Protests 2024 - Stop Hey What's That Sound...

[Zarathud]

If your news is from sources like YouTube and TickTock, you might know more factoids and propaganda but you actually understand less because there is no (or distorted) context or analysis of the information. The goal of social media is to crowdsource attention and support, not inform. Knowledge is secondary (at best).

This effect has been studied and is known.

[Victoria Raverna]

Ilhan Omar questioned UCLA chancellor:

[Unagi]

You didn't used to only communicate by tossing YouTube videos at everything

What changed in you? I'm sure your goal is to make a point and communicate, you've been told it's not effective - but you press on.

You aren't "villanized" for your opinion, it's mostly your delivery.

I'm not compelled to watch that video, now that you posted it.

[Victoria Raverna]

You didn't used to only communicate by tossing YouTube videos at everything

What changed in you? I'm sure your goal is to make a point and communicate, you've been told it's not effective - but you press on.

You aren't "villanized" for your opinion, it's mostly your delivery.

I'm not compelled to watch that video, now that you posted it.

You don't have to. Just posted the video for anyone that want to watch because it is about the response to the protest and the attack on protestors at UCLA. Doesn't mean you have to.

Just like a tv channel, you don't like it. Just skip it. Fair?

[Blackhawk]

Hey, you added a description before the video. That's an improvement.

If you want to go the rest of the way, add your thoughts on it as well, and tell us what made you want to share it.

[Victoria Raverna]

Hey, you added a description before the video. That's an improvement.

If you want to go the rest of the way, add your thoughts on it as well, and tell us what made you want to share it.

Because it is related to this:

CNN investigated the incident at UCLA:

https://edition.cnn.com/2024/05/16/us/u ... index.html

Spoiler:

A young man in a white plastic mask beats a pro-Palestinian protester. Another in a maroon hoodie strikes a protester with a pole. A local instigator pushes down barricades.

Law enforcement stood by for hours as counterprotesters attacked the pro-Palestinian encampment at UCLA on April 30, which erupted into the worst violence stemming from the ongoing college protests around the country over Israel’s war in Gaza.

While a criminal investigation is underway into the assaults that occurred at UCLA, the identities of the most aggressive counterprotesters have gone largely unknown. A CNN review of footage, social media posts, and interviews found that some of the most dramatic attacks caught on camera that night were committed by people outside UCLA – not the university students and faculty who were eventually arrested.

Many at the scene appeared dedicated to the pro-Israel cause, according to social media and their own words that night. The violent counterprotesters identified by CNN, which included an aspiring screenwriter and film producer and a local high school student – were joined by unlikely allies, several of whom are known throughout southern California for frequenting and disrupting a variety of protests and public gatherings.

The young man sporting the white mask and a white hoodie in widely shared video clips is Edan On, a local 18-year-old high school senior, his mother confirmed to CNN, though she later said he denies being at UCLA. Video shows On joining the counterprotesters while waving a long white pole. At one point, he strikes a pro-Palestinian protester with the pole, and appears to continue to strike him even when he was down, as fellow counterprotesters piled on.

“Edan went to bully the Palestinian students in the tents at UCLA and played the song that they played to the Nukhba terrorists in prison!” his mother boasted in Hebrew on Facebook, referencing Hamas. She circled an image of him that had been broadcast on the local news.

“He is all over the news channels,” his mother wrote in a now-deleted post.

Some counterprotesters had been spotted on campus days earlier, drawn by a high-profile pro-Israel rally as inflammatory videos and claims rapidly spread across social media.

Many at the scene Tuesday hid their faces behind masks and scarves. Some attackers sprayed protesters with chemical irritants, hit them with wooden boards, punched and kicked them and shot fireworks into the crowd of students and supporters huddled behind umbrellas and wooden planks, attempting to stay safe. For hours, they sought to pull away pieces of the barrier, scooping up fallen wooden planks and poles to use as makeshift weapons, lunging toward pro-Palestinian protesters who emerged from the camp to protect it from being breached.

As protesters chanted, “We’re not leaving” from the encampment, some counterprotesters shouted back, “You are terrorists, you are terrorists!”

Video footage shows that some counterprotesters instigated the fighting, while others did little to intervene. Then police did little as a large group of counterprotesters calmy walked away, leaving behind bloody, bruised students and other protesters.

The Los Angeles Police Department and California Highway Patrol referred all questions about the incident to the UCLA Police Department, which did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Law enforcement did not track injuries from the attack. But according to the encampment’s organizers, more than 150 students “were assaulted with pepper spray and bear mace,” and at least 25 protesters ended up being transported to local emergency rooms to receive treatment for injuries including fractures, severe lacerations and chemical-induced injuries.

“I actually thought someone would get killed,” said Rabbi Chaim Seidler-Feller, UCLA Hillel’s Director Emeritus, who called 911 around midnight as he watched the violence on live TV. “They came to beat people up.”

The next day, Hillel at UCLA posted an open letter from student leaders denouncing what it called “fringe members of the off-campus Jewish community” who did not represent “the estimated 3,000 Jewish Bruins at UCLA.”

“We cannot have a clearer ask for the off-campus Jewish community: stay off our campus,” it stated. “Your actions are harming Jewish students.”

In one of the more dramatic videos of the night, a protester wearing the colors of the Palestinian flag underneath an LA Kings jersey was knocked to the ground and beaten by multiple counterprotesters as he guarded the encampment.

One of those assailants was On, who rushed into the middle of the fray with his pole. When CNN showed On’s mother a video of him attacking the protester, she said Edan, who she confirmed is a senior at Beverly Hills High School, was only defending himself. His mother – who previously described a smaller group of UCLA students protesting the war last year as “human animals” on social media – said dozens of his schoolmates had also gone to campus on the 30th and that her son intends to join the Israel Defense Forces.

The school district said federal law prohibits sharing information about students, including confirming their identities. On could not be reached for comment directly. When CNN contacted On’s mother for an interview with him, she replied that her son was in Israel and that he claimed he wasn’t at UCLA despite her earlier confirmation.

The man in the LA Kings jersey was ultimately dragged into a group of counterprotesters and kicked by an aspiring Los Angeles screenwriter and producer who CNN identified as Malachi Marlan-Librett, according to a review of social media photos, footage from the protest and interviews with multiple people who knew him. According to his LinkedIn, he graduated from UC Santa Cruz in 2019 and attended a UCLA professional film and television program the following year.

A man in a maroon hoodie joined Marlan-Librett in dragging the protester into the mob.

The protester was later seen in a video receiving treatment for a bloody head injury at the encampment. Marlan-Librett and the man in the maroon hoodie, along with other counterprotesters, such as an unmasked man wearing a red bandana around his neck, were seen committing multiple acts of violence throughout the night.

They became prime targets for online researchers who told CNN they had created internal nicknames such as #UCLARedBandana, #UCLANeffHat and #UCLAMaroonHoodie as they attempted to identify them.

In one violent episode captured on video, Marlan-Librett is seen carrying the end of a broom in his hand, using it to strike a protester in the head before kicking him. Even after the protester retreats, Marlan-Librett sneaks up on him from behind and strikes him in the head once again. Marlan-Librett didn’t respond to calls and texts from CNN.

In another video, the man in the maroon hoodie runs toward the encampment yelling, “You guys are about to get f**ked up.” In the over 3-hour-long livestream, the young man is in the thick of the scrum and can be seen hitting another man with a pole before arming counterprotesters with wood planks. The man could be heard yelling at protesters, “F**k you, f**king terrorists,” then, “The score is 30,000” – a reference to the number of Palestinians killed by Israel’s bombing campaign and ground offensive in Gaza.

Just minutes earlier, the man pepper-sprayed a journalist in the face, while she was filming the crowd. “I had to walk off because I literally could not see anything,” the local journalist, Dolores Quintana, told CNN. “And it was getting in my mouth. And so, I was starting to choke.”

She said a volunteer came out of the encampment to wash out her eyes with water and saline. Quintana took a selfie when she could open her eyes again. In the photo, her face was drenched and pale, with red blotches on her forehead.

“This was the worst situation I ever found myself in as a journalist,” she said. “I was afraid they were going to kill somebody.”

According to multiple acquaintances of the man in the maroon hoodie, he attended Los Angeles Valley College with his brother. Both brothers were enrolled at USC in the fall 2023 semester for a couple weeks before disenrolling, according to the school.

CNN could not reach the man in the maroon hoodie, and he did not have any apparent connection to UCLA.

Neither did Tom Bibiyan, a 42-year-old who was once a local Green Party official. Bibiyan was stabbed at a KKK rally where he was a counter-protester in 2016 and has since become an ardent Trump supporter. His colorful Instagram page is a mix of right-wing memes, numerous posts defending famous men against sexual assault allegations and pro-Israel content.

Video footage shows Bibiyan among those at the front line of people rushing the encampment in an attempt to remove protective metal barriers, as campus security guards watched the violence unfold.

“The moment we rushed the terrorist encampment last night at ucla to take it apart,” he captioned a video he posted to Instagram. “F**k them kids,” he said in a separate post, which has since been deleted.

A CNN journalist reached Bibiyan outside his home, wearing the same jacket he had worn at UCLA, but he refused to say why he had taken part in the violence. “You’re being a little rude, and I’m going to call the police if you don’t leave,” he said.

Other older men spotted among the mob looked familiar to local public school mom Angie Givant as she followed what happened that Tuesday night on social media: a group of right-wing provocateurs who she’d seen protesting LGBTQ rights in public schools at school board and city council meetings around Los Angeles.

“As soon as there were rumors that, you know, things were going to go down at UCLA, there was a mobilization of very familiar reactionary extremists,” she told CNN.

One of the older men, Narek Palyan, joined the group of counterprotesters despite having posted anti-Jewish tropes on his social media accounts. Palyan, who didn’t appear to engage in the violence, claimed to CNN he has a child at UCLA, though a student was not seen accompanying him that night. “I was definitely keeping the peace, at least trying to,” he said.

UCLA junior and student journalist Catherine Hamilton said that when a firework landed a few feet away from where she was standing and she saw the men approaching in masks, it was clear to her that they were about to do something they didn’t want to be recognized for.

“In that moment when that firework went off and started ringing in my ears, I was like, something very bad is going to happen on this campus,” she said.

When the police finally arrived hours later to break up the chaos, Hamilton and her colleagues regrouped to head back to their newsroom. As they walked past a line of cops and along a well-lit street in the center of campus, just before 3:30 am, she says they were encircled by a small group of counterprotesters mainly dressed in black. She told CNN the man leading the group was someone whom she immediately recognized. He was a counterprotester who had previously verbally harassed her and taken a photo of her press badge, she said.

Within seconds, they sprayed the student journalists with a type of mace or pepper spray and flashed lights in their faces. As she tried to get away, Hamilton said, she was repeatedly struck in the chest and abdomen.

One of the journalists confronted the attackers and shoved one before he was pummeled to the ground and beaten, according to video footage of the incident.

The day after the attack, UCLA’s chancellor called the events “a dark chapter” in the school’s history that “has shaken our campus to its core.”

A parent who was at the encampment with their child, a UCLA student, also described the night as feeling like “a civil war movie” with embers raining down and the wounded being treated all around. The parent said they were frantic to find help, calling UCLA campus police six times in a row.

One fourth-year UCLA student – who requested anonymity due to safety concerns – told CNN he was hit in the corner of his forehead with a traffic cone. Minutes later, video captured a counterprotester smashing a wooden plank into the back of his head.

With two deep cuts on his head, he said he rushed to the hospital and ultimately received 14 staples and three stitches for the injuries.

The violence directed at the protesters and his access to medical treatment reminded him of why they had set up the encampment in the first place, trying to raise awareness about the mass deaths and destruction from Israel’s war in Gaza, and calling for the university to divest from any financial ties with Israel. “I had the privilege of going to a hospital,” he said. “In Gaza, there are zero fully functioning hospitals.”

Thistle Boosinger, a 23-year-old member of the encampment who is not a UCLA student, had her hand smashed the night of the violence. She described how her assailant took a piece of wood above his head before slamming it down on her hand. “At first, I just screamed,” she said. “And then after like five minutes where my adrenaline wore off, it was so extremely painful.”

In a video call, Boosinger held up her hand wrapped in gauze and described her injury. “My bone is broken totally in half below my knuckle … [which is] shattered into a bunch of pieces and jumbled up.”

Dylan Kupsh, a UCLA graduate student, said he linked arms with other protesters in an attempt to defend the encampment and keep people safe. “We were … trying to keep the barricade wall up because that was literally protecting our lives,” Kupsh said. It wasn’t long before he was pepper sprayed, forcing him to seek medical treatment as the attacks continued.

Kupsh and others still wonder what would have happened had the encampment been breached that night.

“I hate to say it,” said Catherine Hamilton, the student journalist, “but I was expecting us to start working on an obituary the next day because I thought something that serious would happen to the students in the encampment.”

Cops still doing nothing tho.

[GreenGoo]

You don't have to. Just posted the video for anyone that want to watch because it is about the response to the protest and the attack on protestors at UCLA. Doesn't mean you have to.

Just like a tv channel, you don't like it. Just skip it. Fair?

If only other countries had access to youtube, we wouldn't need Indonesia's help on this.

[Unagi]

Hey, you added a description before the video. That's an improvement.

If you want to go the rest of the way, add your thoughts on it as well, and tell us what made you want to share it.

This. Thank you.

[Unagi]

You don't have to. Just posted the video for anyone that want to watch because it is about the response to the protest and the attack on protestors at UCLA. Doesn't mean you have to.

Just like a tv channel, you don't like it. Just skip it. Fair?

If only other countries had access to youtube, we wouldn't need Indonesia's help on this.

Thank you, as well - I was trying to find a snarky way to say this and you nailed it.

[Victoria Raverna]

Yawn. Apparently to ignore something that you don't like is difficult for you guys. If you don't like my post, just ignore. Easy.

Or maybe you think I broke OO's rule, if so show me the rule that I broke then maybe I'll stop.

[Zarathud]

At what point do we recognize that VR has become a Chinese troll farm posting nothing but propaganda?

[Unagi]

Yawn. Apparently to ignore something that you don't like is difficult for you guys. If you don't like my post, just ignore. Easy.

that's fine - if that's your reply, that's cool.

Just understand, that you, yourself, have willfully become a strawman to your own arguments. Good luck.

[Kurth]

Worse than that, he is single-handedly ruining this and other threads related to Israel. How many posts are now about VR and his BS troll posting instead of substantive posts about the topic at hand? It’s unfortunate.

[YellowKing]

I can't believe y'all are still engaging. Block, move on.

[GreenGoo]

Yawn. Apparently to ignore something that you don't like is difficult for you guys. If you don't like my post, just ignore. Easy.

I don't understand why you keep responding in this way. If you don't like that people keep calling you out on this, just ignore them. It's easy.

[Blackhawk]

At what point do we recognize that VR has become a Chinese troll farm posting nothing but propaganda?

Benefit of the doubt. There are both linguistic and cultural barriers in play. After a couple of comments from posters whose opinions I respect, I realized that I was jumping on without making the attempt to give him the benefit of the doubt by actually explaining, sans-snark, sans-sarcasm, what was bothering us so much.

If it continues after a certain amount of benefit of the doubt, I'll just do what YK said.

[Victoria Raverna]

The thing is I feel like I got picked on for doing the thing that others also do here. Like for example link to an article/tweet/video without any comment or one line comment. I'm not the only one that does that. We can see examples of others doing that here in this thread. That made me not respond nicely when being criticized here.

I did post video from some questionable sources on or very biased source but I haven't done that lately. Now if I found a news or story from biased source, I tried to find a more neutral or mainstream source that report the same thing then post that here instead of the ones from biased source.

[Blackhawk]

The thing is I feel like I got picked on for doing the thing that others also do here. Like for example link to an article/tweet/video without any comment or one line comment. I'm not the only one that does that. We can see examples of others doing that here in this thread. That made me not respond nicely when being criticized here.

I did post video from some questionable sources on or very biased source but I haven't done that lately. Now if I found a news or story from biased source, I tried to find a more neutral or mainstream source that report the same thing then post that here instead of the ones from biased source.

Understandable, but try to understand that how often you did it, combined with your aggressive defense (often by baiting or insulting the poster) gave you a bit of a reputation. You're doing better. The volume of no-context videos is down. You're adding a brief explanation with your videos. But people are a little predisposed to react strongly to you right now because of the earlier posting style. If you care enough to change that, it's simply going to take time. Keep on with what you're talking about in the second paragraph, be willing to accept some negative fallout from before, and give it time. We've had plenty of posters who were genuinely disliked for a while (anyone remember Kelric's early days?) who learned and became much more accepted.

So, yeah - you get more flak than some. But you're far from the only one - you're just the only one right now. Other posters got similarly negative responses for, for instance, constantly posting links with no context. And Daehawk recently got some hard-right stuff stuck in his algorithm and started posting it. People explained why they were getting fed up, he fixed the problem, and it went away. On the other hand, there are posters like Drazzil, who double down on their bullshit. If Drazzil were to show up again right now, he'd have to suffer a lot more flak than you're getting before people started trusting him.

[Victoria Raverna]

Not really about campus protests but somewhat related to it:

After publishing an article critical of Israel, Columbia Law Review’s website is shut down by board.

Spoiler:

Student editors at the Columbia Law Review say they were pressured by the journal’s board of directors to halt publication of an academic article written by a Palestinian human rights lawyer that accuses Israel of committing genocide in Gaza and upholding an apartheid regime.

When the editors refused the request and published the piece Monday morning, the board — made up of faculty and alumni from Columbia University’s law school — shut down the law review’s website entirely. It remained offline Tuesday evening, a static homepage informing visitors the domain “is under maintenance.”

The episode at one of the country’s oldest and most prestigious legal journals marks the latest flashpoint in an ongoing debate about academic speech that has deeply divided students, staff and college administrators since the start of the Israel-Hamas war.

Several editors at the Columbia Law Review described the board’s intervention as an unprecedented breach of editorial independence at the periodical, which is run by students at Columbia Law School. The board of directors oversees the nonprofit’s finances but has historically played no role in selecting pieces.

In a letter sent to student editors Tuesday and shared with The Associated Press, the board of directors said it was concerned that the article, titled “Nakba as a Legal Concept,” had not gone through the “usual processes of review or selection for articles at the Law Review, and in particular that a number of student editors had been unaware of its existence.”

“In order to preserve the status quo and provide student editors some window of opportunity to review the piece, as well as provide time for the Law Review to determine how to proceed, we temporarily suspended the website,” the letter continued.

Those involved in soliciting and editing the piece said they had followed a rigorous review process, even as they acknowledged taking steps to forestall expected blowback by limiting the number of students aware of the article.

In the piece, Rabea Eghbariah, a Harvard doctoral candidate, accuses Israel of a litany of “crimes against humanity,” arguing for a new legal framework to “encapsulate the ongoing structure of subjugation in Palestine and derive a legal formulation of the Palestinian condition.”

Eghbariah said in a text message that the suspension of the law journal’s website should be seen as “a microcosm of a broader authoritarian repression taking place across U.S. campuses.”

Editors said they voted overwhelmingly in December to commission a piece on Palestinian legal issues, then formed a smaller committee — open to all of the publication’s editorial leadership — that ultimately accepted Eghbariah’s article. He had submitted an earlier version of the article to the Harvard Law Review, which the publication later elected not to publish amid internal backlash, according to a report in The Intercept.

Anticipating similar controversy and worried about a leak of the draft, the committee of editors working on the article did not upload it to a server that is visible to the broader membership of the law journal and to some administrators. The piece was not shared until Sunday with the full staff of the Columbia Law Review — something that editorial staffers said was not uncommon.

“We’ve never circulated a particular article in advance,” said Sohum Pal, an articles editor at the publication. “So the idea that this is all over a process concern is a total lie. It’s very transparently content based.”

In their letter to students, the board of directors said student editors who didn’t work on the piece should have been given an opportunity to read it and raise concerns.

“Whatever your views of this piece, it will clearly be controversial and potentially have an impact on all associated with the Review,” they wrote.

Those involved in the publishing of the article said they heard from a small group of students over the weekend who expressed concerns about threats to their careers and safety if it were to be published.

Some alluded to trucks that circled Columbia and other campuses following Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on Israel, labeling students as antisemites for their past or current affiliation with groups seen as hostile to Israel.

The letter from the board also suggested that a statement be appended to the piece stating the article had not been subject to a standard review process or made available for all student editors to read ahead of time.

Erika Lopez, an editor who worked on the piece, said many students were adamantly opposed to the idea, calling it “completely false to imply that we didn’t follow the standard process.”

She said student editors had spoken regularly since they began receiving pushback from the board on Sunday and remained firmly in support of the piece.

When they learned the website had been shuttered Monday morning, they quickly uploaded Eghbariah’s article to a publicly accessible website. It has since spread widely across social media.

“It’s really ironic that this piece probably got more attention than anything we normally published,” Lopez added, “even after they nuked the website.”

The website was later reinstated by the board. Here are the link to the article if anyone is interested in reading it:

https://columbialawreview.org/content/t ... l-concept/

[Punisher]

I have mixed feelings on this.
On one hand, 1st amendment.
On the other hand it's obvious that they were aware of backlash and it looks like they decided to hide it instead of dealing with it. Hard to decide if they hid it just to avoid backlash or they were hiding it because they felt guilty about it.
On the 3rd hand, it may be me but it's hard to tell if this was instead SOP and they weren’t exactly hiding it, it just appeared that way.
Maybe someone better than me can look into it and dumb it down for me.

[Blackhawk]

I can at least tell you that the 1st Amendment doesn't apply here.

[Punisher]

I can at least tell you that the 1st Amendment doesn't apply here.

I assume that's because it's not the government restricting them?

[Blackhawk]

Pretty much, yeah. One could argue that the philosophy behind it applies, but the actual amendment wouldn't.

[Punisher]

Pretty much, yeah. One could argue that the philosophy behind it applies, but the actual amendment wouldn't.

Ok. I think I knew that when posting and must have been thinking about the idea of the 1st.
I understand that some censorship is needed. Drinking bleach to cure Covid for example. Even if technically you wouldn't need to worry about Covid anymore after you did it.

[Victoria Raverna]

I have mixed feelings on this.
On one hand, 1st amendment.
On the other hand it's obvious that they were aware of backlash and it looks like they decided to hide it instead of dealing with it. Hard to decide if they hid it just to avoid backlash or they were hiding it because they felt guilty about it.
On the 3rd hand, it may be me but it's hard to tell if this was instead SOP and they weren’t exactly hiding it, it just appeared that way.
Maybe someone better than me can look into it and dumb it down for me.

Bringing the whole site down for maintenance because of a single article can't be SOP, right?

I think this part of the article important:

Those involved in the publishing of the article said they heard from a small group of students over the weekend who expressed concerns about threats to their careers and safety if it were to be published.

Some alluded to trucks that circled Columbia and other campuses following Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on Israel, labeling students as antisemites for their past or current affiliation with groups seen as hostile to Israel.

Seem like they think they need to self-censor their article to prevent backlash. For Columbia Law Review, are all article they posted mean they agree to them all? Or are they just posting ideas some controversial and some not so people or scholars can discuss or "review" them?

[Punisher]

I have mixed feelings on this.
On one hand, 1st amendment.
On the other hand it's obvious that they were aware of backlash and it looks like they decided to hide it instead of dealing with it. Hard to decide if they hid it just to avoid backlash or they were hiding it because they felt guilty about it.
On the 3rd hand, it may be me but it's hard to tell if this was instead SOP and they weren’t exactly hiding it, it just appeared that way.
Maybe someone better than me can look into it and dumb it down for me.

Bringing the whole site down for maintenance because of a single article can't be SOP, right?

I mean, maybe. IF the article wasn't posted by following established SOP then their emergency SOP might have been to shut the site until they can properly isolate and remove the article.
I know I had one client that had multiple people writing blogs and that was the SOP in an emergency. Put site into maintenance mode, locate the correct blog, disable it, reopen site.
It wasn't used too often. Usually only in the case of a disgruntled worker on their way out who decide to burn every bridge. Usually it wasn't so offensive that we couldn't wait 30 minutes to look for it. The other times were if someone posted prices that were way off. Say a $1000 item selling for $100 by mistake.