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Jay Tcath

Non-Tentative: 10 Signs Your Tents Camouflaged a Campus Con

An unsuccessful tent camouflage. Getty Images, by license subscription.
An unsuccessful tent camouflage. Licensed from Getty Images.

Unauthorized anti-Israel tent encampments sprung up across American campuses this past spring.  They were cesspools of hate, intimidation, and criminality.  Neither their irrelevant pleas of “free speech” nor childish chants of “power to the people” could camouflage that these tent encampments were built atop morally shaky ground.

Below are but 10 examples of their cynicism, hypocrisy, and antisemitism.  Add your own – sarcasm welcome – in the comment section below.

  1. Amid your signs of “divestment,” “intifada,” and “crush Zionism by all means necessary,” there were no signs – literally or figuratively – that you are for peace.
  2. You taunt Jewish students to “go back to Poland,” yet you (and we) would denounce anyone telling others to “go back to Mexico,” or China, or Iraq, or Africa.
  3. You denounce security checkpoints for Palestinians entering Israel for work and healthcare as “crimes against humanity” while your checkpoints enforce an intersectional, rabid anti-Zionist purity test.
  4. You demand transparency of university endowment portfolios, but your protests are coordinated by outside groups who shield their own funding sources.
  5. Your demands for transparency don’t extend to your university’s funding from homophobic, nativist, theocratic, patriarchal monarchies like Qatar and Saudia Arabia.
    Knives and a gun were among the weapons cache at the DePaul University tent encampment. Open source, www.depaul.edu
  6. You demand divestment and boycott of Israel and anyone doing business with Israel, while your encampment tents were manufactured by a defense contractor supplying the IDF.
  7. Your encampments are rung with military-like barricades shielding knives and guns, and yet you complain that university police are militarized when dismantling your illegal encampment.

    A masked protester at DePaul visibly celebrated — and promised a repeat of — by hand-signaling “10-7″ (October 7) and drawing his finger across his neck, pantomiming slitting his throat. Open source, www.depaul.edu
  8. You invoke “free speech” to rationalize your violation of university codes of conduct but replace the flag of the very country (the U.S.) that created free speech with the flag of two governments – Hamas and the Palestinian Authority – that imprison those daring to exercise free speech themselves.
  9. We see you, non-Arab allies of Hamas, stylishly attired with keffiyehs, accusing Israel of “cultural appropriation.”
  10. Your 4-week tent encampment was privileged by smartphones and Grubhub. It overlapped with the 3,000+ anniversary of our Passover liberation and tenting truly “old school” in the desert for 40 years. We were  returning to our brethren in what even then was our homeland, the Land of Israel.
About the Author
Jay Tcath is Executive Vice President of the Jewish United Fund.
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