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Columbia and the World from ’68 to ’08
PUBLISHED MAY 2, 2008
College is, for the vast majority of us who experience these four years of “higher education,” the last womblike vessel that we will inhabit before being sent out into the world to sink or swim on our own. It is the place where the veil between fantasy and reality is the thinnest, where we can see the world up close and actually try to touch it, where we can get the texture, the feel of it.
There is nothing purer than the beliefs of a college student. We are given four years to actually study the world, and that we surely do. One of the core realities of that study is, hopefully, the realization that “I am the same as everyone else in the world.” We all bleed, we all love and want to be loved, we are all shaped by whatever circumstances we receive by chance or design. Humanness remains at the center of it all, and is, I believe, what student activists in particular are keenly and often painfully aware of.
I stopped Thursday night as I crossed campus to hear the reading of the names and the incidents of the dead in Iraq. I used to feel that the whole world should stop at every moment that there was an untimely death. We do stop everything, of course, for our most beloved leaders, but I felt deeply that every single one of us deserved the same love, at the same moment, impractical though the idea may have been.
The urgent desire to communicate a feeling, a thought, a realization, is what gives rise to the reality of art. That is what I saw in the reading of those names. Student activism is an art form that signals an urgent, heartfelt need to communicate the empathy felt about an issue at hand. That is what I believe I took part in back in 1968, and it is what I see in the student activists today.
I was fortunate enough to see an interview with a young hunger striker at Columbia a few months back. He was in a tent on campus, I believe. I deeply admired the student’s ability to clearly articulate his viewpoint, and felt that his level of maturity was greater than mine was at his age. I would almost say that the student activists of today may be more spiritual in the realization of their work than we were back in 1968, although I do not expect that they perceive themselves to be so.
Making a memorable, clear statement is the challenge in any art form. If life has meaning, then the most urgent task is to communicate that significance.
I didn’t know what I was going to do on that day in April ’68. But I knew there was an urgent need to communicate a reality. I’m a native New Yorker—a Brooklynite—but most of my family, including my father, comes from the South. So I cannot adequately describe how I felt when I heard that “the community” was going to have to enter the back door to use the gym in Morningside Park. It made my eyes tear and my chest get tight, and I could only look down and shake my head. I had turned 20 just three months earlier. I was no longer a teenager, but I didn’t think I was going to have to feel so old so soon in this life.
I followed my heart. I woke up that morning to see students milling about the campus from a window on the 10th floor of Furnald. Someone was saying, “Students have taken over Hamilton Hall.” I was riveted, and someone from WKCR (where I was a jazz jock) called me—I think we had floor phones back then—and said, “You’ve got to get over there as a reporter!”
We did some live work from inside the lobby, and it was chaotic and upbeat. We were reporters at the center of a serious moment and all of the “guys” were very up and very focused. Then it turned more serious for me, as the black student leaders said that everyone would have to get out. That was the moment I joined the strike. This was my impulsive yet deliberate response to the realization that the great academic leaders of my world-renowned University were no more educated than “those crackers,” as my father would say, down South.
There is no question in my mind that “the way of things” is not “things as they should be,” now as in ages past and those to come. The student activist will continue to be an important part of anything recognizable as civilization on our tiny planet, practicing the art of meaningful, urgent, and essentially peaceful communication. Anyone have a better definition of love?
The author is a member of the Columbia College class of 1969.
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On June 8, 1967, US Navy intelligence ship USS Liberty was suddenly and brutally attacked on the high seas in international waters by the air and naval forces of Israel. The Israeli forces attacked with full knowledge that this was an American ship and lied about it. Survivors have been forbidden for 40 years to tell their story under oath to the American public. This USS Liberty Memorial web site tells their story and is dedicated to the memory of the 34 brave men who died.
The Attack
After surveilling USS Liberty for more than nine hours with almost hourly aircraft over flights and radar tracking, the air and naval forces of Israel attacked our ship in international waters without warning. USS Liberty was identified as a US naval ship nine hours before the attack by Israeli reconnaissance aircraft and continuously tracked by Israeli radar and aircraft thereafter. Sailing in international waters at less than five knots, with no offensive armament, our ship was not a military threat to anyone.
The Israeli forces attacked without warning and without attempting to contact us. Thirty four Americans were killed in the attack and another 174 were wounded. The ship, a $40 Million Dollar state of the art signals intelligence platform, was later declared unsalvageable and sold for scrap.
The Cover Up
Despite a near-universal consensus that the Israeli attack was made with full knowledge that USS Liberty was a US Navy ship, the Johnson administration began an immediate cover-up of this fact. Though administration officers continued individually to characterize the attack as deliberate, the Johnson administration never sought the prosecution of the guilty parties or otherwise attempted to seek justice for the victims. They concealed and altered evidence in their effort to downplay the attack. Though they never formally accepted the Israeli explanation that it was an accident, they never pressed for a full investigation either. They simply allowed those responsible literally to get away with murder.
Anti-Semitism and the Anti-American Apologists
The USS Liberty Memorial web site abhors the racist and extreme positions often taken by Liberty Lobby, American Free Press and similar antiSemitic, Holocaust denial, conspiracy theorist and other such groups which often seek to identify with USS Liberty and to usurp our story as their own. We repudiate their comments and oppose them in every way. The campaign for accountability for the attack on USS Liberty has no room for hatemongers. We do not wish harm to any country or people; we seek only accountability for the criminal acts perpetrated against us.
On the Israeli side, the group of pro-Israel, anti-American critics of our story, while small, persists in launching loud, vicious ad hominem attacks on anyone who attempts to discuss the deliberateness of the attack. These anti-American apologists refuse to discuss the facts of the case. Instead, they rely on propaganda and charge anyone who questions the Israeli position with being antiSemitic.
For detailed and authoritative accounts of the power and influence of the pro-Israel lobby, please see The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy by Mearsheimer and Walt and The Pro-Israel Lobby by Edward Herman.
The Betrayal of American Veterans
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Americans who volunteer for military service effectively write a blank check, payable to the United States of America for an amount "up to and including my life." The United States, in turn, promises to spend these checks responsibly. That bargain implicitly includes a promise by the United States to protect them and to seek retribution against anyone who harms them. In the case of USS Liberty, the United States has failed to keep its promise.
Barack Obama once told Hillary Clinton that she didn't understand black people. This is a polite way of saying that the White House was his Back takeover building and that she needed to take over another building. America does not understand Iraqi people, Iranian people. This is the dilemma that any American Constitution Convention faces, to say" EQUAL PROTECTION" of the laws and really mean it. To have the Federal marshals arrest George W Bush on grounds of treason when the invasion of Iraq turned into a false arrest warrant against Islam. When the enforcement of laws are slanted in the favor of blacks over whites, male over female, American dictators over Iraqi dictators, we should not put these prejudicial vessels of political power into American office for extended periods of time.
I don't know if it is an urban university legend, but I head that Harvard University turned down a class of '12 applicant who scored 2400 on the SAT. Was this applicant attacked and denied admission because of his religion, his medical condition, her color, her religion or her politics? This person belongs on Sixty Minutes. This person belongs on the Jerry Springer show. This person needs to get on the front page of the newspapers, or this urban legend needs to be debunked.
Harvard, you don't understand smart people; you don't understand genius; you don't understand civil rights, you don't understand freedom of the press, you don't understand liberty or freedom.
Is Harvard a Tory-Israeli institution of treason and sedition? My thesis statement says, "YES."
Do you have the IQ of a brick? Do you belong in a mental institution? Did you just write three paragraphs of barely-coherent psycho-babble? My thesis statement says, "YES."
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