Northwestern Gaza Protest Photos
Two protests in one week!
I heard all the helicopters overhead, so I took my lunch break today and went down to Northwestern to see what was going on with the protests. I’m sharing these photos because it’s a newsworthy event in town. This seems like it may make national news, so I think it is newsworthy to document here.
At about noon today, there were probably a couple hundred protesters there, around 6 tents, and lots of free food. I didn’t see any Evanston Police but there were a few Northwestern cops milling around. Some of the media outlets had their own private security folks. This is in front of the Deering Library, right off of Sheridan. It was all open and nothing was roped or closed off.
I stopped and had lunch this chair:
Here’s the view from Deering Library around noon. Here’s a short video from that view. Shout out to the OTIS Elevator company for parking their van there.
There were lots of folks from the news media there, they lined the fence along Sheridan all the way to the old business school building.
View from Sheridan:
Again, please keep the comments respectful and don’t get into fights over the conflict or national politics. My position on this conflict is not public and never will be, because it is not relevant to my writing here, which is devoted to local issues. To the extent there is a protest, this is a local issue but this not the place to fight about Israel/Hamas/Gaza, etc.
Peaceful is good. But it doesn't mean that police have no grounds to interfere. FIRE - the premiere national defender of free speech - reminds us that "engaging in civil disobedience may result in punishment, including arrest. Civil disobedience derives its expressive power from the willingness of participants to accept the consequences of breaking the rules. That willingness illustrates their intensity of feeling. Students occupying campus spaces in violation of reasonable, content-neutral rules risk punishment. When that punishment is viewpoint-neutral, proportional, and in keeping with past practice, it does not violate expressive rights." https://www.thefire.org/news/fire-statement-campus-violence-and-arrests
It’s hard to take the protesters seriously when they say the NU president is engaged in genocide and killing children (I saw this reported by the Daily Northwestern).
I have serious problems with the Netanyahu government. But when folks like the Equity Army target irrelevant entities like the Evanston City Council and our Jewish mayor, it makes me very skeptical of the actual motives of these protesters .