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Comment by racional | Hacker News Reader

I haven't seen a shred of evidence that these protestors are violent, or that they harass members of campuses, as they are said to do.

Then you need start reading from more diverse sources.

Just in the past week, for example - there's Khymani James, still currently front and center within the protest movement at Columbia, who was recorded earlier in the year saying "Zionists don't deserve to live" and "You shouldn't be surprised to see me murdering Zionists":

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/26/nyregion/columbia-student...

And the assault on Israeli activist Yoseph Haddad by an identified member of the local activist community:

https://www.jpost.com/diaspora/antisemitism/article-797910

In general the right wing vastly overexaggerates the violent aspects of the protest movement. But beyond question it has its share of assholes.

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and some (all?) of these assholes are agent provocateurs, just like in the 60s, which a previous poster alluded to.

That's speculation, and in essence an attempt at misdirection.

Full focus on unsavoury comments, or even actions, by one out of a thousand protesters (I'm taking a guess at the rate here; might be even lower than that) in order to label the whole protest movement as hateful, violent, and whatnot, is an attempt at misdirection from the message of the protest — that they want their universities to divest away from groups that are actively participating in the complete destruction of Gaza and mass killings of its people. This is a fairly standard way to bust protests [0, 1], and the fact that the mainstream media is playing along with that shows their alignment.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terry_Norman

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COINTELPRO

in order to label the whole protest movement as X, Y, Z

I'm not labeling the "whole protest movement" as anything.

Go find someone or something else to direct your excess energy at, please.

> I'm not labeling the "whole protest movement" as anything.

Ok maybe not. What you did do, however, was accuse a person of misdirection, when your initial comment is itself a misdirection from the greater issue -- ~34 thousand people dead and the survivors in largely unlivable conditions with the full support of the government of this country; and the universities investing into the industry supporting it all. Interesting that 'ethical purity' of genocidal statements of high-ranking members of the Israeli government as the bombing began do not get people concerned much and it is casually rationalized away -- even though they actually did and do have the power to act on those threats, and have evidently acted on them as we have been seing over the past 6 months. Yet here we are spending time debating ethical purity of 1-2 college students, with no actual power, that have made questionable comments, out of thousands protesting, while the mass killing is still ongoing. That is the bigger misdirection, with more dire consequences.

> Go find someone or something else to direct your excess energy at, please.

One might be able to ridicule and patronize comments such as mine in a different time, if not for the ongoing slaughter in Gaza that we are witnessing in real time. Trivialization of it through misdirection is something worthy of pushing back against.

Khymani James probably isn't a provocateur; he was (before he was banned from campus) one of the leaders and organizers of the protest, and its media spokesperson. Just a day before the recordings were revealed, he gave a widely covered press conference.

If he's an agent, he's a spectacularly successful one!

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