The July 4, 1970 Campus Demonstration in Kent State (I), a Pro-Israel Culture Warriors, and the May 4 Task Force
The war in Gaza happened 54 years ago when a similar campus demonstration ended in four student deaths, but hundreds of pro-Palestinian demonstrators gathered Saturday at Kent State University to protest.
The activists did not talk but they were very visible. They assembled in a semicircle around a stage on Kent State’s commons where speakers were commemorating the events of May 4, 1970: The governor of Ohio, James Rhodes, called in the National Guard to quell a protest about the Vietnam War. The troops started shooting. Four people were killed. Several people were wounded.
The campus still bears the scars of the 1970 shooting. Illuminated columns mark the precise spots where the four students were killed, and the tragedy was immortalized in the song “Ohio” performed by the folk-rock quartet Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young.
In a speech on Saturday to honor the victims, Sophia Swengel, a sophomore and the president of the May 4 Task Force, a group formed in 1975 to keep the students’ legacy alive, also acknowledged the protesters. Many of them were hoisting signs calling on the university to divest from weapons manufacturers and military contractors.
An unfortunate symbiosis has developed between pro-Israel culture warriors like Republican Representative Elise Stefanik and the most self-indulgent fringe of pro-Palestinian campus protesters. Israel’s planned incursion into the southern city of Rafah, and the larger problem of antisemitism on campus are shifting attention away from the crises in Gaza and the United States.
The R.O.T.C. program and the research and development of the liquid crystal used in heat detectors that were dropped on Cambodia were among the demands made by students in 1970.
Ms. Tinnin and Mr. Shaikh, along with two other students, met with Mark Polatajko, senior vice president for finance and administration for Kent State, on Dec. 4, a meeting confirmed in a statement from Rebecca Murphy, a Kent State spokeswoman. Ms. Tinnin said that Mr. Polatajko gave the university’s investment portfolio to the four activists. She said activists who scrutinized the portfolio found that it included investments in weapons manufacturers.
Yaseen Shaikh, 19, a member of Students for Justice in Palestine who is going to graduate with a degree in computer science, said that Kent State can’t end the war in Gaza, but it can control its own investment portfolio.
Considering the enormity of mass death, displacement and starvation in Gaza, some pro-Palestinian demonstrators believe that it is better for them to accept so-called respectability politics, which whitewash horror in the name of civility. “To the Jewish students, faculty and trustees blocking divestment and urging the violent crackdowns on campus: You threaten everyone’s safety,” said a recent communiqué from the Columbia Law chapter of the National Lawyers Guild, a left-wing group that’s been providing legal support to the protesters.
The statement disdains the ethos of nonviolence, quoting Black Panther leader Kwame Ture, formerly Stokely Carmichael: “In order for nonviolence to work, your opponent must have a conscience. The United States has no. Within the movement, I imagine such rhetoric functions as a sign of total commitment, a no-going-back rejection of hollow liberal pieties. It serves to stoke a panic about the protests that distracts from the war and feeds a backlash that threatens academic freedom if anyone takes this language seriously.
That panic is the backdrop for a dangerous piece of legislation that passed the House overwhelmingly last week and could soon be taken up by the Senate. The Anti-Semitism Awareness Act is a bill that has been pushed by pro-Israel politicians to codify federal civil rights law in higher education. Civil libertarians were once able to head off such legislation, but that has now become harder in the current climate.