As reported recently by The BFD, spineless university authorities are wringing their hands about the prominence of so-called “outside activists” and “blow-ins” at campus anti-Jew “protests”. These are no harmless fist-shakers, either: the “activists” include accused kidnapper-torturer Mohammad Sharab. Another supposed “outside activist” is Ihab al-Azhari, a vicious anti-Semite who brags that October 7 is just the bloody beginning of it’’.
But, are they really “outsiders”? Or ringleaders?
As with all left-wing protests, what’s immediately obvious is the sheer amount of organisation that’s evident. These aren’t “spontaneous” outbursts of passionate anti-Semitism: they’re well-planned and heavily funded. This is most obvious in the US protests, but given that the antipodean left is nothing if not slavishly imitative, the following almost certainly applies here, too.
Want to know how Woke activists take over buildings, smash windows, trash university campuses, and still have the press call them “non-violent”?
Well, as it turns out these are well trained activists using intelligent, highly developed tactics.
This is the absolute key to understanding what is going on on campuses, and why the students are behaving as they do. The foot soldiers on campus might be mindless sheep, but they are following orders handed to them by some very smart, very evil people. Once you understand the tactics, you can see through the theatrics straight away.
And, as Sun Tzu said, knowing how your enemy thinks is key to winning the battle.
First off: none of this is spontaneous.
[For example] The protestors in the video going around have shields. In 2020 we learned these shields can take hours to make and are made by volunteers working all day. You don’t do that spontaneously. It takes planning […]
Another clue that this is all VERY well planned is the fact they tend to all have the same tent.
This is because the organizations that run and fund the protests purchase the tents in bulk and then give them to the protestors as needed.
As already reported at The BFD, it’s important to understand that these are not “student” protests: they’re well-planned, far-left actions using students as cannon fodder.
In the US, one regular face at “pro-Palestinian” campus protests is one Lisa Fithian. Fithian, 63, is not a student — she’s a professional protester. In 2012, Mother Jones reported that Fithian was trousering hundreds of dollars per day, training left-wing protesters. Fithian also trained activists for the so-called “Flotilla to Gaza”, and publicly endorsed the anti-Semitic BDS movement.
According to the NYPD one-third of the people arrested at Columbia, and most of the people arrested at the CCNY, were not students.
The second key to defeating the anti-Semites is understanding their tactics.
When you see videos of “students” squealing and crying, kicking and screaming, it must look funny, but it’s a deadly serious tactic. They’re not just pathetic snowflakes: they’ve been coached to do exactly what they do.
It’s all a performance. A performance directly targeted at the media.
The first strategy is to put their target in a “decision dilemma.” This is where they select a method of protest that leaves the person with no good options. No matter how the target reacts they look bad.
As John Searle explained in his 1971 book “The Campus War,” the strategy is to leave the University with no good options:
They either let the protestors take over, or call police and then students play victim and use the optics to look like sympathetic martyrs for the cause.
The decision dilemma strategy is paired with: “the real action is your targets reaction.” You use someone’s reactions to your protest against them.
It’s paramount to understand that they have no real interest in convincing the university, the police, or politicians with their theatrics. As far as they’re concerned, all of those are oppressive state apparatuses that cannot be changed but must be eliminated. The immediate targets (the university, and police) are just props.
Activists want to LOOK like they are trying to change the minds of people they protest against, but that’s just for show […]
The point of the protest is not to change the mind of the people whose building they have taken over, the goal is to use the protest as a way of building social and political pressure against the people they are trying to make give it.
THAT is the goal.
And the weapon is the media. Their strategy is to “do the media’s work for them”. They know perfectly well that most of the media are in ideological lockstep with them. All they have to do is supply the media with the footage they desperately want.
The strategy is: “lead with sympathetic characters.” It’s EXACTLY what it sounds like. They put sympathetic people out front to garner sympathy and create the APPEARANCE of underdogs fighting against the powerful.
This is why in the coverage of these protests you rarely see the images of smashed glass, trashed buildings, broken doors, and blood on the street, but you will often see pictures of the people below which are meant to make the protestors look sympathetic.
Why else do you think there as so many grey-haired Boomer nannas shoved to the front of these protests?
The protestors have a highly developed theory of protest optics. They understand videos can be sliced and diced to tell any story, and the story that “resonates” with people most, wins. So they are intentional in trying to create moments on video that can go viral.
So, what can the targets (like universities) do about it?
Act first, act unhesitatingly.
Had universities known this they would have understood that the right move is to eject the encampments the minute they start. There was not way to negotiate with the protestors because, as the activists themselves tell us, negotiating is not the point. The point is to create a situation where the University has no good option and expose the university as weak, and then use that to extract concessions and make the university fold because they have ZERO good options.
Knowing that this is the strategy allows you avoid the trap by taking the PR hit and ejecting the protestors and tearing down the encampments on day one. You’re taking a PR hit no matter what, so take the hit day one and then ride it out. The longer the protests last, the bigger a story they become, so end it quick and kill the momentum.
Twitter/Wokal Distance
Sooner or later, the target is going to have to remove the occupiers. This is where both the universities and even Trevor Mallard screwed up: they knew they’d have to act, eventually. Doing so was always going to look bad to the audience the protesters are playing to, but ripping a band-aid off hurts, too, Dragging it out, just drags out the pain and makes it worse. And it makes you look weak.
