Beege wrote about this dope yesterday. His name is Khymani James and he's the student leader of the Columbia group that has been occupying the campus. Yesterday he became famous beyond campus after a video went viral in which he said, "Be glad — be grateful — that I’m not just going out and murdering Zionists." He added, "I feel very comfortable, very comfortable, calling for those people to die."

The really shocking part of this, as Beege pointed out, is that Khymani James wasn't just spouting off in Instagram. This was actually his response to school administrators who were speaking to him because of a prior post on social media which mentioned killing people. In other words, this was his response during a disciplinary hearing.

Later yesterday we learned that James has been banned from Columbia's campus.

Columbia University announced on Friday that it had barred from its campus a leader in the pro-Palestinian student protest encampment who declared on video in January that “Zionists don’t deserve to live.”...

In announcing their decision to bar Mr. James from campus, the university did not make clear if he had been suspended or permanently expelled.

His comrades in the movement seem eager to assure everyone that his views are not representative.

Sophie Ellman-Golan, the communications director of Jews for Racial & Economic Justice and a Barnard College graduate, said she found Mr. James’s comments awful and upsetting but she added that it was clear his views did not represent those of the other campus protesters.

Ms. Ellman-Golan said that in her 10 years as an organizer, there were always people who tried to inject hateful messages into public action, and that such messages tended to be amplified by those looking to smear entire movements.

“For people who want to believe that characterization, that our movements are inevitably and permanently hostile to us as Jews, this is catnip, right?” she said. “It’s irresistible.”

She's trying to do the old "conservatives seize" switcheroo. Sure this looks bad so let's talk about the people who are amplifying this instead of the actual story.

Over at the Washington Post, former Columbia protester Paul Berman has written a pretty interesting piece comparing his time stirring up protests in 1968 to what is happening now. He writes that the protests don't bother him even if they seem a bit rowdy at times. It's the goals of the protesters that worry him.

The students — the students of today, the best of them — will defend themselves by explaining that, if they are occupying Columbia’s South Lawn and chanting and drumming, it is because extremist Israeli settlers are oppressing the West Bank Palestinians, which is a right and worthy point to raise. The students will emphasize that, in launching its riposte in Gaza, Israel’s army has ended up killing immense numbers of civilians, which is also incontestable. And the Israeli effort to crush Hamas has ended up imposing famine-like conditions and one dreadful thing after another, all of which is true and horrific and enraging.

And yet it has to be acknowledged that ultimately the central issue in the war is Hamas and its goal, which has lately seemed more realistic than anyone among Israel’s friends has imagined in recent years. The goal is and has always been the eradication of the Israeli state. And the radical students at Columbia, even if not all of them, have shown that, at some level, if not at every level, they understand and embrace the goal.

Speaking of the oft-chanted slogan "From the river to the sea" he writes:

The slogan promises eradication. It is an exciting slogan because it is transgressive, which is why the students love to chant it. And it is doubly shocking to see how many people rush to excuse the students without even pausing to remark on the horror embedded in the chants.

Because of how he views all of this, he has a different solution than any I've heard so far. He says he would offer amnesty to the students with the exception of those (like Mr. James?) who have gone too far. But he would not show the same amnesty to the professors.

I would turn in wrath on Columbia’s professors — not just the handful who sound crazy, but the professors who sound reasonable. These are the professors who have created a disastrous climate of opinion at Columbia...I would turn on those professors out of a belief that, at Columbia, appalling chants and occasional hints of violence from students on a tear are not ultimately the problem. Intellectual degeneration is the problem.

Is that a fair trade? Grant the students amnesty and send the anti-Semitic professors packing? I'd love to see it happen but of course the professors in question mostly have tenure. They probably can't be fired for offering their scholarly opinions, no matter how awful they are.

And I would add that much of the woke professoriate is in the same position. We can't get rid of them once they become fixed in the institution. So while a crackdown sounds nice, the reality is it will probably never happen. 

Meanwhile, the students who follow their example can still be suspended and expelled.