It’s a hallmark of totalitarian regimes. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote about it in his monumental exploration of the nightmare of totalitarianism, “The Gulag Archipelago”: “The sharp nighttime ring or the rude knock at the door. The insolent entrance of the unwiped jackboots of the unsleeping State Security operatives.” The left has now adopted this tactic in the United States, not for arrests (yet), but to frighten its foes into submission.
The Jerusalem Post reported Thursday that “anti-Israel masked men arrived at the homes of University of Michigan Board of Regents members before dawn on Wednesday to protest and demand the adoption of Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) policies, according to the university and the regents.” Why before dawn, when the Regents were least likely to be able to carry on a rational discussion about these issues? Because rational discussion is the last thing these masked thugs want. Like those who made nighttime arrests in the old Soviet Union, they want to terrify their targets and catch them off guard.
Intimidation is the stock-in-trade of the ideologues who regard human freedom as the enemy, and so it is no real surprise that anti-Israel thugs have started using the same tactics in Michigan. One of the regents, Jordan Acker, says that it was, to be more precise, “around 4:40 A.M.” when “a masked intruder came to the door of my family’s home with a list of demands, including defunding the police. My three daughters were asleep in their beds, and thankfully unaware of what transpired.”
Acker continued: “This form of protest is not peaceful. Public officials should not be subject to this sort of intimidating conduct, and this behavior is unacceptable from any Michigan community member, especially one led by someone who called for the death of people they disagree with.” He didn’t say whom he was talking about, but there has been a good bit of calling for the death of one’s enemies in Michigan lately.
In the face of the clear threat, Acker was defiant, although he seized the opportunity to affirm his loyalty to the leftist line, irrelevantly invoking 2020 “election deniers”: “I will not be intimidated. In the wake of the 2020 election, public officials here in Michigan were subjected to threats from mobs of election deniers who engaged in similar conduct.”
The leftists went even further at the home of another regent, Sarah Hubbard. She recounted that “at dawn, a group of around thirty protesters came to her home on Wednesday and erected tents, and according to the university, placed fake corpses wrapped in bloodied sheets on her lawn.” Not content with strewing her lawn with trash in an effort to frighten her into doing their bidding, the leftists “used bullhorns, drums, and chants to disrupt the peace of her neighborhood and taped a list of demands to her front door.”
That’ll do the trick. Who could resist such a charming, eloquent appeal? Instead of being outraged at this thuggery, however, all that Hubbard, another loyal leftist, could manage was a bit of schoolmarmish finger-wagging: “Protesting at a public official’s private residence is unacceptable and will not move their cause forward in a satisfactory manner.”
Yikes, she said it was “unacceptable”! That’ll stop these totalitarians from trashing anybody else’s lawn!
Hubbard explained that the board had recently rejected the demands of the BDS thugs, but “representatives of the encampment said that they would not take ‘no for an answer,’ and told her to ‘stop complaining on Twitter and come to the encampment to actually negotiate.’”
Related: Why Is the Pro-Palestinian Encampment Craze Sweeping Our Colleges?
For its part, the University of Michigan observed with Sherlock Holmesian perceptiveness that the “tactics used today represent a significant and dangerous escalation in the protests that have been occurring on campus.” No doubt about that. But what will be done? The university’s Public Affairs managed more finger-wagging: “Going to an individual’s private residence is intimidating behavior and, in this instance, illegal trespassing. This kind of conduct is not protected speech; it’s dangerous and unacceptable.”
The problem that the university faces is that the groups behind this intimidation tactic include groups that have been coddled and favored on university campuses all over the country for years: the University of Michigan’s Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) chapter, Students Allied for Freedom and Equality (SAFE), and the Transparency, Accountability, Humanity, Reparations, Investment, Resistance (TAHRIR) Coalition. JVP and TAHRIR also demand the “abolishment of policing on campus.”
Yeah, that’s a great idea while you people are running around in the middle of the night and scaring people half to death. All those involved in this who are students should be summarily expelled. But will the University of Michigan have the courage to cut down a plant it has watered and nurtured for years now?