Free Republic

ARCATA, Calif. — Cal Poly Humboldt announced on Friday that its campus will remain closed through the rest of the semester due to the ongoing protests and occupation of Siemens Hall and Nelson Hall East. The semester was set to end on May 10. The university said remote instruction and work will continue until that time. On Monday, several dozen demonstrators took over Siemens Hall, one of the main buildings on campus. Another group of protesters was outside the building. University officials said the ongoing occupation of the two buildings has caused an "ongoing inability to open other campus facilities."...

Once again, young people who have nothing important or valuable in their lives and who believe in nothing substantive or enduring are demonstrating their desperate need for belonging and purpose. Psychologists who have studied violence in young men and especially young men’s willingness to forsake everything they know, everything they’ve been taught, and everything they might otherwise believe about right and wrong, say that there is a set of shared circumstances and “revelations” that link spree killers and self-radicalized terrorists. Faced with the emptiness of their own lives, isolated from many of their contemporaries, and desperately in search of...

First, let me apologize to my Jewish readers. I realize that hearing those three words must be painful. Many of you have parents or grandparents whose friends or family were gruesomely murdered in that very manner. The reason I use those words is that today in the year 2024 we are closer to such horror than we’ve been for 80 years, and we must not pretend otherwise. The Jewish nation that promised “never again” is being explicitly threatened with “again.” This moment comes in the wake of the atrocious murdering, raping, beheading, burning alive and hostage-taking committed by Palestinians against...

It wasn’t long ago when the activist Left had a whole laundry list of systems and impersonal forces that it was battling against: sexism, homophobia, white supremacy, ableism – you name it. The Millenial Left may have nodded along to Bernie Sanders’ old labour-Left leanings. Still, they largely abandoned the class struggle of old for a struggle against boutique oppressions that were contingent but intersecting, hence the rise of so-called “intersectionality.” That’s the once-trendy academic philosophy that relies on a view of power relations of society, where advantages and disadvantages are filtered primarily through identities: race, gender, and sexual orientation....

The messaging of modern Leftist activism is muddled at best. It wasn’t long ago when the activist Left had a whole laundry list of systems and impersonal forces that it was battling against: sexism, homophobia, white supremacy, ableism – you name it. The Millenial Left may have nodded along to Bernie Sanders’ old labour-Left leanings. Still, they largely abandoned the class struggle of old for a struggle against boutique oppressions that were contingent but intersecting, hence the rise of so-called “intersectionality.” That’s the once-trendy academic philosophy that relies on a view of power relations of society, where advantages and disadvantages...

The House of Representatives Israel aid bill is under scrutiny for including more than $9 billion in humanitarian assistance, which is significantly more than the annual gross domestic product of the Gaza Strip, as critics say the U.S. is essentially funding Hamas through the bill.The Israel bill, which passed in a 366-58 vote Saturday, allocates $26.4 billion in aid to the region, including more than $9.1 billion marked as "Migration and Refugee Assistance" and "International Disaster Assistance," to address the humanitarian needs that arose in the Gaza Strip following the Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel.The aid is more than...

On Saturday, 69 people were arrested at the Arizona State University trying to establish a Gaza Camp to demand the university divest itself from Israeli companies. An official with the university told 12 News, that most of the individuals that were attempting to set up the encampment were not part of ASU's student body, nor were they faculty. ASU began clearing the tents around midnight, and by 1:45 AM the last of the group had left. Three of the protesters arrested and charged with criminal trespassing were Michael Clancy, 20, Harry Smith, 19, and William Whitmire, 59.

US. President Joe Biden is being accused of responding to a reporter on Monday in a manner that recalls former president Donald Trump’s saying that there were “very fine people on both sides” of a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Va. “Do you condemn the antisemetic protesters,” Biden was asked on Monday. “I condemn the antisemitic protests. That’s why I have set up a program to deal with that,” Biden said, per the pool report. “I also condemn those who don’t understand what’s going on with the Palestinians.” “President Biden says there are good people on both sides of Oct....

More than six months into the war in Gaza and with dimming hopes for a cease-fire deal, Palestinians there are growing more critical of Hamas, which some of them blame for the months-long conflict that has destroyed the territory — and their lives. The war has displaced most of the Gaza Strip’s population, killed tens of thousands of people and pushed the enclave toward famine, its infrastructure in ruins. The Israeli military waged a punishing campaign to eliminate Hamas after the group, which ruled Gaza for 17 years, attacked Israel on Oct. 7, killing an estimated 1,200 people and abducting...

British troops could be deployed on the ground in Gaza to help deliver aid via a new sea route, the BBC has learned. The US has said no American forces would go ashore and an unnamed "third party" would drive trucks along a floating causeway onto the beach. The UK is understood to be considering tasking British troops with this when the aid corridor opens next month. Whitehall sources said no decision had been made and the issue had not yet crossed the prime minister's desk. The Ministry of Defence (MoD) and Israeli army declined to comment. Britain has been...

AUSTIN, Texas — Seth Greenwald, who hopes to graduate in May from the University of Texas School of Law, is a fortunate survivor of the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel. Greenwald described his experience in Israel during the horrific attack that claimed the lives of nearly 1,200 people in Israel. During a video interview, Greenwald told Breitbart Texas he was spat on twice and told to “go back to Poland” during a pro-Palestine demonstration on the university’s campus earlier this week.

“Academia, particularly at the level of Columbia and the Ivy League, is completely broken. I don’t think it can be repaired internally. They have created over 20 to 30 years a unified monoculture which is hostile to western values, which is hostile to capitalism, and which exploits and singles out Israel as the object of their ire as a mobilizing tactic…. People need to understand that there is no internal opposition left.” There is a plus-side to the vile anti-Israel and antisemitic encampments at Columbia and several other universities – the anti-American side of the movement is on full display....

On Friday’s broadcast of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” White House National Security Communications Adviser John Kirby stated that Hamas doesn’t care about the Palestinian people and if they did, “they’d lay down their arms, they’d step aside, they’d release those hostages,” but they’ve refused hostage release offers. Kirby also stated that there have been too many civilians killed in Gaza and the number of civilian casualties “needs to be zero.”

New York Democratic Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Jamaal Bowman, both members of "The Squad," were seen Friday mingling with anti-Israel agitators at Columbia University, where "support" was offered to those in the encampment established to protest the Israeli military's actions in Gaza. In one video shared on social media, a smiling Ocasio-Cortez is shown speaking with those inside the encampment and offering her "support" for those who have become engaged in the protest. Photographs of Bowman also circulated on social media, showing the cheerful New York Democrat listening to those who were taking part in the encampment protest. His appearance...

The Nazi cheers of Sieg Heil didn’t start out in Munich, but in Massachusetts.The Nazi chant was borrowed from Harvard football cheers and imported to Germany by Ernst “Putzy” Hanfstaengl, a Harvard man in good standing who befriended Hitler and helped build a more respectable brand for the National Socialists.“Putzy” was one of a number of Ivy League elites who were enchanted by the Third Reich.Socialism forcefully implemented by great men, whether it was FDR, Mussolini, Stalin or Hitler, was the great obsession of America elites of the era who were convinced that it was the only answer to the...

As far as the student protesters at Columbia University and other universities are concerned, they’re making a strong and principled stand for justice. Yet events at Columbia and elsewhere have taken an ugly turn, with the protesters sounding more like the National Socialists (remember, that’s what “Nazi” means) of 1930s Germany than any actual crusader for human rights.When this latest social contagion has run its course and the hysteria has died down, these students would do well to consider carefully what they’re actually supporting. It’s clear that they haven’t done so as of yet.The New York Post on Thursday published...

… Question 1: On Oct. 7, the terrorist group Hamas slaughtered young Israelis at a music festival as well as other civilians in surrounding communities. They murdered, stabbed, shot, raped, beheaded, burned. They forced children to watch the butchering of parents. They cut off the breasts of women. They killed the defenseless elderly. They abducted and continue to hold innocent civilians hostage. Did you protest that massacre in the days, weeks, months after Oct. 7. At least once? Did you fly flags, wave banners, demand justice? If not, why not? Why do you protest only Israel? Question 2: In the...

Columbia student Khymani James: "Be grateful that I'm not just going out and murdering Zionists."One of the most vocal student activists leading the anti-Israel Gaza Solidarity Encampment at Columbia University, Khymani James, openly stated in an live-stream of an official university inquiry in January that “Zionists don’t deserve to live.”James, who states in the hearing that he goes by “he/she/they” pronouns, live-streamed his meeting with Columbia’s Center for Student Success and Intervention, where he doubled down on an Instagram post that sparked the report. In the report, which he reads aloud at the start of the meeting, James warned Zionists...

"Low information protestors" are a perfect foil for these groups' financing activities. Recent revelations about the financial contributions of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund to organizations like IfNotNow and Jewish Voice for Peace have sparked debate about the nature of pro-Palestinian protests on U.S. college campuses. Over the past five years, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund has donated significant sums — $100,000 to IfNotNow and nearly $500,000 to Jewish Voice for Peace. These organizations openly advocate for the cessation of U.S. support for what they describe as Israel’s "Apartheid" system. Financial Support and Its ImplicationsThe funding from such an established philanthropic entity...

The situation unfolding across college campuses in the United States is a complicated one, and bears reflection. I do not propose anything definitive, but I wanted to share a few thoughts. A Very Brief History of the University: The first question we must ask is “What are universities even for?” It is not an easy one. They began as institutions to train clerics in theology and philosophy, and evolved gradually into places for training gentleman scholars. Oxford and Cambridge in the 19th century did not live up to the model St. John Henry Newman describes in The Idea of a...