Earlier: UCLA Riot—A Battle Between The Diverse And The Jews
UCLA receives the most college admission applications of any college in the United States: 109,000, far ahead of UC Berkeley’s 88,000. It has an impressive campus located between Sunset and Wilshire Boulevards in the heart of the south slope of the Hollywood Hills on the west side of Los Angeles. So, UCLA is a big deal.
I mentioned this earlier, but the evidence continues to pile up that the big brawl on UCLA’s central quad last week was largely started by pro-Israel Israelis and perhaps other Jews: the Jewish version of the Men with Gold Chains whom I talk about a lot in describing the modern San Fernando Valley.
The western half of Los Angeles, with UCLA at its center, is home to a sizable number of Israelis and other Jews from places like Iran, Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus (the ex-Soviets are often part Jewish and part Slav, Armenian, or the like).
However, the term “Jewish violence” is almost off-limits in the press.
From the New York Times news section:
How Counterprotesters at U.C.L.A. Provoked Violence, Unchecked for Hours
The New York Times used videos filmed by journalists, witnesses and protesters to analyze hours of clashes—and a delayed police response—at a pro-Palestinian encampment on Tuesday.
By Neil Bedi, Bora Erden, Marco Hernandez, Ishaan Jhaveri, Arijeta Lajka, Natalie Reneau, Helmuth Rosales and Aric Toler May 3, 2024
On Tuesday night, violence erupted at an encampment that pro-Palestinian protesters had set up on April 25.
… The clashes began after counterprotesters tried to dismantle the encampment’s barricade. Pro-Palestinian protesters rushed to rebuild it, and violence ensued. …
Police arrived hours later, but they did not intervene immediately. …
A New York Times examination of more than 100 videos from clashes at the University of California, Los Angeles, found that violence ebbed and flowed for nearly five hours, mostly with little or no police intervention. The violence had been instigated by dozens of people who are seen in videos counterprotesting the encampment.
The videos showed counterprotesters attacking students in the pro-Palestinian encampment for several hours, including beating them with sticks, using chemical sprays and launching fireworks as weapons. As of Friday, no arrests had been made in connection with the attack.
To build a timeline of the events that night, The Times analyzed two livestreams, along with social media videos captured by journalists and witnesses.
The melee began when a group of counterprotesters started tearing away metal barriers that had been in place to cordon off pro-Palestinian protesters. Hours earlier, U.C.L.A. officials had declared the encampment illegal.
Security personnel hired by the university are seen in yellow vests standing to the side throughout the incident. A university spokesperson declined to comment on the security staff’s response.
It is not clear how the counterprotest was organized or what allegiances people committing the violence had. The videos show many of the counterprotesters were wearing pro-Israel slogans on their clothing. Some counterprotesters blared music, including Israel’s national anthem, a Hebrew children’s song and “Harbu Darbu,” an Israeli song about the Israel Defense Forces’ campaign in Gaza.
In The Forward (formerly Jewish Daily Forward), a Jewish UCLA professor wrote an opinion piece blaming pro-Israel Jewish outside agitators for the riot:
I’m a UCLA professor. Why didn’t the administration stop last night’s egregious violence?
The university should have anticipated Tuesday night’s chaos—but security personnel were nowhere to be found
David N. Myers
May 1, 2024David N. Myers is a Distinguished Professor of History at UCLA. He is the co-author (with Nomi Stolzenberg) of “American Shtetl: The Making of Kiryas Joel, a Hasidic Village in Upstate New York” (2022) and a member of the Haredi Research Group.
UCLA, a prestigious public university in the United States, experienced one of the darkest nights in its 105-year history on Tuesday. Over the course of my 33-year career at UCLA, I have never seen anything so terrifying take place.
Around 11 p.m., a group of masked counterdemonstrators made their way to the Royce Quad in the heart of campus and began to attack the encampment set up last week by demonstrators opposing the war in Gaza. They threw a firecracker into the encampment, tore down its outer walls, threw heavy objects at demonstrators and instigated direct physical confrontations. Those in the encampment were left to fend for themselves against a violent band of thugs intent on inflicting damage.
The incident marked a total systems failure by the university, the city of Los Angeles and the state of California.
For three hours, the counterdemonstrators attacked the encampment with impunity. UCLA has its own trained police force, and the UCLA administrators with whom I spoke told me that the Los Angeles Police Department had been called to campus. But, somehow, there was no police presence whatsoever until the early hours of the morning.
What makes last night all the more inexplicable was that the university had, over the weekend, seen a haunting warning of what could happen.
On Sunday, a number of Jewish and Israeli groups, including the Jewish Federation of Los Angeles and the Israeli American Council, sponsored a rally on campus to advocate for the protection of Jewish students. The rally featured speeches by local Jewish public figures, along with musical performances.
But just adjacent to the rally, which occurred near the student protesters’ encampment, there were a number of sites on the edges of the main campus quad in which hundreds of demonstrators and counterdemonstrators converged and moved toward each other until they stood nose-to-nose. The tension was palpable, and it was striking that there was no police or safety officer presence.
Sensing that the confrontation could explode, a number of colleagues and I inserted ourselves between the two groups to serve as a buffer. We heard a constant stream of invective, epithets and accusations; witnessed pushing and shoving; and tried to intervene when punches were thrown. It got scary at times, as if a mass melee or even stampede might break out.
Over the course of our hours on the front lines, I estimate that more than 90% of the verbal and physical instigation came from the agitated counterdemonstrators, a fair number of whom spoke Hebrew and appeared to come from outside campus. The anti-war group had yellow-vested personnel who maintained discipline and sought to deescalate when the threat of violence arose.
But even they were greeted with insulting words from the other side, as were members of a small contingent of a local chapter of Standing Together who came bearing signs calling for peace and equality for Palestinians and Jews.
I do not know whether there was overlap between the counterdemonstrators on Sunday and those who provoked last night’s violence, who carried Israeli and American flags, as well as at least one Chabad flag celebrating “Mashiach,” or the Messiah. But the behavior of the two groups bore striking similarities, making it all the more unsettling that UCLA wasn’t better prepared. …
Okay, so the UCLA riot appears to be a good example of Jewish violence. But I haven’t seen anybody in the press use the term “Jewish violence.”
