Who were the 'outsiders' at Columbia University's Hamilton Hall?

[SunSeeker]

When James Carlson was arrested inside Columbia University’s Hamilton Hall, he was already under investigation for snatching an Israeli flag out of a man’s hand near campus and setting it on fire. 

That wasn’t the first time Carlson, who has no affiliation with Columbia, had run afoul of the law. He was arrested in San Francisco in 2005 during a violent protest organized by an anarchist group, according to a senior law enforcement official.  The 40-year-old animal rights lawyer is among the group of “professional outsiders” cast by the New York City police department and mayor as having a significant role in the takeover of Hamilton Hall. 

Some of the student protesters think the narrative pushed by city and university officials — of dangerous outsiders co-opting the demonstrations — is fueled by ulterior motives. Rory Wilson, 22, a Columbia senior who did not participate in the protests, offered a different take.

After midnight on Tuesday, Wilson and a friend placed themselves outside a Hamilton Hall door for several minutes to prevent the protesters from barricading it shut. Video footage released by the city showed a 63-year-old activist named Lisa Fithian at the center of the action, directing the protesters on how to barricade the doors and referring to Wilson and his friend as “assholes.”
“She was right in the middle of it, instructing them how to better set up the barricades,” said Wilson, who has Jewish heritage but is not a practicing Jew. “Given that the barricades were a pretty central part of the plan of how to take over Hamilton, I’d expect that she would have been pretty central in the logistics planning.”

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/investigations/outsiders-columbia-universitys-hamilton-hall-rcna150530

[stopdiggin]

1. non-students and 'outsiders' are neither the whole story

nor a negligible part of the whole story.
And not sure - after this amount of time - why this should come as a surprise to anyone.

[Jedi Guy]

2. No doubt "outside agitators" were responsible for some of the bad behavior at these protests.

"Outside agitators" could be anything from students' friends to Blac Bloc assholes to right-wing saboteurs, though, and there's no way to know with any certainty. There's also no way to know with certainty exactly to what extent they were behind the harassment of fellow students and the various flavors of lawlessness that took place. Both data points are question marks and there's no way to prove anything one way or another.

Anything to do with Israel/Palestine is a hot button issue that provokes very strong feelings on both sides, and when emotions run high and people are gathered in a crowd, rational thought and restraint are easily consumed by anger and action. Mob psychology and dynamics have been pretty thoroughly studied. It's just how humans are wired. A friend of mine refers to humans as "overclocked apes", and he's really not wrong.

Some of the bad behavior can most certainly be attributed to the protesters themselves, though. Hand waving it away as the work of "outside agitators" is another very human tendency: the desire to absolve one's own "team" (for want of a better term) of wrongdoing. Acknowledging that some on our team made mistakes and behaved badly is uncomfortable, but it's absolutely necessary.

The protests revealed that there's a pretty virulent strain of anti-Semitism active in some cohorts of the left. There really isn't another way to frame the hateful rhetoric and harassment of Jewish students. Hand waving it away as the work of "outside agitators" is a willful refusal to recognize it for what it is and, even worse, a refusal to confront it.

[melm00se]

8. Have a nice stay

[Voltaire2]

3. It's a good thing for older generations to share

their knowledge with younger generations.

[AnrothElf]

4. Seems more like living vicariously, to me. Misplaced nostalgia.

[SunSeeker]

10. This older generation is teaching them all the wrong things.

Fithian taught them to apply the excesses of Occupy Wall Street (property appropriation and destruction) that cost OWS public support (but she didn't teach them to bug out before the cops moved in, like she did!). Carlson taught them hate, violence and disrespect.

None of these lessons served them well. These has-beens were just trying to stay relevant by co-opting the issue du jour. They had nothing to offer but their bad ideas to these kids.

Where are this generation's Mario Savio, MLK, Cesar Chavez? It seems most of these kids hide behind tents and keffiyehs they bought on Amazon and get inspired by uneducated influencers and shadowy foreign internet organizations like Students for Justice in Palestine instead of by their fellow students. Indeed, some of them label many of their fellow students the enemy, "Zionists." It's tragic.

[Marcuse]

5. Remember these infiltrators at the George Floyd protests?

[SunSeeker]

11. Yes, that guy turned out to be a white supremacist, total saboteur.

https://abcnews.go.com/US/man-helped-ignite-george-floyd-riots-identified-white/story?id=72051536

[BlueWaveNeverEnd]

6. interesting.. kick

[Sympthsical]

9. People need to decide if they want this outsider narrative or not

It's incredibly weird. At first, the argument was that all the bad things that happened at these protests was outsiders. The students would never. And here's the thing - I half buy it. I think a lot of these students themselves are just your standard boring Marxist sociology majors for the most part. They don't need help to say stupid things about decolonization and Zionism - there are plenty of professors who teach them that. Hell, a bunch of them wrote letters and showed up. So it's not like we're starved for evidence here.

However, there are "professional protesters" who will show up wherever there's potential for chaos. Living in the Bay Area, you can find protesters in their 40s and 50s who clearly have not learned or grown in the intervening 30 years and are still shouting the same old slogans. If there's a gathering, there is non-zero chance you'll discover that it's one of these assholes most eager to start throwing the bricks. It's a kind of anarchist, burn-it-all-down, boo to the System tedium. That you expect in much, much younger people, but hey, some people just get emotionally stuck in adolescence. Nothing to be done for it.

I absolutely believe these types showed up. They always show up. It's their Christmas.

But now that the police are saying, "Yeah, there were outsiders here," people are disbelieving, calling it conspiracy, and argue the police are trying to paint things in a bad light by noting the outsiders?

Which is it? Were outsiders responsible for and encouraging the bad behavior or were there few outsiders and it's all a police propaganda plot?

Of course the obvious is obvious. There was bad behavior by both students and outsiders at some of these protests - they worked together because they had aligned interests. I keep hearing the "We Are Hamas!" and "Globalize the Intifada!" and "Hooray for October 7th!" people were all outsiders. Which no one thought to get rid of at any point for . . . reasons. But now, no, that had no effect on anything at all, and why are the police saying that?

Pick. Your. Lane.

But that's just, you know, common sense. And that shit's pretty much outlawed nowadays.

[betsuni]

12. Speaking of the Bay Area and anarchists, saw this from "Bohemian San Francisco" (1914) today:

"Up in the second story of a large building you may see a sign that tells you meals will be served and rooms provided. One of these is the rendezvous of Anarchists, who gather each evening and discuss the affairs of the world, and how to regulate them. But they are harmless Anarchists in San Francisco, for they have no wrongs to redress, so they sit and drink their forbidden absinthe, and dream their dreams of fire and sword, while they talk in whispers of what they are going to do to the crowned heads of Europe."

Stay in the tavern.