Installation of the day

A new “installation” appeared in the Quad yesterday next to the tent that appeared the other day; both were designed by the Students for Justice in Palestine and were erected with permission of the University.  That makes a total of three “hatey” installations on the quad, and it makes the area look like a mess. Prospective students and parents are now visiting the campus, and I wonder what they think of it, especially if they’re Jewish.

This one below may have had a tent nearby, as it looks as if something collapsed, or there is some canvas at the bottom. At any rate, this shows four of our Trustees, all accused of “financing genocide.”   I disagree:it is Hamas that is committing genocide, not Israel.

The tent is nearby, showing our President, Paul Alivisatos (with a dollar sign for the “s”), looking satanic and bearing the blood-dripping label, “genocide normalizer”.  At the top we read “Israel Bombs” along with an Israeli and American flag.  At the bottom we see the useless cry to “divest,” for the University has already said it won’t.  SJP is fighting a battle they’ve already lost, but they can’t help acting out. This is the equivalent of a tantrum by a petulant child.

The tent. You can enter it to “find out more,” but a herd of elephants couldn’t push me inside that den of admiration for terrorism and antisemitism:

The official University permission, required for any such installation:

Somebody seems to have complained, because at the bottom of the “permission” sign, highlighted in yellow, is a note that the OEOP is investigating this installation for whether it violates university policy. Until that determination is made, the installation will stay up, though it has to come down this Saturday. That’s in two days, so the “investigation” is more or less a sham.  But if the Trump administration sees this, what with its use of antisemitism as an excuse to control universities and remove federal funding, who knows what will happen? I wonder if the University thinks of that.  Still, giving permission for these “art installations” is making a statement in favor of free speech, and for that I admire them.

Below is the old sign before the updated replacement above. At the bottom it reads:

Installation Description

A 15 X 15 foot tent with a presentation inside about on going [sic]genocide in Palestine and the University’s ties to Israel. Art will be displayed.

They don’t say what’s on the outside, which I showed the other day: hateful caricatures of administrators and trustees embellished with symbols of red hands, a widely-understood symbol of killing Jews. Some art!

I wonder if there’s any number of installations that reaches a threshold of constituting harassment of Jews. For the meantime, I construe this as free speech, but, as I said, even our free-speech advocates are debating whether the Quad should be free of banners and signs and used as a place for discussion and speech, since some construe a plethora of signage as actually chilling speech. For the time being, I am on the pro-sign side, but there should be a limit on the number and size of signs allowed on the central part of our campus.

And the hatred evinced by these signs makes me detest the ideology behind them, for the ideologues have already lost–both on campus and in Gaza.  And remember, after the extremists take care of the Jews, their next aim is to destroy Western civilization and its Enlightenment values.