Campus protests do little more than make lots of noise
By Daily Bruin Staff
May 13, 2001 9:00 p.m.
 Doug Lief Lief is a third-year English
student who says fur isn’t murder, but pearls are oyster burglary.
Sling some mud at [email protected]. Click
Here for more articles by Doug Lief
On April 25th Jewish and Arab students together set up a table
on Bruin Walk to promote peace in the Middle East. The following
day, Arab students carried signs protesting Israeli atrocities into
the middle of a celebration of Israeli independence. This begs the
question, “So, how’s that “˜peace’ thing
coming along?”
An alert reader sent me an e-mail accusing me of not having an
“unbiased opinion,” so before we proceed any further I
should mention that I do in fact have an opinion on this subject,
and therefore have a bias. I am Jewish, and therefore feel
compelled to root for the home team, but the larger issue is that
most campus protests are utterly puerile and embarrassing exercises
in futility.
If these protests tell me one thing, it’s that obviously
Chancellor Carnesale is not doing enough to resolve the
Israeli/Palestinian conflict. When was the last time he sent an
emissary to the Knesset, or invited Sharon and Arafat to a
symposium in the Bomb Shelter? Why else would the Arab students
choose UCLA as the appropriate site for their protest if this
wasn’t the case?
I understand Arab students have a legitimate grievance against
the Israelis, and I’m not going to defend everything the
Israelis have done (especially after what they’ve done this
month). Most of the attitudes held by UCLA students about the
conflict fall into the “easy for you to say” category.
The truth is the conflict isn’t nearly as bad as it appears
on CNN, much to the dismay of the people who make news graphics
like “Israel/Palestine Smackdown 2001, The Deathmatch in the
Dunes”.
Most people experience Judaism through the eyes of Woody Allen,
and assume we are shy, furry creatures who go around saying funny
words like “ferschnikkit,” and generally keep out of
the way.
 Illustration by RACHEL REILICH/Daily Bruin This may be
true of American Jewry, but Israelis are a whole other strain.
Let’s not forget that Yitzhak Rabin was not assassinated by
an Arab, but by a fellow Israeli who felt Rabin wasn’t
hard-core enough. These are the kinds of Jews who went undercover
into Argentina to hunt down former Nazis and garrote them with
piano wire. Throw these people into a country that’s 195
degrees at night and surrounded by enemies and you see how popular
pacifism can be.
On the other side, there’s the foolhardy Palestinian
rock-throwing endeavor. What do the Palestinians expect the
Israelis to do, catch the rocks? Let me explain something to the
people who protest this sort of thing: if you start throwing rocks
at a guy with an uzi, politics aside, and he turns around and
shoots you, you forfeit the right to call “unfair
surprise.” The pecking order goes paper, scissors, rock,
automatic firearm.
It’s just common sense.
This situation is continually exacerbated when the Palestinians
decide to throw rocks and blow things up just before an Israeli
election. This prompts the Israelis to vote for an even more
hard-line crank than the previous one; a guy who is even less
likely to go for that crazy “peace” idea.
To me, the whole thing looks pretty immature. I say, if both
sides are going to act like children, we can prevent a lot of
violence by agreeing to scale-down the conflict to just a prank
war. At night, Israeli commandos will sneak in and TP the Gaza
Strip. Then the next day, the Palestinians run up to an Israeli bus
and plant a stink bomb.
The issues of the conflict are paramount to the people living in
the region, but are completely irrelevant to a bunch of privileged
Southern California college kids. Thankfully, the visible tension
between Muslim and Jewish groups was fairly subdued this year in
comparison with previous years, but still, what is the point?
I’m willing to venture a guess that what the Muslim
Students Association is trying to do is raise awareness, but seeing
that they’re talking about an international crisis which has
been going on since 1948, I’d say that awareness is pretty
high already. Instead, we are left with the by-product of
unnecessarily creating tension between fellow Bruins where none
previously existed.
The idea that holding up a sign qualifies as political activism
offends me. If holding up a sign is political activism, then I can
tape a flyer to every telephone pole in L.A. and call it the
Million Man March. The Montgomery bus boycott was activism. Writing
to a congressman is activism. Volunteering at a lobbyist’s
office is activism. Carrying a sign with some tired slogan like
“Stop the Violence” is about as inactive as you can
get. Why not dumb it down all the way and say “Bad things are
bad!”?
Holding a sign and chanting, especially on this campus, is
simply a pathetic need to cling to the ’60s we missed out on.
Shallowly imitating the protests people staged for causes like
civil rights and the Vietnam War cheapens everything they fought
for.
Case in point, the latest protests over animal testing. I found
the protesters who showed up dressed as ninjas to be particularly
amusing. Apparently they will not rest until UCLA not only ceases
the testing, but until they have all the dragonballs.
Is animal testing really the best cause we could be putting our
efforts into as a generation? Let’s face it, they have to
test medicine on something. What’s it going to be, a mouse or
grandma? Besides, the protests are always biased toward cute
animals. Nobody’s fighting against the genocide that happens
every time a petri dish filled with millions of blechtococcus is
flushed. Where’s “Save the Cockroaches”?
No matter how many magic markers are run dry, Mumia isn’t
going to be free based on the wishes of uninvolved students who
haven’t yet passed the bar exam, let alone taken the LSAT. If
I were Mumia I wouldn’t let UCLA student protesters handle my
appeal any sooner than I would let them perform an angioplasty.
In a democracy such as ours your voice does count for something,
but not nearly as much as your vote and your dollar. To a faceless
government, your bucks and your ballot are your identity, and thus
those are the means by which any protest is going to be validated.
Volume is nothing; impact everything.
What hurts our protests more than anything else is a credibility
problem. For the most part, we’ve never had it so good. We
don’t appear to be in a position that requires adamant
opposition.
As Martin Luther King Jr. said, “The ultimate measure of a
man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience,
but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.”
Thankfully this is not a time of challenge and controversy.
Therefore, I say now is not the time to take a measure of
ourselves.
Whether it is the Middle East, Mumia, or animal testing,
chanting is not working toward a better tomorrow. It is only
complaining about an unsatisfactory today. Let’s not copy the
foolishness of the Israelis and Palestinians to make a statement.
There are wars and causes to fight for the world over, but the UCLA
campus is not the battleground.
