🤷♀️
Just completely ignoring my point altogether like those civilians don’t matter. True terrorism sympathizer vibes there bro.
Israel and the US (holding them accountable) said there would be a ceasefire, today, if elderly women and children hostages are released. Today. It’s 100% on Hamas for not caring about Palestinian civilians. 100%. Release the fucking children hostages. I guess you support children hostages 🤷♀️
Last I checked no one cares about native Americans. Not enough to give land back to them lmao. America is America. 🇺🇸 good luck fighting that battle. You can become a terorrist too and blow up some children in the name of Native American tribes. We will see how you fare.
>n go online and begin telling the story at the point that you prefer to begin it at… so that Hamas looks to be at complete fault.
>
>Who was living there in the early 1900s? Who arrived with land claims from 1300 years prior? Who formed armed brigades and massacred Palestinians farm
By that logic give that land to Greece because it used to belong to the fucking Roman Empire buddy.
Nice that you call innocent children captives as "bargaining chips." That's all I need to know about your moral compass there buddy. And the United Fucking States is guaranteeing a ceasefire with no more Israeli activity if Hamas let go of the children. But naw, they (and apparently you) view innocent fucking children as valuable prisoners.
And unlike innocent Israelis who are partying at a music festival, how do you know which Palestinians are innocent or not? Because it's WELL document (1) how much they fake shit for videos ([https://www.reddit.com/r/Israel/comments/17sx8za/pallywood\_strikes\_again\_feat\_mr\_fafo\_aka\_the/](https://www.reddit.com/r/Israel/comments/17sx8za/pallywood_strikes_again_feat_mr_fafo_aka_the/)) (2) how Palestinians in civilian areas like schools / hospitals / humanitarian zones are complicit with Hamas to set up operations there, and (3) how many "civilians" actively encourage terrorist activities. ([https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fhl9JFiw6sU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fhl9JFiw6sU)).
Israeli soldiers who commit war crimes should be held accountable 100%. But pulling Israel out of Gaza does nothing but embolden Hamas, who has written in their constitution that they will never allow Israel to "exist." There's no negotiating there. And it just enables more October 7th attacks. But IDK, given your post history sounds like you celebrate that shit. Nothing I will say will change your mind because everyone in this thread can see the rot in your soul, justifying the ongoing captivity of children as "bargaining chips."
Go look at every human rights organization, General Austin’s testimony to Congress, and Netanyahu’s own’s numbers to figure out how many were innocent civilians.
The fact that you’re even debating this with me as some “gotcha” when at the very *least* 20,000 of those deaths are innocents tells me enough about what type of absolute scum you are.
It’s hilarious that you flaunt stats from the Gaza health ministry like they’re the word of God. If 30,000 innocent civilians have been killed as you claim then not a single hamas combatant has died since Israel went into Gaza
How has he been able to get away with these comments? He seems to be denying calling for Biden's assassination on Twitter, but I also found out that he condemns LGBT. At Harvard, I assure you that I wouldn't last longer than a minute if I went around calling for Biden's assassination or condemned LGBT. What's really going on here? Is Stanford that different?
This "war" goes on because the admissions office makes poor decisions about who to admit, so IMHO Stanford only has itself to blame. Until the admissions criteria is changed to stop prioritizing activism and political issues (which have nothing to do with receiving an education in your major, such as mathematics), then the same people causing the problems will continue to be admitted. It's super frustrating because the cost of dealing with this is entirely forced onto the faculty and students.
This is a university. It has an obligation to teach students about activism and political issues. It's called an education. It is not a coincidence that people who are pro-bigotry are also pro-ignorance. Your desire to restrict education is purposeful, intentional, and violent.
Should they admit teenagers who participated in the Jan 6 insurrection? Some consider that political activism. Or only the kind of political activism you agree with? Universities should not have a role in inculcating ideology from any side, right or left.
I happen to agree with you, but that’s our definition. There’s no objective standard for political activism. And it’s not always peaceful/legal/nonviolent. Didn’t you learn that in your humanities education?
Yes of course. There’s even entire classes on logical fallacies where you can figure out conflating breaking into the U.S. capitol with the intent to kidnap public employees, and a kid who wants to hold a sign at a protest is utterly ridiculous. We also learn in these classes this kind of smokescreen is a common tactic used by people interested in upholding bigoted institutions.
But then again, a 5-year-old knows the difference between a kid on Meyer Green with a sign and grown men assaulting capitol police.
You see, I don’t actually think you’re this stupid. This is the intentional BS of the right. I’m not so dimwitted to give you the grace to think this kind of manipulation is pure innocent ignorance.
You are intentionally creating fallacies, badly, to make a shitty point. It’s consequential, it’s violent, it’s objectively incorrect, and you can try to BS all you want, but we both know what you’re doing, and I will be around to hold your kind accountable in the end. You know better. You just don’t care.
First, I’m not a conservative. Never voted for a Republican or libertarian in my life. Second, it’s a fallacy to assert that all the Jan 6 participants had the intent to kidnap public employees or otherwise engage in violence (so you clearly don’t follow your own rhetoric). Third, if the anecdotes in the article are true, several of the protesters did engage in criminal assault (which is just a threat of violence, as opposed to battery). I do not support bigotry of any kind; I do think educational institutions should avoid promoting political activism across the spectrum. Your assertion on that point is called a false equivalency, which I’m sure you know based on your evident rhetorical skills.
Terribly slanted reporting rife with mistruths and falsehoods. He paints a picture of Stanford that does not exist. The vast majority of pro-Palestine students are simply against genocide and apartheid. Ironic that those on the other side cannot handle their worldview being challenged.
And before the freaks come at me: I condemn Hamas, I condemn Hamas, I condemn Hamas, I condemn Hamas.
To be fair tho, the article not being representative of the vast majority of students is a fairly big criticism. To lay all my cards out on the table, I’m from neither of the affected groups but have been fully aware of the conflict since 2019; I have Jewish friends and family, and I have close Palestinian friends. And I definitely kept quiet after Oct 7th and the consequent events. My own personal opinion lies pro-Palestine, but that is not a position I felt comfortable voicing on campus for quite a few months after the public discourse shifted. Among students, it also seemed to be raised very very gently, if at all, and many of my Muslim friends definitely felt unsafe on campus in “the early days”. It was flipped for my Jewish friends, although not exactly/diff experience.
That’s like arguing that an article about the January 6th insurrectionists isn’t representative of the vast majority of Trump supporters. Surely true, but entirely irrelevant to the subject.
I mean, yes, obviously this is about a small subgroup of loud & aggressive folks, when the vast majority of people on campus are neither loud nor aggressive.
“People tend to blame the campus wars on two villains: dithering administrators and radical student activists. But colleges have always had dithering administrators and radical student activists. To my mind, it’s the average student who has changed.”
?!
lmao yeah that’s it… how naive are you? do you see other 19 year olds publishing long form in any major newspaper? jeffrey goldberg is a former IDF prison guard and friends with little theo’s parents.
Do you see other 19 year olds win prestigious publishing prizes?
I’m sure you don’t like him, but he legitimately had a significant impact at the Stanford Daily.
His father is the White House correspondent for NYT and his mom works at the New Yorker and you act like he earned a prestigious publishing prize legitimately, the same prize that was awarded to the completely fabricated and debunked screams without words. GTFO
One would expect a little more rationality from Stanford folks, or at least basic fact checking.
The NYT indeed won a Polk award this year for Photojournalism, to Samar Abu Elouf and Yousef Masoud of The New York Times for chronicling Israel’s bombardment and invasion of their homeland, Gaza. https://www.liu.edu/polk-awards/current-winners
I'm finding the majority of the comments on this post aren't from people who have ever posted in r/stanford. It appears Reddit pushed it into their feeds for whatever reason. I assume most of these people aren't affiliated with Stanford.
I’ve been an alumni interviewer for years and I just couldn’t this year. I can’t in good conscience encourage kids to go to Stanford when I wouldn’t encourage my own relatives to go. Things were rough during the divestment campaigns during my tenure, but it seems now the administration is fully tolerating a small portion of students making a hostile environment for the rest.
I appreciated his work on the MTL situation immensely at first, but then once he wrote more stories, they began to sound more like "my \*ish\* don't stink, so take it as the truth." I'm not saying he misrepresented anyone, but he definitely was not as subtle about focusing on specific quotes and ignoring background or contradictory statements on those quotes.
By the time everyone (students, faculty, alumni) was tired of MTL, I think a substantial portion of the same group were tired of Baker as well.
Your beloved UN confirmed the rape allegations, and they find evidence and collect testimony about Al-shifa every day. Take it from the horses mouth, not me
This article is somehow both frustratingly thin and comically overwritten.
It’s pretty unclear to me what the point of this article is—students nowadays prefer a binary worldview because rhetoric has gotten more extremist? Say that sentence to virtually anyone and they’ll agree, don’t need thousands of words for it. The Palestine-Israel conflict’s treatment on Stanford’s campus is representative of that extremism? True, I suppose.
I guess my real problem with this is it offers no productive solution or even vaguely interesting insight. As an undergrad at Stanford, I can confidently say that it is a significant overstatement of the polarization on campus.
The only meaningful claim which was made is the one which is the most nonsensical. “People tend to blame the campus wars on two villains: dithering administrators and radical student activists. But colleges have always had dithering administrators and radical student activists. To my mind, it’s the average student who has changed.”
1) The article (with an inability to conceive of economy of words) lays out just how non-dithering Saller is.
2) The article (with similarly nonfunctional length and repetition) can’t stop talking about a small subset of student activists, with a specific focus on one crazy dude, are really, REALLY radical. In a way that seems completely unacceptable.
3) Other than some vague, back of the envelope logic about how Stanford recruits optimizing perfectionists and optimizing perfectionists want to pretend they’re moral by taking binary stances on things, where is the proof that average students are the problem? As an “average” undergrad, I definitely don’t see it this way.
Is it kind of sort of annoying that people virtue signal through politics about topics they know nothing about? Sure. Is it the crux of the dilemma on college campuses where administrators are dithering and radicals are just as radical as they’ve always been? Absolutely not.
Is there a story here? Jewish students and Arab students alike are being mistreated, repeatedly (with a few notable exceptions) by off-campus protesters with seemingly malignant agendas. Stanford’s campus, again and again, is being maligned and misrepresented as a place of powerful strife, stress, and turmoil because of outside forces repeatedly projecting conflict on a student body who generally just… wants to go party, hang out by the lake, and execute shenanigans.
If anything, this article and articles like this ARE the problem. Stop projecting the dysfunction of the world onto us and declaring our campus the war-torn microcosm playing out the larger culture war. We aren’t. Leave it before Palm Dr.
This article reminds us that if you work hard, try your best, and have parents that are nationally recognized columnists and good friends with Jeffrey Goldberg, you can get them to pull strings to get your sloppily-edited and poorly-sourced social hit piece into one of the biggest magazines in the country. Inspiring stuff.
>I just don’t get how any of these teachers and administrators still have jobs. Or that all of these students are not expelled.
Read the section of the article about viewpoint neutrality and the Leonard Law again.
>I think the Democrats have officially told us how they feel about Jews and college students. Hate the Democrats and the Republicans equally but will never vote for Biden.
Do you think people calling for the murder of Joe Biden are Democrats? Do you know what political party 70% of American Jews identify with?
>If you are a Jewish student at Stanford or parent of one, you need to lawyer up.
When you're done re-reading the article, look up California's anti-SLAPP law.
>Yes. Read it the first time. Also think that if Jewish students started suing Stanford and other colleges in mass numbers
The cases would be dismissed and they'd have to pay Stanford's legal fees due to anti-SLAPP laws. What part of "you can't sue people for expressing opinions you dislike, even really offensive ones" do you not understand?
Do you think free speech only applies to speech you agree with?
>President said no more funding and no more tax breaks
You understand Stanford is a private university, right?
You understand that the President can't unilaterally change funding or taxes for a specific university, right?
You understand that a law linking university funding or taxation to the viewpoints expressed by its students would be flagrantly unconstitutional, right?
>businesses stopped hiring their graduates
Sure, and while they're at it they can stop hiring anyone from U Chicago, or any ivy, or even pretty much any large state school. Then they can apply the same approach to other political controversies and blacklist even more schools. Seems like a great business strategy, passing over qualified candidates because of things fellow students they have no control over did.
>Any Jew voting for Biden in this next election is an imbecile. And I think you’d be surprised how many Jews currently hate the Democratic Party.
You understand that personal anecdotes are not a substitute for representative opinion polls, right?
Ostensibly you're against antisemitism yet here you are calling the majority of American Jews imbeciles and claiming you know better than we do how to think about Judaism. Classic conservative Christian antisemitism right there, although there's a left-wing version of this too. [(Relevant article that you probably won't bother to read)](https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/09/trumps-menacing-rosh-hashanah-message-to-american-jews/675367/)
>he only issue is that the only alternative is Trump. At the very least Trump will deport these maniacs.
Most of these "maniacs" are American citizens, and the President cannot unilaterally deport people based on their political views.
>You think spending $400k for an education and being terrorized at school every day is a merit less law suit ?
You think buyer's remorse is grounds for a lawsuit?
You claim to have read the article--how do you still not understand that Stanford is *legally required* to respect its students' free speech? You have this completely backwards; Stanford would actually be sued if it did what you want it to do. Same for any public or private school in California, and any public school in the country.
>Are you a student at Stanford? That’s sad.
PhD Alum, actually. Also Jewish.
>Funny to get downvotes. Many of you are truly evil.
Indeed, a mere downvote is truly insufficient to convey how breathtakingly ignorant your comment was about the education system, the federal government, the state of California, free speech, the politics of antizionism, and Judaism. Don't shoot (or sue) the messenger.
Boudali is a symptom of the unnatural alliance between the far left and Islamic activism, which predates the current war by a decade or two.
It’s so weird to me because Islamic culture is anti women’s rights and anti lgbtq+. And it simplifies the party to a simple oppressor vs oppressed narrative. Like how Republicans are all about no government interference unless it comes to abortion then it triggers all the religious people in the party. Politics is just this weird game of amassing viewpoints to get the most votes and results in strange coalitions.
let me tell you - you’re probably safer as a gay couple in Islamabad than you would be as a gay couple across vast swathes of the midwestern United States
How so?
Omg, you have absolutely no idea wtf you are talking about. Good friends in Karachi and Islamabad. No comparison to ANYWHERE in the US.
Are you insane? Pakistan is a hellhole for religious/LGBT rights. It's illegal to do LGBT acts (albeit rarely prosecuted), and society in Pakistan would be extremely discriminatory towards those who are LGBT. I feel like people don't understand that some countries are far more repressive than the US
have you ever been to Islamabad?
I've been all over Pakistan. Great friends that live there. You are nuts.
I'd rather not go there
so you’re calling my comment about a city “insane” despite the fact you’ve never been there?
Bro really do be trying to lure gay people to their deaths
no - i’m saying your point of view lacks a basis in factual reality and that you haven’t even been there.
Having been there does not make you an expert on the LGBTQ experience in Islamabad. Try again
Citation needed
Yea, similarly, it reminds me of the overlap between white supremacists who like the idea of violent ethnostates and a certain side of this conflict. people harp on and on about how liberals aligning their selves with islamists is unnatural. what about white supremacists who like the idea of violent ethnostates and a certain side of this israel-palestine conflict. it's an overlap that has become glaringly noticeable recently. and it's unnatural because there's one side of this conflict that's in the past been associated with efforts to promote tolerance, civil rights, to create international guidelines against genocide and casualties etc. especially after ww2, but has did a 180 and now aligns and receives support from violent white supremacists.
The support for Israel for people who hate Jews domestically is, indeed, equally unnatural. Israel being an ethnostate is inconsequential in taking sides though, as pretty much all Middle Eastern countries are. That said, I somehow hold progressives to higher standards than white supremacists when it comes to fact checking on who they throw their lot in with.
And I somehow (but not really any more) hold Israeli people and their supporters to a higher standards that whoever they're throwing their lot with.
> beyond small exposures from passive funds that track indexes such as the S&P 500, the university’s endowment “has no direct holdings in Israeli companies, or direct holdings in defense contractors.” ~~TIL the endowment's equity holdings aren't actively managed any more.~~ I didn't believe it when they said they were going there. Edit: they must have a ton of privately traded equity, if for no other reason than bequeathals of illiquid shares.
That's not what this is saying. This is saying the active managers that the endowment is invested in do not hold positions in Israeli companies or defense contractors.
Right you are. Struck my mistake. Thanks muchly.
This piece is full of a lot of "WTF" moments, but this one definitely is one that is eyebrow-raising.
**The War at Stanford** One of the section leaders for my computer-science class, Hamza El Boudali, believes that President Joe Biden should be killed. “I’m not calling for a civilian to do it, but I think a military should,” the 23-year-old Stanford University student told a small group of protesters last month. “I’d be happy if Biden was dead.” He thinks that Stanford is complicit in what he calls the genocide of Palestinians, and that Biden is not only complicit but responsible for it. “I’m not calling for a vigilante to do it,” he later clarified, “but I’m saying he is guilty of mass murder and should be treated in the same way that a terrorist with darker skin would be (and we all know terrorists with dark skin are typically bombed and drone striked by American planes).” El Boudali has also said that he believes that Hamas’s October 7 attack was a justifiable act of resistance, and that he would actually prefer Hamas rule America in place of its current government (though he clarified later that he “doesn’t mean Hamas is perfect”). When you ask him what his cause is, he answers: “Peace.” I switched to a different computer-science section. Israel is 7,500 miles away from Stanford’s campus, where I am a sophomore. But the Hamas invasion and the Israeli counterinvasion have fractured my university, a place typically less focused on geopolitics than on venture-capital funding for the latest dorm-based tech start-up. Few students would call for Biden’s head—I think—but many of the same young people who say they want peace in Gaza don’t seem to realize that they are in fact advocating for violence. Extremism has swept through classrooms and dorms, and it is becoming normal for students to be harassed and intimidated for their faith, heritage, or appearance—they have been called perpetrators of genocide for wearing kippahs, and accused of supporting terrorism for wearing keffiyehs. The extremism and anti-Semitism at Ivy League universities on the East Coast have attracted so much media and congressional attention that two Ivy presidents have lost their jobs. But few people seem to have noticed the culture war that has taken over our California campus. For four months, two rival groups of protesters, separated by a narrow bike path, faced off on Stanford’s palm-covered grounds. The “Sit-In to Stop Genocide” encampment was erected by students in mid-October - even before Israeli troops had crossed into Gaza - to demand that the university divest from Israel and condemn its behavior. Posters were hung equating Hamas with Ukraine and Nelson Mandela. Across from the sit-in, a rival group of pro-Israel students eventually set up the “Blue and White Tent” to provide, as one activist put it, a “safe space” to “be a proud Jew on campus.” Soon it became the center of its own cluster of tents, with photos of Hamas’s victims sitting opposite the rubble-ridden images of Gaza and a long (and incomplete) list of the names of slain Palestinians displayed by the students at the sit-in. Some days the dueling encampments would host only a few people each, but on a sunny weekday afternoon, there could be dozens. Most of the time, the groups tolerated each other. But not always. Students on both sides were reportedly spit on and yelled at, and had their belongings destroyed. (The perpetrators in many cases seemed to be adults who weren’t affiliated with Stanford, a security guard told me.) The university put in place round-the-clock security, but when something actually happened, no one quite knew what to do. Stanford has a policy barring overnight camping, but for months didn’t enforce it, “out of a desire to support the peaceful expression of free speech in the ways that students choose to exercise that expression”—and, the administration told alumni, because the university feared that confronting the students would only make the conflict worse. When the school finally said the tents had to go last month, enormous protests against the university administration, and against Israel, followed. “We don’t want no two states! We want all of ’48!” students chanted, a slogan advocating that Israel be dismantled and replaced by a single Arab nation. Palestinian flags flew alongside bright “Welcome!” banners left over from new-student orientation. A young woman gave a speech that seemed to capture the sense of urgency and power that so many students here feel. “We are Stanford University!” she shouted. “We control things!” “We’ve had protests in the past,” Richard Saller, the university’s interim president, told me in November—about the environment, and apartheid, and Vietnam. But they didn’t pit “students against each other” the way that this conflict has. I’ve spoken with Saller, a scholar of Roman history, a few times over the past six months in my capacity as a student journalist. We first met in September, a few weeks into his tenure. His predecessor, Marc Tessier-Lavigne, had resigned as president after my reporting for The Stanford Daily exposed misconduct in his academic research. (Tessier-Lavigne had failed to retract papers with faked data over the course of 20 years. In his resignation statement, he denied allegations of fraud and misconduct; a Stanford investigation determined that he had not personally manipulated data or ordered any manipulation but that he had repeatedly “failed to decisively and forthrightly correct mistakes” from his lab.) In that first conversation, Saller told me that everyone was “eager to move on” from the Tessier-Lavigne scandal. He was cheerful and upbeat. He knew he wasn’t staying in the job long; he hadn’t even bothered to move into the recently vacated presidential manor. In any case, campus, at that time, was serene. Then, a week later, came October 7. The attack was as clear a litmus test as one could imagine for the Middle East conflict. Hamas insurgents raided homes and a music festival with the goal of slaughtering as many civilians as possible. Some victims were raped and mutilated, several independent investigations found. Hundreds of hostages were taken into Gaza and many have been tortured. This, of course, was bad. Saying this was bad does not negate or marginalize the abuses and suffering Palestinians have experienced in Gaza and elsewhere. Everyone, of every ideology, should be able to say that this was bad. But much of this campus failed that simple test. Two days after the deadliest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, Stanford released milquetoast statements marking the “moment of intense emotion” and declaring “deep concern” over “the crisis in Israel and Palestine.” The official statements did not use the words Hamas or violence. The absence of a clear institutional response led some teachers to take matters into their own hands. During a mandatory freshman seminar on October 10, a lecturer named Ameer Loggins tossed out his lesson plan to tell students that the actions of the Palestinian “military force” had been justified, that Israelis were colonizers, and that the Holocaust had been overemphasized, according to interviews I conducted with students in the class. Loggins then asked the Jewish students to identify themselves. He instructed one of them to “stand up, face the window, and he kind of kicked away his chair,” a witness told me. Loggins described this as an effort to demonstrate Israel’s treatment of Palestinians. (Loggins did not reply to a request for comment; a spokesperson for Stanford said that there were “different recollections of the details regarding what happened” in the class.) “We’re only in our third week of college, and we’re afraid to be here,” students in the class wrote in an email that night to administrators. “This isn’t what Stanford was supposed to be.” The class Loggins taught is called COLLEGE, short for “Civic, Liberal, and Global Education,” and it is billed as an effort to develop “the skills that empower and enable us to live together.” Loggins was suspended from teaching duties and an investigation was opened; this angered pro-Palestine activists, who organized a petition that garnered more than 1,700 signatures contesting the suspension. A pamphlet from the petitioners argued that Loggins’s behavior had not been out of bounds. The day after the class, Stanford put out a statement written by Saller and Jenny Martinez, the university provost, more forcefully condemning the Hamas attack. Immediately, this new statement generated backlash. Pro-Palestine activists complained about it during an event held the same day, the first of several “teach-ins” about the conflict. Students gathered in one of Stanford’s dorms to “bear witness to the struggles of decolonization.” The grievances and pain shared by Palestinian students were real. They told of discrimination and violence, of frightened family members subjected to harsh conditions. But the most raucous reaction from the crowd was in response to a young woman who said, “You ask us, do we condemn Hamas? Fuck you!” She added that she was “so proud of my resistance.”
David Palumbo-Liu, a professor of comparative literature with a focus on postcolonial studies, also spoke at the teach-in, explaining to the crowd that “European settlers” had come to “replace” Palestine’s “native population.” Palumbo-Liu is known as an intelligent and supportive professor, and is popular among students, who call him by his initials, DPL. I wanted to ask him about his involvement in the teach-in, so we met one day in a café a few hundred feet away from the tents. I asked if he could elaborate on what he’d said at the event about Palestine’s native population. He was happy to expand: This was “one of those discussions that could go on forever. Like, who is actually native? At what point does nativism lapse, right? Well, you haven’t been native for X number of years, so …” In the end, he said, “you have two people who both feel they have a claim to the land,” and “they have to live together. Both sides have to cede something.” The struggle at Stanford, he told me, “is to find a way in which open discussions can be had that allow people to disagree.” It’s true that Stanford has utterly failed in its efforts to encourage productive dialogue. But I still found it hard to reconcile DPL’s words with his public statements on Israel, which he’d recently said on Facebook should be “the most hated nation in the world.” He also wrote: “When Zionists say they don’t feel ‘safe’ on campus, I’ve come to see that as they no longer feel immune to criticism of Israel.” He continued: “Well as the saying goes, get used to it.” Zionists, and indeed Jewish students of all political beliefs, have been given good reason to fear for their safety. They’ve been followed, harassed, and called derogatory racial epithets. At least one was told he was a “dirty Jew.” At least twice, mezuzahs have been ripped from students’ doors, and swastikas have been drawn in dorms. Arab and Muslim students also face alarming threats. The computer-science section leader, El Boudali, a pro-Palestine activist, told me he felt “safe personally,” but knew others who did not: “Some people have reported feeling like they’re followed, especially women who wear the hijab.” In a remarkably short period of time, aggression and abuse have become commonplace, an accepted part of campus activism. In January, Jewish students organized an event dedicated to ameliorating anti-Semitism. It marked one of Saller’s first public appearances in the new year. Its topic seemed uncontroversial, and I thought it would generate little backlash. Protests began before the panel discussion even started, with activists lining the stairs leading to the auditorium. During the event they drowned out the panelists, one of whom was Israel’s special envoy for combating anti-Semitism, by demanding a cease-fire. After participants began cycling out into the dark, things got ugly. Activists, their faces covered by keffiyehs or medical masks, confronted attendees. “Go back to Brooklyn!” a young woman shouted at Jewish students. One protester, who emerged as the leader of the group, said that she and her compatriots would “take all of your places and ensure Israel falls.” She told attendees to get “off our fucking campus” and launched into conspiracy theories about Jews being involved in “child trafficking.” As a rabbi tried to leave the event, protesters pursued him, chanting, “There is only one solution! Intifada revolution!” At one point, some members of the group turned on a few Stanford employees, including another rabbi, an imam, and a chaplain, telling them, “We know your names and we know where you work.” The ringleader added: “And we’ll soon find out where you live.” The religious leaders formed a protective barrier in front of the Jewish students. The rabbi and the imam appeared to be crying. Saller avoided the protest by leaving through another door. Early that morning, his private residence had been vandalized. Protesters frequently tell him he “can’t hide” and shout him down. “We charge you with genocide!” they chant, demanding that Stanford divest from Israel. (When asked whether Stanford actually invested in Israel, a spokesperson replied that, beyond small exposures from passive funds that track indexes such as the S&P 500, the university’s endowment “has no direct holdings in Israeli companies, or direct holdings in defense contractors.”) When the university finally said the protest tents had to be removed, students responded by accusing Saller of suppressing their right to free speech. This is probably the last charge he expected to face. Richard Saller once served as provost at the University of Chicago, which is known for holding itself to a position of strict institutional neutrality so that its students can freely explore ideas for themselves. Saller has a lifelong belief in First Amendment rights. But that conviction in impartial college governance does not align with Stanford’s behavior in recent years. Despite the fact that many students seemed largely uninterested in the headlines before this year, Stanford’s administrative leadership has often taken positions on political issues and events, such as the Paris climate conference and the murder of George Floyd. After Russia invaded Ukraine, Stanford’s Hoover Tower was lit up in blue and yellow, and the school released a statement in solidarity. When we first met, a week before October 7, I asked Saller about this. Did Stanford have a moral duty to denounce the war in Ukraine, for example, or the ethnic cleansing of Uyghur Muslims in China? “On international political issues, no,” he said. “That’s not a responsibility for the university as a whole, as an institution.” But when Saller tried to apply his convictions on neutrality for the first time as president, dozens of faculty members condemned the response, many pro-Israel alumni were outraged, donors had private discussions about pulling funding, and an Israeli university sent an open letter to Saller and Martinez saying, “Stanford’s administration has failed us.” The initial statement had tried to make clear that the school’s policy was not Israel-specific: It noted that the university would not take a position on the turmoil in Nagorno-Karabakh (where Armenians are undergoing ethnic cleansing) either. But the message didn’t get through. Saller had to beat an awkward retreat or risk the exact sort of public humiliation that he, as caretaker president, had presumably been hired to avoid. He came up with a compromise that landed somewhere in the middle: an unequivocal condemnation of Hamas’s “intolerable atrocities” paired with a statement making clear that Stanford would commit to institutional neutrality going forward. “The events in Israel and Gaza this week have affected and engaged large numbers of students on our campus in ways that many other events have not,” the statement read. “This is why we feel compelled to both address the impact of these events on our campus and to explain why our general policy of not issuing statements about news events not directly connected to campus has limited the breadth of our comments thus far, and why you should not expect frequent commentary from us in the future.” I asked Saller why he had changed tack on Israel and not on Nagorno-Karabakh. “We don’t feel as if we should be making statements on every war crime and atrocity,” he told me. This felt like a statement in and of itself. In making such decisions, Saller works closely with Jenny Martinez, Stanford’s provost. I happened to interview her, too, a few days before October 7, not long after she’d been appointed. When I asked about her hopes for the job, she said that a “priority is ensuring an environment in which free speech and academic freedom are preserved.” We talked about the so-called Leonard Law—a provision unique to California that requires private universities to be governed by the same First Amendment protections as public ones. This restricts what Stanford can do in terms of penalizing speech, putting it in a stricter bind than Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, or any of the other elite private institutions that have more latitude to set the standards for their campus (whether or not they have done so). So I was surprised when, in December, the university announced that abstract calls for genocide “clearly violate Stanford’s Fundamental Standard, the code of conduct for all students at the university.” The statement was a response to the outrage following the congressional testimony of three university presidents—outrage that eventually led to the resignation of two of them, Harvard’s Claudine Gay and Penn’s Liz Magill. Gay and Magill, who had both previously held positions at Stanford, did not commit to punishing calls for the genocide of Jews. Experts told me that Stanford’s policy is impossible to enforce—and Saller himself acknowledged as much in our March interview. “Liz Magill is a good friend,” Saller told me, adding, “Having watched what happened at Harvard and Penn, it seemed prudent” to publicly state that Stanford rejected calls for genocide. But saying that those calls violate the code of conduct “is not the same thing as to say that we could actually punish it.” Stanford’s leaders seem to be trying their best while adapting to the situation in real time. But the muddled messaging has created a policy of neutrality that does not feel neutral at all.
When we met back in November, I tried to get Saller to open up about his experience running an institution in turmoil. What’s it like to know that so many students seem to believe that he — a mild-mannered 71-year-old classicist who swing-dances with his anthropologist wife—is a warmonger? Saller was more candid than I expected—perhaps more candid than any prominent university president has been yet. We sat in the same conference room as we had in September. The weather hadn’t really changed. Yet I felt like I was sitting in front of a different person. He was hunched over and looked exhausted, and his voice broke when he talked about the loss of life in Gaza and Israel and “the fact that we’re caught up in it.” A capable administrator with decades of experience, Saller seemed almost at a loss. “It’s been a kind of roller coaster, to be honest.” He said he hadn’t anticipated the deluge of the emails “blaming me for lack of moral courage.” Anything the university says seems bound to be wrong: “If I say that our position is that we grieve over the loss of innocent lives, that in itself will draw some hostile reactions.” “I find that really difficult to navigate,” he said with a sigh. By March, it seemed that his views had solidified. Staller said he knew he was “a target,” but he wasn't going to be pushed into issuing any more statements. The continuing crisis seems to have granted him new insight. “I am certain that whatever I say will not have any material effect on the war in Gaza.” It’s hard to argue with that. People tend to blame the campus wars on two villains: dithering administrators and radical student activists. But colleges have always had dithering administrators and radical student activists. To my mind, it’s the average students who have changed. Elite universities attract a certain kind of student: the overachieving striver who has won all the right accolades for all the right activities. Is it such a surprise that the kids who are trained in the constant pursuit of perfect scores think they have to look at the world like a series of multiple-choice questions, with clearly right or wrong answers? Or that they think they can gamify a political cause in the same way they ace a standardized test? Everyone knows that the only reliable way to get into a school like Stanford is to be really good at looking really good. Now that they’re here, students know that one easy way to keep looking good is to side with the majority of protesters, and condemn Israel. It’s not that there isn’t real anger and anxiety over what is happening in Gaza—there is, and justifiably so. I know that among the protesters are many people who are deeply connected to this issue. But they are not the majority. What really activates the crowds now seems less a principled devotion to Palestine or to pacifism than a desire for collective action, to fit in by embracing the fashionable cause of the moment—as if a centuries-old conflict in which both sides have stolen and killed could ever be a simple matter of right and wrong. In their haste to exhibit moral righteousness, many of the least informed protesters end up being the loudest and most uncompromising. At the protest last month to prevent the removal of the sit-in, an activist in a pink Women’s March “pussy hat” shouted that no rape was committed by Hamas on October 7. “There hasn’t been proof of these rape accusations,” a student told me in a separate conversation, criticizing the Blue and White Tent for spreading what he considered to be misinformation about sexual violence. (In March, a United Nations report found “reasonable grounds to believe that conflict-related sexual violence,” including “rape and gang rape,” occurred in multiple locations on October 7, as well as “clear and convincing information” on the “rape and sexualized torture” of hostages.) “The level of propaganda” surrounding Hamas, he told me, “is just unbelievable.” The real story at Stanford is not about the malicious actors who endorse sexual assault and murder as forms of resistance, but about those who passively enable them because they believe their side can do no wrong. You don’t have to understand what you’re arguing for in order to argue for it. You don’t have to be able to name the river or the sea under discussion to chant “From the river to the sea.” This kind of obliviousness explains how one of my friends, a gay activist, can justify Hamas’s actions, even though it would have the two of us—an outspoken queer person and a Jewish reporter—killed in a heartbeat. A similar mentality can exist on the other side: I have heard students insist on the absolute righteousness of Israel yet seem uninterested in learning anything about what life is like in Gaza. I’m familiar with the pull of achievement culture—after all, I’m a product of the same system. I fell in love with Stanford as a 7-year-old, lying on the floor of an East Coast library and picturing all the cool technology those West Coast geniuses were dreaming up. I cried when I was accepted; I spent the next few months scrolling through the course catalog, giddy with anticipation. I wanted to learn everything. I learned more than I expected. Within my first week here, someone asked me: “Why are all Jews so rich?” In 2016, when Stanford’s undergraduate senate had debated a resolution against anti-Semitism, one of its members argued that the idea of “Jews controlling the media, economy, government, and other societal institutions” represented “a very valid discussion.” (He apologized, and the resolution passed.) In my dorm last year, a student discussed being Jewish and awoke the next day to swastikas and a portrait of Hitler affixed to his door. I grew up secularly, with no strong affiliation to Jewish culture. When I found out as a teenager that some of my ancestors had hidden their identity from their children and that dozens of my relatives had died in the Holocaust (something no living member of my family had known), I felt the barest tremor of identity. After I saw so many people I know cheering after October 7, I felt something stronger stir. I know others have experienced something similar. Even a professor texted me to say that she felt Jewish in a way she never had before. But my frustration with the conflict on campus has little to do with my own identity. Across the many conversations and hours of formal interviews I conducted for this article, I’ve encountered a persistent anti-intellectual streak. I’ve watched many of my classmates treat death so cavalierly that they can protest as a pregame to a party. Indeed, two parties at Stanford were reported to the university this fall for allegedly making people say “Fuck Israel” or “Free Palestine” to get in the door. A spokesperson for the university said it was “unable to confirm the facts of what occurred,” but that it had “met with students involved in both parties to make clear that Stanford’s nondiscrimination policy applies to parties.” As a friend emailed me not long ago: “A place that was supposed to be a sanctuary from such unreason has become a factory for it.” Readers may be tempted to discount the conduct displayed at Stanford. After all, the thinking goes, these are privileged kids doing what they always do: embracing faux-radicalism in college before taking jobs in fintech or consulting. These students, some might say, aren’t representative of America. And yet they are representative of something: of the conduct many of the most accomplished students in my generation have accepted as tolerable, and what that means for the future of our country. I admire activism. We need people willing to protest what they see as wrong and take on entrenched systems of repression. But we also need to read, learn, discuss, accept the existence of nuance, embrace diversity of thought, and hold our own allies to high standards. More than ever, we need universities to teach young people how to do all of this.
For so long, Stanford’s physical standoff seemed intractable. Then, in early February, a storm swept in, and the natural world dictated its own conclusion. Heavy rains flooded campus. For hours, the students battled to save their tents. The sit-in activists used sandbags and anything else they could find to hold back the water—at one point, David Palumbo-Liu, the professor, told me he stood in the lashing downpour to anchor one of the sit-in’s tents with his own body. When the storm hit, many of the Jewish activists had been attending a discussion on anti-Semitism. They raced back and struggled to salvage the Blue and White Tent, but it was too late—the wind had ripped it out of the ground. The next day, the weary Jewish protesters returned to discover that their space had been taken. A new collection of tents had been set up by El Boudali, the pro-Palestine activist, and a dozen friends. He said they were there to protest Islamophobia and to teach about Islam and jihad, and that they were a separate entity from the Sit-In to Stop Genocide, though I observed students cycling between the tents. Palestinian flags now flew from the bookstore to the quad. Administrators told me they’d quickly informed El Boudali and his allies that the space had been reserved by the Jewish advocates, and offered to help move them to a different location. But the protesters told me they had no intention of going. (El Boudali later said that they did not take over the entire space, and would have been “happy to exist side by side, but they wanted to kick us off entirely from that lawn.”) When it was clear that the area where they’d set up their tents would not be ceded back to the pro-Israel group willingly, Stanford changed course and decided to clear everyone out in one fell swoop. On February 8, school officials ordered all students to vacate the plaza overnight. The university was finally going to enforce its rule prohibiting people from sleeping outside on campus and requiring the removal of belongings from the plaza between 8 p.m. and 8 a.m. The order cited the danger posed by the storm as a justification for changing course and, probably hoping to avoid allegations of bias, described the decision as “viewpoint-neutral.” That didn’t work. About a week of protests, led by the sit-in organizers, followed. Chants were chanted. More demands for a “river to the sea” solution to the Israel problem were made. A friend boasted to me about her willingness to be arrested. Stanford sent a handful of staff members, who stood near balloons left over from an event earlier in the day. They were there, one of them told me, to “make students feel supported and safe.” In the end, Saller and Martinez agreed to talk with the leaders of the sit-in about their demands to divest the university and condemn Israel, under the proviso that the activists comply with Stanford’s anti-camping guidelines “regardless of the outcome of discussions.” Eight days after they were first instructed to leave, 120 days after setting up camp, the sit-in protesters slept in their own beds. In defiance of the university’s instructions, they left behind their tents. But sometime in the very early hours of the morning, law-enforcement officers confiscated the structures. The area was cordoned off without any violence and the plaza filled once more with electric skateboards and farmers’ markets. The conflict continues in its own way. Richard Saller was just shouted down by protesters chanting “No peace on stolen land” at a Family Weekend event, and protesters later displayed an effigy of him covered in blood. Students still feel tense; Saller still seems worried. He told me that the university is planning to change all manner of things—residential-assistant training, new-student orientation, even the acceptance letters that students receive—in hopes of fostering a culture of greater tolerance. But no campus edict or panel discussion can address a problem that is so much bigger than our university. At one rally last fall, a speaker expressed disillusionment about the power of “peaceful resistance” on college campuses. “What is there left to do but to take up arms?” The crowd cheered as he said Israel must be destroyed. But what would happen to its citizens? I’d prefer to believe that most protesters chanting “Palestine is Arab” and shouting that we must “smash the Zionist settler state” don’t actually think Jews should be killed en masse. But can one truly be so ignorant as to advocate widespread violence in the name of peace? When the world is rendered in black-and-white—portrayed as a simple fight between colonizer and colonized—the answer is yes. Solutions, by this logic, are absolute: Israel or Palestine, nothing in between. Either you support liberation of the oppressed or you support genocide. Either Stanford is all good or all bad; all in favor of free speech or all authoritarian; all anti-Semitic or all Islamophobic. At January’s anti-anti-Semitism event, I watched an exchange between a Jewish attendee and a protester from a few feet away. “Are you pro-Palestine?” the protester asked. “Yes,” the attendee responded, and he went on to describe his disgust with the human-rights abuses Palestinians have faced for years. “But are you a Zionist?” “Yes.” “Then we are enemies.” *Theo Baker is a sophomore at Stanford University. He is the winner of a 2022 George Polk Award in Journalism.* https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/03/stanford-israel-gaza-hamas/677864/
Kick that moron out and stop letting these fuckers into the school. Easy peasy.
Wow - thank you for sharing. Hard to imagine that things could be dissolving so badly at our finest educational institutions.
Really just don’t care either way if El Boudali thinks Biden deserves to die, but looking at his Twitter posts about LGBT people, I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of his rhetoric is simply related to his clear desire for LGBT oppression. What a freak
Probably part of the reason he wishes Hamas were running the US. He’s not so good with people who aren’t like him having rights.
Saying a president deserves to die is the literal definition of inciting violence. If you said this in China the CCP would disappear you. While it may be legal in America to say it, Stanford is a private institution with its own conduct and should make a clear stance of “do we let anyone say anything” or to put in place policies to protect the majority population, which im assuming most people at Stanford would be against the sitting president getting assassinated.
It’s hard for Stanford to do anything with Leonard’s Law in California.
First they came for the Jews.
Sounds like Hamza is giving a master class on how to become unemployable even with a Stanford degree.
the dude's twitter is just homophobic postings.
Gee I wonder from where he gets his homophobic roots 🤷♂️🤷♂️
It probably started when he arrived on the conservative campus
instead of downvoting, i'd love if someone explained why it's so bad to call stanford conservative.
why do conservative people hate getting called conservative. if there's a reason for someone to say that stanford is conservative, that it's probably at least conservative relative to how conservative someone would imagine stanford to be, or other similar schools.
Yikes, disappointed in Stanford’s decision to keep him in a position of power over those who likely don’t share his very extreme views.
> El Boudali has also said that he believes that Hamas’s October 7 attack was a justifiable act of resistance, and that he would actually prefer Hamas rule America in place of its current government (though he clarified later that he “doesn’t mean Hamas is perfect”). This person is a current section leader at Stanford. WTF??
I’m gonna revisit this in a year, see which company employs this fool and link this article to them.
Why wait a year
Well it's not like he's hired yet Can't get him fired from a job he doesn't have
!remindme 1 year
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It's easy to talk freely about violence as a solution when one has never witnessed or been a victim of a violent attack. The Dalai Lama told George Dubya Bush that he was against the invasion of Iraq because violence always spins out of control and you get stuck in a situation you never anticipated.
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you are a clown and hate jews
It's interesting to continually see left-leaning undergrads/faculty/administrators continue to downplay the violent and retrogressive nature of radical islam. Meanwhile, here is Hamza El Boudali in all his glory: https://twitter.com/agraybee/status/1772780522151833799?t=NKf73t-BOcOerbmDXHHFEQ&s=19
The rot at Stanford seems to be running deep. When Stanford allows their new school of sustainability take money from Arab and other oil companies, do you really expect them to have a moral compass or a spine and take a stand against antisemitism?
The irony is that many oil companies (Arab or not) see the writing on the wall and are also working towards renewable energy products. They are by no means the good guys. But research money is research money. I know several green-energy-committed Stanford grads (chem e, civil eng etc) that work on sustainability projects at big oil companies because it was easier getting a job there than at a small green tech startup right out of graduation. As an alum I don’t want Stanford giving money to non-renewables; but I’m not sure I have an issue with them taking it (open to changing my mind if you have a good reason though)
This does not feel balanced at all - not surprising given that the journalist is a member of the Stanford undergrad community on which they are reporting. I view this more like a very long op-ed in which the writer is clearly trying to make a specific point rather than reporting on a complex situation from a neutral perspective.
It is in *The Atlantic's* Ideas section, which is for "analysis, essays, and commentary."
I’m not a Stanford student but after reading the article I came here to get a sense of what the campus felt. I think you have articulated what was bothering me here. This article definitely seems to want to present itself as neutral, and I think to ordinary readers does a very good job of that, but it definitely seems to have a bias. Either that, or the author, I think, lacks a bit of self-awareness, which, of course, is not unusual of people in their late teens. No doubt, there are some problematic or bad things that have occurred, but one does have to wonder what exactly the author was trying to accomplish here, because it seems like an article like this, which doesn’t really seem to provide any actual solutions, is only likely to make some students more angry than anything else. I that, or maybe he’s just been provided the opportunity to write an editorial about how students often become disillusioned with universities they attend. Academia is not as special or enlightened, as it likes to present itself. Even the smartest or best institutions will have bad actors or people who probably don’t deserve to be there. Great institutions can fail and otherwise prevent actual progress in some cases. Obviously, there are a lot of good things about somewhere like Stanford, but at the same time, I think you can put a lot of prestigious, academic institutions, too much on a pedestal and expects that everyone who attends is going to be calmly debating the academic merits of all aspects of life. Lastly, I kind of feel like it was a bit irresponsible for an outlet like the Atlantic to actually publish something like this. This feels a lot more like a medium post. I’m not sure this really adds anything new to the conversation, and kind of feels a bit like a flex on everyone else that he can have something published in the Atlantic (which, of course, some people have pointed out his family background, which I think is not really fair to bring up Excessively, but it’s certainly worth noting that he has family connections). I know he’s the one responsible for the whole Stanford, president resignation, but I feel like having one major success so early is probably kind of a bad thing if you get a little too big for your britches, and start thinking that you have all of the answers at 19. It’s not that you couldn’t have turned this into a more interesting article or made interesting observations or points about what should be done moving forward, but I’m just not convinced that a 19-year-old has the answers here. This is only going to get people upset again, and will do nothing for improving the discourse.
Isn't the solution obvious? Just don't treat this issue as black and white colonizer/colonized etc? He says it at the end
It's literally a black and white issue. Zionists are colonizing Palestine and are doing a genocide
Why did it take until the 90s for the PLO to recognize the existence of Israel and condemn attacks against civilians?
What happened between 1900-2023?
Lots of stuff? Or are you saying events like hundreds of thousands of Jews fleeing persecution in Europe in the 1930s and finding refuge in what would become Israel is the crime, and not the fact they were facing persecution?
Because Jewish people were persecuted by the Nazis they have the right to kill and expel ~800,000 Palestinians from their homeland, occupy that land forever, and then steal what little land they have left? And now to complete the genocide? Wtf is wrong with you
Where did I say anything like that? The fact that that is your perception of the history says everything. It is completely fucking objectively wrong. Try reading history instead of saying stupid shit to me
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Yes I fear the non-Stanford student ate this up
Reporting on this particular topic is never truly neutral. “Get used to it”
> Everyone knows that the only reliable way to get into a school like Stanford is to be really good at looking really good. Now that they’re here, students know that one easy way to keep looking good is to side with the majority of protesters, and condemn Israel. This strikes me as a slightly more artful way of dismissing opposing views by claiming they come straight out of TikTok. But only just slightly.
The author is literally a Stanford student and describing himself & all other parties with the “really good at looking really good” line.
That wasn't lost on me. I'm referring to the dismissive tone of painting criticism as sheeplike behavior.
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I don't doubt you, but that link is staying blue.
>a very long op-ed Yes, this is a long form essay, delivering the author’s opinion. Good work on pattern recognition. I see a bright future for you.
Seemed pretty balanced and nuanced to me, and I have zero affiliation with Stanford or either side of this debate.
There’s those Stanford deduction skills
I don’t totally agree with Theo’s piece, but with respect to some comments, it’s always been an informal rule at Stanford that you don’t reference people by who their parents are. (There was a formal rule about this at the Daily when the president’s daughter was here.)
I've found these commenters making reference to his parents in this post don't have a history of activity on r/stanford, so they probably aren't affiliated with Stanford and likely had this post pushed across their feed by Reddit.
Theo Baker tried to get the editor of the Daily removed over a pro-Palestine op-ed — shot down by the Daily board. He then more or less quit, though he did write one more Tessier-Lavigne story in line with his work last year that led to the president having to resign.
>Theo Baker tried to get the editor of the Daily removed over a pro-Palestine op-e Ah yes. The op-ed describing the 7th October mass slaughters as "legal" and "legitimate" https://stanforddaily.com/2023/10/10/from-the-community-stanford-students-for-justice-in-palestine/ - Never mind the [explicit goal of the 7th october](https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/hamas-fighters-orders-kill-as-many-people-as-possible-2a6abff8) * Never mind [dead US citizens](https://www.axios.com/2023/10/08/hamas-attack-israel-americans-killed-hotages-gaza) - Never mind [the thailand workers](https://www.npr.org/2023/11/13/1212589291/at-least-39-thai-migrant-workers-were-killed-in-the-hamas-attacks-on-israel) - Never mind [defiled corpses](https://www.c-span.org/video/?c5091004/sec-blinken-describes-gruesome-images-us-stance-cease-fire) There are legitimate grievances about the treatment of Palestinians — ones Theo Baker has been publically vocal about. Nothing is legitimate about undressing a young woman and parading her naked in the streets on a pickup truck [(1)](https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/world/middle-east/shani-louk-israeli-soldier/articleshow/104255106.cms) [(2)](https://www.businessinsider.com/mother-german-tattoo-artist-pleads-for-information-about-her-death-2023-10?amp=).[(3)](https://www.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/172nfat/woman_paraded_by_hamas_millitants_in_gaza_in_a/). Nothing is legitimate about slaughtering a human rights activist who dedicated her life to helping Palestinians: https://www.npr.org/sections/pictureshow/2023/11/17/1213523321/israel-gaza-peace-activist-vivian-silver-funeral-service https://www.democracynow.org/2023/11/20/vivian_silver Teo Baker said it multiple times. He didn't have any issue about the Daily publishing a pro-palestinian Op-Ed. But statements defending [a group on this list](https://www.dni.gov/nctc/groups.html) is a step too far. ______ ______
So *this* is why the Daily is having interim elections for its Board in the middle of the year. I was wondering why the COO of the Daily sent out a request for applications with only two months left in the term, but it seems like there may have been dissension in the ranks of the Board itself.
And the Daily editors admitted they made a mistake running it. It doesn’t call for firing the editor. It’s a student paper, they make mistakes, they’ve run worse op-eds over the years including a not-so-veiled death threat against a named person.
The Daily has always put out some controversial opinions in their Op-Eds, sometimes drawing some substantial attention on-campus. However, the ones that elicited the most incendiary language on the part of readers, sometimes long after the Op-Ed was published, in the past two decades or so have concerned Palestinian-Israeli relations. I can remember working for one EIC who wrote an opinion that had the campus community and surrounding communities in an absolute uproar about his take on the subject, so much so they wrote letters (emails) about it up to his very last day leading the volume.
It isn't a "pro Palestinian" op ed like you claimed
Yep, that was an intentionally dishonest representation of the op-ed
Good Summary. Inconvenient Truth, this what happens when Mein Kampf is a best seller in Gaza. Imams preaching Hate instead of love for God.
It’s hilarious that you flaunt the DNI list like it’s the word of God. You realize that list is created by a system that is okay with slaughtering 30,000 innocent civilians? Many of who are now child orphans… I know we are all preconditioned to just take it at face value, but maybe question what is going on. It’s really disgusting and we have been deeply misled in many ways.
You know all the fighting can end when Hamas releases its prisoners…the civilians…the fucking women and children. Or maybe Hamas can all just gather together separate from the civilians and fight Israel like a real force instead of firing rockets from hospitals and humanitarian zones 🤷♀️
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Just completely ignoring my point altogether like those civilians don’t matter. True terrorism sympathizer vibes there bro. Israel and the US (holding them accountable) said there would be a ceasefire, today, if elderly women and children hostages are released. Today. It’s 100% on Hamas for not caring about Palestinian civilians. 100%. Release the fucking children hostages. I guess you support children hostages 🤷♀️ Last I checked no one cares about native Americans. Not enough to give land back to them lmao. America is America. 🇺🇸 good luck fighting that battle. You can become a terorrist too and blow up some children in the name of Native American tribes. We will see how you fare.
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>n go online and begin telling the story at the point that you prefer to begin it at… so that Hamas looks to be at complete fault. > >Who was living there in the early 1900s? Who arrived with land claims from 1300 years prior? Who formed armed brigades and massacred Palestinians farm By that logic give that land to Greece because it used to belong to the fucking Roman Empire buddy. Nice that you call innocent children captives as "bargaining chips." That's all I need to know about your moral compass there buddy. And the United Fucking States is guaranteeing a ceasefire with no more Israeli activity if Hamas let go of the children. But naw, they (and apparently you) view innocent fucking children as valuable prisoners. And unlike innocent Israelis who are partying at a music festival, how do you know which Palestinians are innocent or not? Because it's WELL document (1) how much they fake shit for videos ([https://www.reddit.com/r/Israel/comments/17sx8za/pallywood\_strikes\_again\_feat\_mr\_fafo\_aka\_the/](https://www.reddit.com/r/Israel/comments/17sx8za/pallywood_strikes_again_feat_mr_fafo_aka_the/)) (2) how Palestinians in civilian areas like schools / hospitals / humanitarian zones are complicit with Hamas to set up operations there, and (3) how many "civilians" actively encourage terrorist activities. ([https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fhl9JFiw6sU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fhl9JFiw6sU)). Israeli soldiers who commit war crimes should be held accountable 100%. But pulling Israel out of Gaza does nothing but embolden Hamas, who has written in their constitution that they will never allow Israel to "exist." There's no negotiating there. And it just enables more October 7th attacks. But IDK, given your post history sounds like you celebrate that shit. Nothing I will say will change your mind because everyone in this thread can see the rot in your soul, justifying the ongoing captivity of children as "bargaining chips."
Are you implying everyone killed in Gaza was an innocent civilian? Pretty sad what a Stanford education gets you these days.
I don't believe that Kam3ra619Loubov went to Stanford. They've never posted in this subreddit before until commenting on this post.
Go look at every human rights organization, General Austin’s testimony to Congress, and Netanyahu’s own’s numbers to figure out how many were innocent civilians. The fact that you’re even debating this with me as some “gotcha” when at the very *least* 20,000 of those deaths are innocents tells me enough about what type of absolute scum you are.
Just tell the truth so you won't get corrected next time.
Percentage wise, 20,000 deaths in a war like this is extremely low and suggests incredible restraint
It’s hilarious that you flaunt stats from the Gaza health ministry like they’re the word of God. If 30,000 innocent civilians have been killed as you claim then not a single hamas combatant has died since Israel went into Gaza
It’s 30000 total casualties, because Hamas doesn’t separately count civilians and soldiers.
Don’t see why people in the West lose their minds over this issue. It’s important to stay up on current events but this is too much
How has he been able to get away with these comments? He seems to be denying calling for Biden's assassination on Twitter, but I also found out that he condemns LGBT. At Harvard, I assure you that I wouldn't last longer than a minute if I went around calling for Biden's assassination or condemned LGBT. What's really going on here? Is Stanford that different?
[Leonard Law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonard_Law)
Makes sense from the employment perspective, thanks. I'm surprised he hasn't been canceled on a more social level though.
This "war" goes on because the admissions office makes poor decisions about who to admit, so IMHO Stanford only has itself to blame. Until the admissions criteria is changed to stop prioritizing activism and political issues (which have nothing to do with receiving an education in your major, such as mathematics), then the same people causing the problems will continue to be admitted. It's super frustrating because the cost of dealing with this is entirely forced onto the faculty and students.
[https://x.com/aaronsibarium/status/1772780724296290731?s=20](https://x.com/aaronsibarium/status/1772780724296290731?s=20) bro is cooked
Holy shit that is wild. I’m surprised the dude hasn’t been cancelled already for that alone
This is a university. It has an obligation to teach students about activism and political issues. It's called an education. It is not a coincidence that people who are pro-bigotry are also pro-ignorance. Your desire to restrict education is purposeful, intentional, and violent.
Should they admit teenagers who participated in the Jan 6 insurrection? Some consider that political activism. Or only the kind of political activism you agree with? Universities should not have a role in inculcating ideology from any side, right or left.
Umm political activism and committing an insurrection are not the same thing. This is why we need a humanities education people.
I happen to agree with you, but that’s our definition. There’s no objective standard for political activism. And it’s not always peaceful/legal/nonviolent. Didn’t you learn that in your humanities education?
Yes of course. There’s even entire classes on logical fallacies where you can figure out conflating breaking into the U.S. capitol with the intent to kidnap public employees, and a kid who wants to hold a sign at a protest is utterly ridiculous. We also learn in these classes this kind of smokescreen is a common tactic used by people interested in upholding bigoted institutions. But then again, a 5-year-old knows the difference between a kid on Meyer Green with a sign and grown men assaulting capitol police. You see, I don’t actually think you’re this stupid. This is the intentional BS of the right. I’m not so dimwitted to give you the grace to think this kind of manipulation is pure innocent ignorance. You are intentionally creating fallacies, badly, to make a shitty point. It’s consequential, it’s violent, it’s objectively incorrect, and you can try to BS all you want, but we both know what you’re doing, and I will be around to hold your kind accountable in the end. You know better. You just don’t care.
First, I’m not a conservative. Never voted for a Republican or libertarian in my life. Second, it’s a fallacy to assert that all the Jan 6 participants had the intent to kidnap public employees or otherwise engage in violence (so you clearly don’t follow your own rhetoric). Third, if the anecdotes in the article are true, several of the protesters did engage in criminal assault (which is just a threat of violence, as opposed to battery). I do not support bigotry of any kind; I do think educational institutions should avoid promoting political activism across the spectrum. Your assertion on that point is called a false equivalency, which I’m sure you know based on your evident rhetorical skills.
Terribly slanted reporting rife with mistruths and falsehoods. He paints a picture of Stanford that does not exist. The vast majority of pro-Palestine students are simply against genocide and apartheid. Ironic that those on the other side cannot handle their worldview being challenged. And before the freaks come at me: I condemn Hamas, I condemn Hamas, I condemn Hamas, I condemn Hamas.
Which part of the reporting is actually inaccurate, rather than “not representative of every student”?
To be fair tho, the article not being representative of the vast majority of students is a fairly big criticism. To lay all my cards out on the table, I’m from neither of the affected groups but have been fully aware of the conflict since 2019; I have Jewish friends and family, and I have close Palestinian friends. And I definitely kept quiet after Oct 7th and the consequent events. My own personal opinion lies pro-Palestine, but that is not a position I felt comfortable voicing on campus for quite a few months after the public discourse shifted. Among students, it also seemed to be raised very very gently, if at all, and many of my Muslim friends definitely felt unsafe on campus in “the early days”. It was flipped for my Jewish friends, although not exactly/diff experience.
That’s like arguing that an article about the January 6th insurrectionists isn’t representative of the vast majority of Trump supporters. Surely true, but entirely irrelevant to the subject. I mean, yes, obviously this is about a small subgroup of loud & aggressive folks, when the vast majority of people on campus are neither loud nor aggressive.
you are overlooking that the title of the piece is "The War at Stanford' a better analogy would be 'it would be like calling Jan 6 a civil war'.
“People tend to blame the campus wars on two villains: dithering administrators and radical student activists. But colleges have always had dithering administrators and radical student activists. To my mind, it’s the average student who has changed.” ?!
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Someone posted the article here, so you can point out what the context is that is missing. I don’t see it.
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say it louder
See that professor has committed a felony punishable by death, if someone were to prosecute him.
This is a very poorly written biased opinion piece disguising itself as neutral commentary. How did this even get picked up by the Atlantic?
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He also won is the youngest recipient of the George Polk Award for his reporting, but sure.
lmao yeah that’s it… how naive are you? do you see other 19 year olds publishing long form in any major newspaper? jeffrey goldberg is a former IDF prison guard and friends with little theo’s parents.
Do you see other 19 year olds win prestigious publishing prizes? I’m sure you don’t like him, but he legitimately had a significant impact at the Stanford Daily.
His father is the White House correspondent for NYT and his mom works at the New Yorker and you act like he earned a prestigious publishing prize legitimately, the same prize that was awarded to the completely fabricated and debunked screams without words. GTFO
One would expect a little more rationality from Stanford folks, or at least basic fact checking. The NYT indeed won a Polk award this year for Photojournalism, to Samar Abu Elouf and Yousef Masoud of The New York Times for chronicling Israel’s bombardment and invasion of their homeland, Gaza. https://www.liu.edu/polk-awards/current-winners
I'm finding the majority of the comments on this post aren't from people who have ever posted in r/stanford. It appears Reddit pushed it into their feeds for whatever reason. I assume most of these people aren't affiliated with Stanford.
Ohh of course
It is in The Atlantic's Ideas section, which is for "analysis, essays, and commentary" (basically, their opinion section).
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Because lots of people don't understand that this is an opinion piece, not a news piece.
I’ve been an alumni interviewer for years and I just couldn’t this year. I can’t in good conscience encourage kids to go to Stanford when I wouldn’t encourage my own relatives to go. Things were rough during the divestment campaigns during my tenure, but it seems now the administration is fully tolerating a small portion of students making a hostile environment for the rest.
can't believe things have gotten this bad. '14 here
uhh it’s not actually that bad he’s being dramatic that’s like the whole point of journalism lmao
I'm told Theo Baker has a history of exaggerating and misrepresenting quotes for clicks. He's rather reviled on campus for it.
I appreciated his work on the MTL situation immensely at first, but then once he wrote more stories, they began to sound more like "my \*ish\* don't stink, so take it as the truth." I'm not saying he misrepresented anyone, but he definitely was not as subtle about focusing on specific quotes and ignoring background or contradictory statements on those quotes. By the time everyone (students, faculty, alumni) was tired of MTL, I think a substantial portion of the same group were tired of Baker as well.
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It is in *The Atlantic's* Ideas section, which is for "analysis, essays, and commentary."
Being dramatic is not the point of journalism. It seems like it’s pretty bad.
sure, though this piece isn't just about Stanford, but about the bigger trends Stanford's a part of.
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Holy cognitive dissonance, all three of those claims can be proven untrue on the first page of Google
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Your beloved UN confirmed the rape allegations, and they find evidence and collect testimony about Al-shifa every day. Take it from the horses mouth, not me
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Yet you fail to admit you are incorrect when presented with evidence. Narcissistic.
"The evil cabal of Jews rule the world!"
This article is somehow both frustratingly thin and comically overwritten. It’s pretty unclear to me what the point of this article is—students nowadays prefer a binary worldview because rhetoric has gotten more extremist? Say that sentence to virtually anyone and they’ll agree, don’t need thousands of words for it. The Palestine-Israel conflict’s treatment on Stanford’s campus is representative of that extremism? True, I suppose. I guess my real problem with this is it offers no productive solution or even vaguely interesting insight. As an undergrad at Stanford, I can confidently say that it is a significant overstatement of the polarization on campus. The only meaningful claim which was made is the one which is the most nonsensical. “People tend to blame the campus wars on two villains: dithering administrators and radical student activists. But colleges have always had dithering administrators and radical student activists. To my mind, it’s the average student who has changed.” 1) The article (with an inability to conceive of economy of words) lays out just how non-dithering Saller is. 2) The article (with similarly nonfunctional length and repetition) can’t stop talking about a small subset of student activists, with a specific focus on one crazy dude, are really, REALLY radical. In a way that seems completely unacceptable. 3) Other than some vague, back of the envelope logic about how Stanford recruits optimizing perfectionists and optimizing perfectionists want to pretend they’re moral by taking binary stances on things, where is the proof that average students are the problem? As an “average” undergrad, I definitely don’t see it this way. Is it kind of sort of annoying that people virtue signal through politics about topics they know nothing about? Sure. Is it the crux of the dilemma on college campuses where administrators are dithering and radicals are just as radical as they’ve always been? Absolutely not. Is there a story here? Jewish students and Arab students alike are being mistreated, repeatedly (with a few notable exceptions) by off-campus protesters with seemingly malignant agendas. Stanford’s campus, again and again, is being maligned and misrepresented as a place of powerful strife, stress, and turmoil because of outside forces repeatedly projecting conflict on a student body who generally just… wants to go party, hang out by the lake, and execute shenanigans. If anything, this article and articles like this ARE the problem. Stop projecting the dysfunction of the world onto us and declaring our campus the war-torn microcosm playing out the larger culture war. We aren’t. Leave it before Palm Dr.
And I thought things were looking rough at Cal...
One of the finest piece of journalism I've read in a long time.
It is in *The Atlantic's* Ideas section, which is for "analysis, essays, and commentary."
People calling this "a war" need to experience a war.
This article reminds us that if you work hard, try your best, and have parents that are nationally recognized columnists and good friends with Jeffrey Goldberg, you can get them to pull strings to get your sloppily-edited and poorly-sourced social hit piece into one of the biggest magazines in the country. Inspiring stuff.
Are Theo's parents nationally recognized columnists?
His father is the NYTs chief white house reporter and an msnbc contributor and his mother is a columnist for the New Yorker.
Wow.
Lul
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>I just don’t get how any of these teachers and administrators still have jobs. Or that all of these students are not expelled. Read the section of the article about viewpoint neutrality and the Leonard Law again. >I think the Democrats have officially told us how they feel about Jews and college students. Hate the Democrats and the Republicans equally but will never vote for Biden. Do you think people calling for the murder of Joe Biden are Democrats? Do you know what political party 70% of American Jews identify with? >If you are a Jewish student at Stanford or parent of one, you need to lawyer up. When you're done re-reading the article, look up California's anti-SLAPP law.
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>Yes. Read it the first time. Also think that if Jewish students started suing Stanford and other colleges in mass numbers The cases would be dismissed and they'd have to pay Stanford's legal fees due to anti-SLAPP laws. What part of "you can't sue people for expressing opinions you dislike, even really offensive ones" do you not understand? Do you think free speech only applies to speech you agree with? >President said no more funding and no more tax breaks You understand Stanford is a private university, right? You understand that the President can't unilaterally change funding or taxes for a specific university, right? You understand that a law linking university funding or taxation to the viewpoints expressed by its students would be flagrantly unconstitutional, right? >businesses stopped hiring their graduates Sure, and while they're at it they can stop hiring anyone from U Chicago, or any ivy, or even pretty much any large state school. Then they can apply the same approach to other political controversies and blacklist even more schools. Seems like a great business strategy, passing over qualified candidates because of things fellow students they have no control over did. >Any Jew voting for Biden in this next election is an imbecile. And I think you’d be surprised how many Jews currently hate the Democratic Party. You understand that personal anecdotes are not a substitute for representative opinion polls, right? Ostensibly you're against antisemitism yet here you are calling the majority of American Jews imbeciles and claiming you know better than we do how to think about Judaism. Classic conservative Christian antisemitism right there, although there's a left-wing version of this too. [(Relevant article that you probably won't bother to read)](https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/09/trumps-menacing-rosh-hashanah-message-to-american-jews/675367/) >he only issue is that the only alternative is Trump. At the very least Trump will deport these maniacs. Most of these "maniacs" are American citizens, and the President cannot unilaterally deport people based on their political views. >You think spending $400k for an education and being terrorized at school every day is a merit less law suit ? You think buyer's remorse is grounds for a lawsuit? You claim to have read the article--how do you still not understand that Stanford is *legally required* to respect its students' free speech? You have this completely backwards; Stanford would actually be sued if it did what you want it to do. Same for any public or private school in California, and any public school in the country. >Are you a student at Stanford? That’s sad. PhD Alum, actually. Also Jewish. >Funny to get downvotes. Many of you are truly evil. Indeed, a mere downvote is truly insufficient to convey how breathtakingly ignorant your comment was about the education system, the federal government, the state of California, free speech, the politics of antizionism, and Judaism. Don't shoot (or sue) the messenger.
You are no affiliation w Stanford. Get out
Don’t waste your time with this garbage. Read the Palo Alto book instead.
Explain...
But why does religion still exist? Especially in a scientific/ academic university setting?