Columbia 2: The Moral High Ground
Last night’s bust at Columbia University was the police equivalent of the Powell Doctrine in war —The application of overwhelming force to incapacitate the enemy with as few casualties as possible. Oerationally, it worked. No one was hurt as a massive force of police surrounded and then invaded the campus to clear about a hundred protesters from Hamilton Hall and the encampment on the south lawn.
My wife, a 71-year-old retired Presbyterian minister, and I, an 82-year-old retired journalist, were among the witnesses —searching, in our separate wonted ways, for the moral high ground. In the end, the cops stood on it, by default.
Hamas blew it by its inhuman tactics against Israeli civilians. Israel blew it by its excessive force and disregard of civilian casualties in Gaza. Columbia blew it by caving in to political pressure and refusing to respect what started out as a peaceful protest. The US blew it by mindlessly pouring arms into an unwinnable war. Biden and Blinken are blowing it daily by allowing themselves to be blown off by Bibi Netanyahu.
The students blew it by allowing the protest to be derailed by the usual suspects — agents provocateurs, and/or fringe political groups pushing violence and hate. We saw it last night, as we stood by the police barricades. The usual call and response chants were going on —and the students, like sheep, followed whatever calls were loudest. A couple of middle-aged guys showed up on Amsterdam Avenue, one with a bullhorn. From the rear of the crowd, they took the lead intermittently with chants like “NYPD, Piggy, Piggy, we will make your lives shitty” and “NYPD, KKK, we know you’re Israeli-trained.” I asked the guy where he got the bullhorn. Amazon, he said. I asked the other guy who he represented. He said “the people.” He then pulled his scarf over his face.
The chants, of course, were all recorded, and will be used as evidence that the protesters were “spewing hatred” and deserve to be expelled. I can attest from my own and others’ eyewitness reporting, that the core of the student protest was moral outrage over US and university support for Israel’s assault on Gaza. But Fox News has half of America’s viewing public, and it is now having a ball vilifying and ridiculing the protesters. In his prime-time stew of news and right-wing views, Jesse Watters last night called it the “Arab Spring Break,” led by the “Columbia Caliphate” AKA the “Keffiyeh Antifa,” in their “terror tepees.” The protesters are “Pro-Hamas” and “Hamas is Iran.” Their Columbia professors are “indoctrinators.” Meanwhile the hero of the nation is detained at a “show trial” downtown, to keep him from going out among the people.
Right now at Columbia, the cops are playing the role of grownups. Shoulder to shoulder at the barricades last night, they were in defensive mode, confident in their overwhelming numbers, with face shields and bullet-proof vests, but only lightly armed, A friendly sergeant at the corner turned away everyone who wanted to cross the barricades, even students with Columbia IDs, and an old lady who said she wanted to go home. It’s a hard freeze, he said. Nobody gets in. We’ll tell you when it’s over.
Their operation was meticulously planned and methodically carried out, with little if any resistance and no casualties. It was like the strategy General Colin Powell used to rout Iraqi forces from Kuwait in 1991 in four days, with so few US losses that American medical units wound up treating the Iraqi wounded.
There’s more to the Powell Doctrine, though, than overwhelming force. It’s a list of questions that have to be answered “yes” before undertaking a military operation. Is a vital national interest at stake? Do we have a clear, attainable objective? Have the risks and costs been fully and frankly analyzed?
Did anyone, in Israel or the US, ask those questions about Gaza? And at home, is the Powell Doctrine appropriate for use against students? Can Columbia call for Operation Campus Storm II the next time a hundred students act up?
By its own request, Columbia will be a police state through graduation. It’s a nanny police state, created by a university that treats its students like misbehaving middle-schoolers, not “men and women” educated to think and judge for themselves.
No disrespect to the police. But when they hold the moral high ground at an Ivy League university, where do we turn for instruction?
