By: C. William Hanson Jr.

Better late than never.  Some surgeons may tend to delay operating, waiting until the patient has suffered sufficiently, enough to ensure ready acceptance of any comparatively mild discomforts or inconveniences associated with a procedure.  It seems that Speaker Johnson adopted a comparable tactic.  But at last more than sixty billion dollars in aid are on their way to Ukraine, following House approval of a composite foreign aid bill, a bill immediately passed also by the Senate and signed by the President.  Aware of the costliness of past delays in military aid to Ukraine, American generals in conjunction with NATO had not been oblivious of Congressional activity.  Needed military supplies stood ready at the border.  These  awaited only the Presidential signature before they resumed their journey to the front lines in Ukraine.

They are certainly arriving none too soon.  I have felt  worried sick about the needless degree of risk endangering my brave and courageous young friends in Ukraine’s east, young journalists, one of whom, Dima, pictured here below, will be the focus of our June 1st issue.

They and all Ukrainians in the east have lacked sufficient shells and air defense systems to prevent Russians from raining down  destruction upon cities in the east  nor to halt the slow but deadly advance of  Russian troops on the front lines, the Russians having a ten to one advantage in their supply of ammunition.  Dima is serving as an army journalist based in Kramatorsk and travels several times each month to the front lines.  Kramatorsk, pictured here below, will be one of the places I shall visit next month.

Regarding admirable youth, however, Ukraine holds no monopoly. Young Americans this month have been active in the fight against tyrannical war criminals, or is it not a war crime to slaughter more than thirty five thousand Palestinian civilians and still counting?  Beginning  at Columbia University,  heroic college students, risking expulsion and incarceration, have been  protesting the killings in Gaza and  demanding that their universities review policies and investments; the students insist that not even inadvertent support should go  to a regime currently engaging  in what many have termed genocide.  AP journalist Jake Offenhartz writes, “Months before they pitched their tents on Columbia University’s main lawn ….a small group of pro-Palestinian student activists met privately to sketch out the logistical details of a round-the-clock occupation. In many hours of planning sessions, they discussed communications strategies and their willingness to risk arrest, along with the more prosaic questions of bathroom access and trash removal. Then, after scouring online retailers and Craigslist for the most affordable options, they ordered the tents. ‘There’s been a lot of work, a lot of meetings that went into it, and when we finally pulled it off, we had no idea how it would go,’said Columbia graduate student Elea Sun. ‘I don’t think anyone imagined it would take off like it did’”  (Offenhartz, Jake. “Carefully Planned and Partly Improvised: Inside the Columbia Protest That Fueled a National Movement.” AP News, AP News, 26 Apr. 2024, apnews.com/article/inside-columbia-protest-movement-0b35ff55f18d0bf4b2c8c0a27b1dbe04).
Then on Wednesday. April 17, the protest began.  Pro-Palestinian Columbia students created an encampment of roughly  50 tents, and called it the “Gaza Solidarity Encampment,” situated on the university’s campus.  The campus occupation has been supported by Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD), a student-led coalition of over 120 groups,^[5] together with Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace.

Just hours after the protest began, Columbia University President Minouche Shafik asked the New York Police Strategic Response Group to storm the campus and conduct mass arrests.

Mark Mazower, a professor of history at Columbia, writes about that day, “Unlike the media or the politicians, the police have consistently underscored the non-violent nature of what has been happening inside the campus. At an impromptu press conference at the top of 116th Street held by the NYPD a reporter asked about students preparing to attend Passover seders: ‘What is happening in general, and have there been any threats against the campus in relation to the upcoming holiday?’  To which NYPD deputy commissioner for public information Tarik Sheppard responded: ‘There have been no credible threats to any particular group or individual coming from this protest or any other.’”  Moreover, NYPD chief of patrol John Chell said at the press conference following the students’ arrests: “To put this in perspective, the students that were arrested were peaceful, offered no resistance whatsoever, and were saying what they wanted to say in a peaceful manner.” Mazower adds, “One of the things I love about Columbia students is that they care. Are not these students, from varied backgrounds, who are supporting the Palestinians, only doing what we have taught them to do? Have we not taught them about the Holocaust and ‘Never Again’?  And can we be surprised if the lesson many of them draw is that you need to be on the lookout for genocide, and to stand up and be counted and not a bystander when you believe you see it happening?”

The predominant faculty and student reaction to the finds expression in these words of Professor Mazower,

“People who yesterday felt sympathy for President Shafik are now appalled; I am among them. Her action is precipitate: something similar happened here in 1968, after protests and sit-ins, but the university leadership agonised before taking such a dramatic and unpredictable step. I ask myself: how is this supposed to end the stand-off? The people ordering it don’t seem to understand students and think they can bully them into submission. Have they ever taught them?”  Shafik’s conduct, her peremptory summoning of the police, quickly received harsh criticism by the Columbia University Senate, a group composed mostly of faculty members and other staff plus a few students (Columbia Leadership Rebuked by Faculty Panel for Police Crackdown on Protesters | Reuters, http://www.reuters.com/world/us/columbia-university-president-faces-vote-confidence-protests-spread-2024-04-26/. Accessed 1 May 2024).

My own curiosity took me to the Columbia campus on the tenth day of the encampment, and I chatted with several students.   Generally they saw President Shafik’s action as a violation of the students’ freedom of expression, freedom of speech.   They told me that the protesting students are actually situated in an officially designated “free speech” zone.  Whether what the students are doing should be protected as an exercise of free speech may be open to question, but the United States Supreme Court has tended to define “free speech” very broadly.  Moreover, the students told me that they had seen zero expressions of antisemitism, but only opposition to the conduct of Netanyahu’s regime.  Shouldn’t President Shafik have exercised more restraint and known that the summoning of city police into a college campus tends not to end well?  I vividly recall events in April 1969 when I was a student at Harvard.   On April 9th students, charging Harvard with complicity in the Vietnam war, occupied the college’s administration building, University Hall.  The next day Harvard University President Nathan Pusey summoned the police.  What ensued is well described by Frank Rich, “Local police officers and state troopers entered Harvard Yard and, in 25 minutes that included clubbing and bloodshed, forcibly evicted and arrested almost 200 of the occupying protestors, setting in motion wider protests, an eight-day strike, two mass meetings in the Stadium—and changes in University policy” (Rich, Frank.“Participants Recall the Harvard Bust and Strike, and Its Aftermath.” Harvard Magazine, 5 Mar. 2024, www.harvardmagazine.com/node/64479).

The occurrence tarnished Pusey’s career irreparably and led to his early retirement.   

What the arrest of the Columbia students last month did accomplish was to trigger student protests on campuses across the country.  Enraged by the arrest of the Columbia students and sharing their concern for the Palestinians, students established encampments at colleges extending from northern New England to southern California.  

I doubt not that there are individual students at some of these campuses who have antisemitic feelings just as there are students with racist or homophobic feelings, but to characterize the protest movements in general as antisemitic reminds me of the McCarthyism of the 1950’s.  As a child I had a precocious interest in politics.  I recall watching on television the McCarthy-Army hearings in 1954.  and remember especially a dramatic moment:

Senator Joseph McCarthy from Wisconsin and others of his ilk such as members of the John Birch Society painted their political opponents red or pink,  with accusations that they were Communist sympathizers.  Similar today are politicians who label the protesting students in the encampments as antisemites or perhaps as Hamas sympathizers including the Jewish students in Jewish Voice for Peace, who are protesting atrocities in Gaza and University complicity.

The students have been demanding divestment, an end to investing in businesses which profit from the Israeli conduct in Gaza and related businesses. Some observers have asked if such divestment might not be feasible.  University of California Associate Professor of Sociology Charlie Eaton, author of Bankers in the Ivory Tower, assures us that some sort of divestment is quite doable along the lines which students are demanding.  Citing Columbia University’s divestment in fossil fuel related equities, he says:“Any endowment can be managed to grow and to serve the university community even while being managed in a way that’s socially and environmentally responsible. And that’s why many university endowments already have social responsibility guidelines for their endowment investments. The case of for-profit prison divestment, we have already seen at Columbia University, for example. We have already seen fossil fuel divestment from Columbia and from the University of California system, where I work. So it’s something where there is a precedence for doing this”. Here Professor Eaton is interviewed on PBS:

Last month not only did I visit Columbia University but also I went to Washington, D.C., as promised in our most recent issue. In Washington on April 14th at Action Summit Ukraine I saw passionately committed young people at a weekend meeting, where they received training as to how best to lobby members of Congress:

Then the next day I saw them, like me, strolling through the halls of Congress to call on their Senators and Representatives. 

In 2020 during the pandemic I went to a not yet affected area of Pennsylvania and joined the campaign to assure the defeat of Trump. While  there I also worked for my friend Lee Griffin, who was running for Congress.   Legally I am still a resident of Pennsylvania.  Talking with either of the Democratic Senators from Pennsylvania would have been “preaching to the choir,” so instead I visited the office of my Republican Congressman, Glenn Thompson. There I met with Brian Arata, Thompson’s Legislative Director (pictured here below), an impressively smart, charming, dedicated young man who has risen rapidly to that position after initially serving as a college student intern.  To his credit, Thompson has consistently voted in favor of aid to Ukraine including the most recent bill.

Thank you dear reader for bearing with this longer than average issue.  There follows in the paragraphs below a new feature of our Gazette,  a section for reader comments.  Please send us one yourself if you feel so inclined.

READER COMMENTS

Wow! What a daring adventure I look forward to your next issue!

-Henry Kuharic

I read the latest edition of TheHansonGazette last night. I was blown away. Again. Sometimes (most of the time) I feel helpless when it comes to the political realm. I occasionally place phone calls to the Maine senators, and either voice my concerns to an intern, or somebody’s voicemail. I should pull myself up out of my self-made “morass”, and see if I can’t get others to join me. I do volunteer from time to time, I should ask the local Dems, who have probably already done what they can, what can I do? I’m just living in the lap of luxury, working on my physical and mental health. I consider myself very lucky to have this option. The other day I was explaining to the best my ability the situation in Gaza to a friend of mine, relying on what little I had read in the news. We always end our discussions on violence in the world with, we cannot understand why people would do such things.

 And we’re lucky to be up here in Central Maine. So best wishes, and I am always amazed by what you do.

-Kate O’Neil