The Issue Is Not the Issue at Trump Tower Protest – The American Spectator | USA News and PoliticsThe American Spectator

“The issue is not the issue,” went a mantra popular 58 years ago when activists shut down Columbia University and held several administrators hostage. Was the protest about a falsely labeled “segregated” gymnasium, the school’s connections to the Department of Defense, or the expansion of the campus into the surrounding neighborhood? All these years later, all that seems clear is that the issue was not the issue.

The activists who occupied the lobby of Trump Tower on Thursday demonstrated that the issue still isn’t the issue.

Ignoring the law led to the arrest of their hero, Mahmoud Khalil. The mob responded to this by again ignoring the law. (RELATED: The Arrest of Columbia University’s Mahmoud Khalil: Unmasking Campus Radicalism)

At Columbia University, activists transformed campus green space into a campground and took over Hamilton Hall. On several occasions, the New York City police, at the request of the Columbia University administration, arrested activists and dismantled the tents of the squatters. The protest of Columbia, a non sequitur given the lack of any real connection between the university and the Hamas–Israel war, disrupted the institution’s purpose to such a degree that it called off final examinations for the spring 2024 semester.

Mahmoud Khalil acted as a “negotiator” for the activists. The school lacked any power to change the course of the war, and the activists lacked anything tangible, beyond an end to their shutdown of much of the campus, to give to Columbia, so why Khalil negotiated and Columbia humored him still perplexes.

As former Columbia University student Irie Sentner wrote at Politico, “The student group behind the encampment — Columbia University Apartheid Divest, or CUAD — had two main demands: that Columbia cut all its ties to Israel, including divesting and halting plans to build a ‘global center’ in Tel Aviv, and that the protesters themselves receive amnesty for their actions.”

The issue was not the issue. The group really just wished to cause a ruckus.

This week, the same crowd again caused a ruckus. They violated private property rights by invading Trump Tower, a place where hundreds of people live. They impeded movement on Fifth Avenue, one of the busiest thoroughfares in the United States.

They surrounded themselves in the trappings of protest. They wore t-shirts saying “Not in Our Name” and held signs bearing such messages as “Fight Nazis, Not Students” and “Opposing Fascism Is Jewish Tradition.” In the tradition of protests, they chanted.

Most people euphemistically refer to such behavior under the blanket term of “protest,” which awards false legitimacy because protest, of course, falls under freedom of speech. Taking over the hallway inside of a stranger’s home does not amount to freedom of speech but trespassing.

This week, and last spring at Columbia, was not about groups of people speaking their minds. Both events involved private property violations and the harassment of strangers.

Along the lines of “the issue is not the issue,” Sentner further explained that “the people leading these protests believe the system needs to be completely reset — for many of them, it doesn’t stop with a ceasefire. They see the U.S. as ‘the belly of the beast,’ the beast being colonialism, capitalism and essentially all other forces of oppression. I think we’d see similar activity, and a similar vibe, even if Harris had won the election.” (RELATED: After Oct. 7, Progressives Destroyed the Democrats)

So, it’s not really about Columbia or Trump or war in the Middle East or this deportation but something broader.

And for the Trump administration, it’s not really about Khalil involving himself in a prolonged protest that involved all sorts of illegalities. The troubling aspect of the protests partly led by Khalil, a Palestinian born in Syria holding Algerian citizenship, involves the perverse idea underlying them: the righteousness of the barbarous Oct. 7, 2023, attacks, which included kidnapping civilians, raping women, and slaughtering defenseless young people at a music festival. One so outside of civilization as to endorse all that does not belong within our civilization. (RELATED: No Woman Left Behind: The Global Feminist Betrayal of Israeli Victims)

Of course, that goes unsaid on his deportation order. The issue is not the issue.

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