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Cornell Pro-Israel students taunted: “F**k You Zionist scums”

Cornell Pro-Israel students taunted: “F**k You Zionist scums”

Another indication of escalating intimidation on campuses.

We have long tracked the increasing aggressiveness of anti-Israel groups on campus.

See my post this summer, Expecting anti-Israel violence on campuses this fall, for a partial catalog of such instances.

One component of these protests is non-student activists inflaming the situation. For example, on April 10, 2014, after the Cornell student assembly tabled an anti-Israel divestment resolution, a non-student Ithaca activist (kat yang-stevens) confronted me and falsely accused me of putting my camera in her face. In fact, the video clearly shows (language warning) she made it up in order to create an incident.

On November 19, 2014, Cornell Students for Justice in Palestine organized a mock Israeli checkpoint at Ho Plaza, a central student gathering point on campus between the Cornell Bookstore and Willard Straight Hall, where many student activities are centered.

Cornell SJP - Mock Checkpoint Ho Plaza 11-19-2014

(Image via Casey Breznick)

Casey Breznick, Editor in Chief of the Cornell Review and an author at Legal Insurrection, has the story at the Cornell Review Blog of a confrontation that took place when a group of pro-Israel students counter-protested holding Israeli flags and signs calling for peace.

Here is video we put together based on footage provided to us by multiple student sources, showing yang-stevens pulling the same ploy she pulled on me last April, claiming that the student had his camera in her face (which he denies both in the video and also in communications with me), as yang-stevens taunted the pro-Israel student to hit her. As another person shouted out “Fuck you Zionist scums”:

(Language Warning)

In addition to his Review report, Casey told me:

At the rally, I witnessed [yang-stevens] acting very aggressively towards pro-Israel students who were peaceably standing off to the side of the plaza waving posters or merely observing the pro-Palestinian displays. Yang-Stevens taunted and cursed at pro-Israel students, and tried provoking some into hitting her. When I said something to her (I forgot exactly what I said, but something to the effect of “Do you condemn Hamas?”), she responded “Do you want some of this?” To another student, she repeatedly asked if he wanted to slap her and taunted him for “foaming at the mouth.” She stood nearly nose-to-nose with this student, who eventually walked away to neutralize the situation.

Cornell Pro-Israel Signs Ho Plaza 11-19-2014

The Cornell Daily Sun student newspaper reported:

Some individuals at the rally — which included members outside the Cornell community who were not affiliated with SJP — confronted the students representing Israel, smearing their sign with ketchup and shouting things such as “Apartheid is fucking apartheid,” “there’s no logic to Zionism” and “we will respond to aggression with aggression.”

This was a really dangerous confrontation, with the chance to escalate if the pro-Israel student had reacted to literally in-your-face taunts.

The student subjected to this abuse, who did not want to be identified by name, told me:

As I captured video depicting Kat Yang-Stevens, she approached me, screaming at me not to touch her. As I raised my hands in the air, she came closer to me. She continually shouted at me as she came within a centimeter of my face, breathing deliberately and forcefully all over me. She shouted to me to “slap me bitch” as her friends egged me on. I never initiated with her or her fellow protesters. I was attacked, and effectively spit on, for being Jewish and taking a video.

The publicly available Cornell Police Daily Crime Log reports that two complaints were filed regarding harassment (and a third because someone mistook the mock checkpoint to be real).  The Cornell Police Chief did not respond to my inquiry as to the status of the investigation.

Cornell Police Log 11-19-2014 highlighted

Jacob Glick, Chair of Cornell J Street U, who was present during the incident, gave the following statement:

“The supposed focal point of the protest was the mock checkpoint that had been set up in the center of Ho Plaza, but the fireworks took place at the margins of the crowd, where Jewish students were silently holding up signs that read, among other things, “Israel invests in peace.”

As SJP protesters chanted “genocide is genocide,” they repeatedly approached the sign-carrying students; one protester, who admitted that she was not a Cornell student, challenged one student to slap her, shouting “you know you want to” at close range.

I’m deeply disappointed and disturbed by the lack of emotional maturity on the part of SJP protesters, who refused to condemn the terrorist attack in Jerusalem when pressed by counter-protesters. The aftermath of such barbaric bloodshed should have been a moment for us to unite around a common regard for humanity.

SJP, in refusing to acknowledge the enormity of the Jerusalem massacre by rescheduling or toning down their protest, forfeited any credibility as an organization that seeks to pursue a political agenda while at the same time having the philosophical flexibility and self-confidence to acknowledge that some atrocities are beyond politics, and not all days are meant to be days of rage.”

Adam Schlussel, Vice President of CIPAC (the Cornell Israel Public Affairs Committee), who also was present during the incident, told me:

SJP claims to be a group pursuing justice but their actions consistently prove otherwise. They didn’t condemn the horrific and gruesome murder of four Jews praying in a synagogue by Palestinian terrorists. Rather, they decided it was a good time to protest checkpoints that Prime Minister Netanyahu ordered to protect Israeli civilians in response to an increase in terror attacks. In fact, SJP paid kat yang-stevens to incite a response from pro-Israel students on campus.

Don’t think that these activists are unwelcome on the Cornell campus. To the contrary, yang-stevens the next day appeared at the Africana Center, where she led a panel discussion on Resisting Domination:

Resisting Domination Program page 1

This aggressive behavior towards peaceful pro-Israel students is becoming all too typical on college campuses, including Cornell.

Update 11-22-2014: Casey, who was at both the protests and the Africana Center event, tells me that he believes the woman shown in the video shouting “Fuck You Zionist Scums” is Amanda Lickers, who appears on the Africana Center event poster and also was involved in the 911 Memorial desecration at Middlebury College in September 2013.

Here is a screen shot from the Cornell video of the person Casey believes is Lickers:

Cornell Anti-Israel Taunting Fuck You Zionist Scums 11-19-2014

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Comments

Easy way to take care of their concerns. The Palestinians simply need to stop streaming weapons into the Gaza Strip and firing them at Israel.

What do they say to the Egyptians who have just started to build a buffer zone in the Sinai, going to the lengths of destroying houses and relocating the inhabitants. I don’t hear a word from schmucks like them about that.

Seeing this rise in anti-Semitism just hurts my heart. It is just evil.

Wouldn’t touch her with a twenty foot pole. “Palestinians” are Egyptian, Jordanian, Saudi and Lebanese scum.
http://youtu.be/aYMviMHH0nc

I am not Jewish and I tell my two oldest children who are teens that you are to support Israel and remember that they are an ally and also from a Christian perspective not to believe in the anti Semitic lies that is growing in this country and throughout the world.

I especially remind them that there was a holocaust and that each generation is losing that perspective. I even have taken my young son who was 10 and my other son who is 14 to the Holocaust Memorial in Miami Beach.

It frightens me that so many “educate liberals” are so angry and filled with rage towards Israel and Jews and those who support Israel’s right to exist. I hope enough people in this country wake up and say no more to this. I fear that we have lost reason to extremism.

    gdaddo in reply to natdj. | November 21, 2014 at 7:23 pm

    I’m what you would call an “educated liberal” in my late 50’s and have always been a strong supporter of Israel. I think this new, strong pro-Palestinian bias on the part of young “progressives” is generational. Israel is establishment to them and Palestinians are the down-trodden minority. It’s a dangerously superficial perspective, but for some reason it’s hip and politically correct.

    As for Kat Stevens (ain’t that clever), she refers to herself on her buzzword-heavy website in the third person plural and refuses to do ANYTHING without being paid an “honorarium”.

    She’s no rebel; she’s a greedy venture capitalist who’s carved out a niche for herself in the race grievance industry.

      guyjones in reply to gdaddo. | November 24, 2014 at 2:10 pm

      The anti-Israel attitudes are generational, but, they also are an example of agitprop operating as fashion statement and lemming “cool” groupthink. Wearing a “Che” t-shirt, joining the neo-communist “Occupy” rabble, or, supporting Mumia Abu-Jamal are other examples of this behavior, to wit, the joining of political movements or causes in total ignorance and without regard to the alleged and dubious merits of those causes, merely because doing so confirms one’s sense of “cool” and “solidarity” with the “movement,” thus resulting in approbation from one’s Leftist peers. It is a form of utter intellectual slavishness and laziness.

Give them an inch, they’ll try to take a country, campus by campus. Their immaturity, self-righteousness and lack of life’s experiences are fertile ground to sow seeds of any cause if given enough fuel to flame the fire and there are always those who show up to do just that. Reasoning and Logic are water to their flames. They have come to the universities to continue their education and become worldly and knowledgeable but have short circuited the process by closing it down, shutting out all other voices. In four years, should they stay the course, they will have to live, work and participate in the Utopia they believe awaits them. Young, naïve, divisive and possibly dangerous onto themselves and to those they rage against. They will blame the “system”, it’s what progressives do.

While on the West Coast at Berkeley this week.

http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Education/2014/1120/What-happens-if-you-wave-an-ISIS-flag-on-Berkeley-s-campus

legacyrepublican | November 21, 2014 at 6:23 pm

It is easy to love Zionists. They want to take over just Israel unlike others who want to take over the world via a caliphate.

It is easy to love Zionists. They love to live while their opponents love to die.

It is easy to love Zionists. They welcome you with a hug while their opponents will chop your head off.

It is easy to love Zionists. They work hard for peace while their opponents cling to their anger and hatred.

It is easy to love Zionists once you get over your jealousy that God chose them over you because God knew they would make good friends and mentors to any nation that wants true freedom and justice for their people.

We wouldn’t be the great nation we are today if it weren’t for Israel leading the way.

Was the fat SJP chick spitting on the demonstrators? Just curious from a self-defense perspective, what is an appropriate response to someone spitting on you repeatedly? Can you bring out the pepper spray?

    Exiliado in reply to BrokeGopher. | November 21, 2014 at 8:11 pm

    It’s ebola times.

    Spitting could be considered a deadly assault.

      Yes, spitting in a cop’s face will get you an assault charge. Ergo, any scum like this spitting in my face would get a few teeth knocked out of their head in return.

      It’s really well past time to stop pussy-footing around with these freaks. Sometimes the only thing that gets a message through a thick skull is a crack or two in that thick skull.

The F word makes up 75% of the leftist vocabulary. It’s easy to identify them by their limited language skills and threatening death, rape, etc. on anyone who disagrees with them.

Hate-filled people, they are.

I’d really like to see these clowns try their “resistance movement” shtick in a country like North Korea. They wouldn’t last two days, if that long ~

This has very little to do with ‘Zionism,’ and everything to do with fascism, and useful, dickless idiots doing the bidding of their malignant masters.

the comments at cornell sun are…bad.
heres a fix.
no student governments, organizations, etc.
you want to learn, then learn.
you want to play politics then get elected.
professors and administrators need to stop enabling this carp. while it may have felt good to be part of it in the past it always was a childish waste of time. I have never understood why people allowed this crap to happen.
school is to learn.
one protest and kicked out.
so anyone want to hire me to run their school?

Mr. Stevens strikes me as the type who will grow up to be a Associate Professor of Feminist Studies with an emphasis in pornography and sex work…

I see a couple of solutions to these events.

1) Have a student put on a suicide vest and detonate it at the checkpoint.

2) Produce some improvised rockets and fire them randomly in the direction of the checkpoint.

3) Drive a car at the checkpoint full-speed, seeking to run down as many of the people in the area as possible.

4) Attack any supporter of the checkpoint with meat cleavers.

In other words, act like the Palestinians and dare the checkpoint students to condemn your actions.

[…] didn’t sit too well with the pro-Palestinian activists, according to Legal Insurrection, as one remarked on camera, “F*** you Zionist […]

Well, hurling expletives, vitriol, spite and invective is what passes for cogent reasoning and substantive expression by the agitators on the Left, these days. At least they’re generally consistent in their behavior in this regard.

Because, it’s easier to insult people who hold viewpoints at variance with your own, than it is to take the time to express arguments on the merits (such as they are). This is really a tacit admission of the general intellectual laziness and infantilism that characterizes the Left.

Ah, the progressive way:

“(t)he story of the progressive movement can best be understood as activists going wherever the field is open. If the people are on your side, expand democracy. If the people are against you, use the courts. If the courts are against you, run down the field with the bureaucrats, or the Congress, or the presidency. Procedural niceties — the filibuster, precedent, the law, custom, the Constitution, truth — only matter if they can be enlisted to advance the cause. If they can’t, they suddenly become outdated, irrelevant, vestigial organs of racism, elitism, sexism, whatever. Obstruction, or even inconvenience in the path of progressive ends is prima facie proof of illegitimacy. The river of history must carry forward. If History hits a rock, the rock must be swept up with the current or be circumvented. Nothing can hold back the Hegelian tide, no one may Stand Athwart History. If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem. This is the liberal gleichschaltung; get with the program or be flattened by it.

Oh right, a Joooooo said that:

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/393246/obama-congress-its-my-way-or-my-way-jonah-goldberg/page/0/1