American Exceptionalism and the NYPD

By Seth Mandel

Friday, May 03, 2024

 

One of the most telling aspects of the pro-Hamas student encampments is their participants’ pathological aversion to police—both for what it says about the campus bubble and for what it reveals about the demonstrators’ antipathy for Jews.

 

“I don’t really know how to process the fact that, at the bare minimum, there are going to be 100 cops at the [graduation] celebration,” Columbia student Suleyman Ahmed told the Wall Street Journal. Ahmed wasn’t part of the protests, the Journal explains, but when he heard there was going to be a police presence on campus through the end of the semester a couple weeks away, “he couldn’t concentrate on cramming.”

 

Whether that’s true—it’s hard to imagine a person carrying such exquisite fragility into adulthood—or whether Ahmed was just mimicking the debilitating sense of entitlement around him is less important than the fact that he was unashamed to say this sentence out loud to a newspaper reporter. In the bubble of “elite” campus culture, this is a normal thing to say. One is left wishing there were some institution that could prepare college graduates for the world.

 

Meanwhile, the reluctance to call in the police by campus administrators has, in roughly 100% of cases, proved not just foolish but dangerously irresponsible. At Columbia, about a quarter of those arrested for violently taking a campus building were unaffiliated with the university. At the City College of New York the same night, more than half of those arrested were unaffiliated with the school. Twenty-two of them violently impeded police clearing of an occupied building.

 

NBC’s reporting shows just what a tourist attraction these protests had become. One of those arrested was anarchist James W. Carlson, whose rap sheet over nearly twenty years of violent demonstrations includes aggravated assault with a deadly weapon and attempted lynching. Another arrestee had reportedly been fired from the New York Botanical Garden for cheering on Hamas’s campaign of mass slaughter, child murder and sexual torture on Oct. 7.

 

Two others have arrest records related to their behavior at various protests over the years. The cause isn’t what matters to these folks; what matters is causing violence and disorder. If you are the parent of a student at one of these schools, you have plenty of reason to wonder why the institution cultivated this atmosphere and then delayed allowing police to restore safety and remove violent trespassers from campus.

 

The “unaffiliated” numbers seem to be common wherever they were recorded; two of four arrested at the University of Arizona, for example, fell into this category. Violence within the encampments at UCLA spurred retaliatory attacks from outsiders. Police presence was resisted by the pro-Hamas campers up until the demonstrators lost their monopoly on the violence, at which point the complaint changed to what took the cops so long?

 

There is more than a little irony in that. The NYPD faced down the violent protesters with remarkable restraint, as expected. But their presence was important for another reason: Jewish history is replete with the gathering storms of anti-Jewish mob violence either encouraged or ignored by police. In the 20th century, in the wake of some of the worst pogroms in the Russian Empire, Jews in the Belarussian city of Gomel organized to fight off impending attacks. The police acted against the Jewish defenders and the courts put thirty-six of them on trial alongside a few pogromists.

 

Any time Jews were protected by police from mob violence, they were accused of bribing the cops, so routine was police cooperation with the pogromists. Often police action was just for show: It would signal to pogromists in one place to disperse and reassemble elsewhere in town to continue the rampage. Police were the only ones able to disarm Jews ahead of planned pogroms. And anti-Semitism has been so rampant in security forces throughout Jewish history that appealing for protection before expected attacks could just as easily exacerbate the coming violence.

 

This is what made the intervention of New York Mayor Eric Adams and the NYPD so symbolically powerful. That symbolism of historic progress is precisely what the demonstrators sought to prevent. It is undeniable that these encampments have both preached and practiced violence against Jews around them. America has distinguished itself—largely but not solely thanks to the NYPD—as an exception to the historical pattern of tolerating or encouraging mob violence against its Jews. This week the country proved itself still capable of living up to the ideals that make it indispensable to the cause of freedom.