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The most active thread over the weekend was titled, "Protests on college campuses" which was posted in the "Political Discussion" forum. The student protests against the Israeli devastation of Gaza which has killed over 30,000 Palestinians, most of them women and children, and placed most of the remaining population at risk of famine, have provoked thread after thread. I've essentially been playing whack-a-mole trying to prevent the threads from taking over multiple forums. While Columbia University and the University of Southern California were the initial focus, protests soon spread to colleges across the nation. The original poster of this thread specifically mentioned a protest at DC's George Washington University and asked what effect the protests might have. The nature of the demonstrations has varied from campus to campus, as has the response of college administrations and local governments. Israel and its supporters clearly view the protests as a serious threat and their reaction has been extreme. Israeli Prime Mininister Benjamin Netanyahu described the protests as "antisemitic" and "horrific". US Speaker of the House of Representatives Mike Johnson called for the National Guard to be deployed. Anti-Defamation League (ADL) CEO Jonathan Greenblatt, a man whose job is supposed to be contesting defamation, went so far as to call the protesters "Iranian proxies" and compare them to Hezbollah. DCUM posters have been similarly hostile to the protests, often criticizing the students as uninformed and entitled. One tactic that has been used across the board by those who oppose the protests is to conflate incidents that don't involve students with the campus protests and to exaggerate, if not outright lie, about events. At Columbia University, protesters who are not associated with the school have gathered outside campus. The media has routinely portrayed aggressive behavior and anti-Semitic incidents involving that crowd as being part of the student demonstrations. The students, for their part, have condemned and disassociated themselves from those instances. At Emory University in Atlanta, video shows a college professor stopping to question police about why they were violently arresting a student. A police officer hurled the professor to the ground, knocking her head on concrete. Similarly, at the University of Texas in Austin, police were filmed violently throwing members of the media to the ground. In an outrageous event at Northeastern University, video shows a member of a pro-Israel counter protest crossing over to the anti-war group and, while in the midst of them, yelling "kill the Jews". University administrators had the anti-war demonstrators arrested on the basis of this statement. All of this is in reaction to students who largely are doing nothing but sitting in the grass with protest signs listening to speeches. But the clear overreaction by authorities has strong support among DCUM posters who, let's be frank, are getting old. They have no time or patience for today's youth. There is lots of advice concerning the "proper" way to protest which basically requires avoiding anything that anybody would notice. Protests are to be neither seen nor heard. But hats off to the kids. They are clearly getting under some skins and the overreaction aimed at suppressing the protests shows that those in power view them as a real threat. They may call you naive, but they clearly fear you.