UCLA Professor Hannah Appel has accused the school of human rights violations amounting to “torture” in the treatment of pro-Palestinian protesters. The reason is the denial of water and food from being brought into a building being unlawfully occupied by protesters, even though the students were free to leave at any time.
Appel teaches in the anthropology department in the areas of “transnational capitalism and finance,” “the economic imagination,” and “anti-capitalist and abolitionist social movements.”
She is also a member of Faculty for Justice in Palestine at UCLA. The Daily Bruin reports that a brief sit-in protest was held at the campus’s Dodd Hall. The students were soon cleared from the building. In the interim, Appel made her accusation of torture tactics. In a video posted on X, Appel is seen declaring “even if this is unlawful which, of course, I don’t think it is […] you cannot deny people to send in water in an effort to get them to do something against their will.” While the students were free to leave at any time, Appel objected that “you cannot use a mechanism of torture” to force people to leave. In another video Appel objects that she and other faculty were not allowed to bring food and water to the encampment demonstrators. Notably, Appel repeats a threat from faculty at various schools that they may withhold their grades in protest to pressure schools to drop any charges or allegations against protesters: “When the university sees that folks are withholding grades, they get scared. They’re scared because we’re flexing our collective power, and optimally, that fear drives them to the bargaining table, and then we win.”
Such threats have already worked as universities have caved to demands at schools like Northwestern or dropped charges against students. Yet, these professors are using the grades of students to coerce universities. It is grossly unfair to students who were not involved in the protests or may oppose these protests. They have right to their grades and these professors have a contractual obligation to supply them. They should not be a tool for faculty protests.
Professors were free to join these students in occupying university buildings so long as they were willing to bear the consequences for their actions. To withhold grades to achieve political ends should be treated as a serious violation of faculty rules of conduct.
As for the torture allegation, Appel is dead wrong. There was no denial of food or water. The students had access to both, outside of the building. Unlawful occupation of a building does not create an obligation on the part of the university to support the occupiers. To call this a human rights violation is to belittle the deprivations of true victims of torture and other abuses.
Sonoma State University President Mike Lee has been suspended after sending out an email yielding to the demands of pro-Palestinian students and faculty. In a Wednesday statement, California State University Chancellor Mildred Garcia criticized Lee for “insubordination” and placed him on administrative leave. Lee had only been in the position for 20 months.
The action was taken soon after Lee’s Tuesday memo in which he announced four “points of agreement” with protesters encamped on the school’s Person Lawn. This included disclosure of university vendor contracts and pursuing “divestment strategies.” It further adopted an “Academic Boycott,” that will avoid formal collaborations that are “sponsored by, or represent, the Israeli state academic and research institutions.”
Sonoma State University is not the first to cave to protesters. In addition to schools like Columbia canceling their commencements, Northwestern (my alma mater) is the ultimate example of administrators picking the path of least resistance in the face of radicalized students. Recently, seven out of 11 members of the “President’s Advisory Committee on Preventing Antisemitism and Hate” resigned in protest.
Under the controversial agreement, the school will admit five Palestinian students each year, support two Palestinian faculty members annually, create special housing for Muslim students, and add students to Committees to review purchases from Israeli businesses.
Notably, at Columbia, the faculty overwhelmingly passed a vote of no confidence this week in President Nemat Shafik for her actions “to have our students arrested, and to impose a lockdown of our campus with continuing police presence.” These students occupied critical areas of campus, took over a building, trashed school property, and held workers briefly against their will.
On my own campus of George Washington, we are still not allowed access to our offices without prior approval and high fencing now blocks off much of the campus. With commencement this weekend, it may have the feel of graduating from the Gulag Archipelago for some of our students.
There are a hundred different definitions, and indeed an entire PBS series devoted to that question. “Civilization: The West and the Rest with Niall Feruguson” debuted in 2012, and the accomplished historian issued a companion book at the same time and with the same title.
“In ‘Civilization: The West and the Rest,’” the summary of the book relays, “bestselling author Niall Ferguson argues that, beginning in the fifteenth century, the West developed six powerful new concepts that the Rest lacked: competition, science, the rule of law, consumerism, modern medicine, and the work ethic.”
Those characteristics are fine and easily applied to exclude from “The West” tyrannies such as the People’s Republic of China, Russia and Iran and all of their puppet states or proxies. But it does not include the essential ingredient: freedom. “The West” is defined by this essential, must-have feature: Some significant measure of individual liberty. That liberty must include the rule of law and not the rule of despots or oligarchs. There is no rule of law where the law can be easily manipulated or avoided. There cannot be in any member nation of “The West” a secret police that operates without restraint and oversight but solely on the direction of unaccountable despot(s).
The members of “The West” have free elections at regular intervals and guarantee freedom of conscience, speech and almost always movement within their boundaries to their citizens. Constitutions of member states may be written as in the United States, or unwritten as in the United Kingdom.
Nations in “The West” may be large or small, rich or poor, and since the end of World War Two at least, can be found on every continent. Countries can be part of “The West” and then lose that status as has happened to Venezuela, or it can aspire and eventually join or re-join “The West” as has happened with many former members of the now defunct “Warsaw Pact.” Poland is one such country, as are many others surrounding Ukraine. Ukraine aspires to be part of “The West” and is fighting and its people suffering and many thousands dying to keep that dream alive. Japan was a tyranny and an empire but, defeated by the Allies in 1945, it is now among the West’s leaders.
Even as the definition becomes clearer, the first question becomes more and more difficult to answer: “Which nation leads the West?”
Until December 7, 1941, the leader of “The West” was the United Kingdom, standing alone after the defeat of France by Hitler’s Germany in 1940. After Pearl Harbor, the United States was thrust into that role and has remained there without question until this decade. Until very recently in fact.
Now, there are reasons to doubt that leadership, for the United States has failed to fulfill that role since 10/7, slipping again and again into a catastrophic ambiguity about the nature of the alliance of “The West,” and at times throwing into considerable doubt whether we can be relied upon as an ally and as an enemy of tyrants and maniacs. A similar palsy overtook us in the aftermath of our loss of the Vietnam War, during the presidency of Jimmy Carter. President Ronald Reagan cured and restored us. That palsy that marked the late 1970s in the United States has returned.
The U.S. remains by far the wealthiest and strongest nation in the world, but it is at present divided at home and deeply confused about good and evil, friend and enemy. President Biden, already infirm and increasingly incoherent, seems to be headed towards incapacity, but he is, by operation of the Constitution, the commander-in-chief of our supremely strong military. We cannot know what he is like in private and many Americans suspect he is not in full control of the Executive Branch. Certainly, many suspect that some among our allies are concerned about his “leadership.”
President Biden’s infirmity and growing incoherence has indeed caused the whole world to wonder if anyone at all is in charge of the country. Of course, few will say this out loud. America’s power to punish is still robust even if its president isn’t. So, our allies pretend that all is fine, while our enemies plot and plan. But since the collapse in Afghanistan signaled to the world that the United States was run by a band of weak bumblers headed in title if not in fact by a very old man of limited ability, it is hard to argue that the United States is “leading” ’anything at all these days.
If “The West” as understood as the family of nations committed to everything laid out above has any leader at all right now, it seems like Israel is the only candidate qualified to step up into the vacuum left by the U.S. paralyzed by the weakness of its leadership. But Israel is also under siege on the world stage and at war with ruthless enemies, and the United States is of a divided mind about Israel, with the left wing of the Democratic Party apparently afraid that Israel might actually win and destroy the military capabilities of Hamas and perhaps after that Hezbollah.
If the United States cannot proudly stand with Israel on the side of victory by Israel over an evil terrorist puppet of an evil theocracy, then we have to, at least for a season, given up title to leadership of “The West.” Israel is the unlikeliest of all nations to become the most courageous defender of the West’s highest and best traditions, but there it is: Alone and besieged, with weak-kneed allies and an absurd world media elite that has lost any idea of why a free press matters, this nation reborn in 1948 is still very young, but it is very much a nation of warriors and however rancorous its internal politics, it has not lost sight of its purpose.
An American and Israeli flag wave in the breeze on either side of signs that discuss IDF soldiers and people kidnapped by Hamas. (Nikolas Lanum/Fox News Digital)
In his introduction to a book of essays, “The City and Man,” the most significant political theorist of the last century, Leo Strauss, wrote this:
“However much the power of the West may have declined, however great the dangers to the West may be, that decline, that danger, nay, the defeat, even the destruction of the West would not necessarily prove that the West is in a crisis: the West could go down in honor, certain of its purpose. The crisis of the West consists in the West’s having become uncertain of its purpose.”
Israel is not uncertain of its purpose. America or at least its present Executive Branch quite obviously is. If there are any other nominees for the job of leading The West, by all means nominate them, or work to restore America to its former position. Until that happens, every citizen of the West looking for a nation committed to the freedom of its citizens and willing to defend that freedom at the cost of extraordinary losses of life and treasure, will need to study the example of Israel, and be willing to develop the weapons it will need to deter the enemies of freedom who have quite openly organized against “The West.”
Hugh Hewitt is host of “The Hugh Hewitt show,” heard weekday mornings 6am to 9am ET on the Salem Radio Network and simulcast on Salem News Channel. Hugh wakes up America on over 400 affiliates nationwide, and on all the streaming platforms where SNC can be seen. He is a frequent guest on the Fox News Channel’s news roundtable hosted by Brett Baier weekdays at 6pm ET. A son of Ohio and a graduate of Harvard College and the University of Michigan Law School, Hewitt has been a Professor of Law at Chapman University’s Fowler School of Law since 1996 where he teaches Constitutional Law. Hewitt launched his eponymous radio show from Los Angeles in 1990. Hewitt has frequently appeared on every major national news television network, hosted television shows for PBS and MSNBC, written for every major American paper, has authored a dozen books and moderated a score of Republican candidate debates, most recently the November 2023 Republican presidential debate in Miami and four Republican presidential debates in the 2015-16 cycle. Hewitt focuses his radio show and his column on the Constitution, national security, American politics and the Cleveland Browns and Guardians. Hewitt has interviewed tens of thousands of guests from Democrats Hillary Clinton and John Kerry to Republican Presidents George W. Bush and Donald Trump over his 40 years in broadcasting, and this column previews the lead story that will drive his radio/TV show today.
Northwestern University has agreed to a controversial settlement with pro-Palestinian protesters encamped on its campus this week, including
a commitment for scholarships for Palestinians,
Palestinian faculty appointments,
and special housing for Muslim students.
The protesters will also be allowed to continue their protests while agreeing to stay in a particular area of campus.
It will also put the students and supporting faculty on bodies to review any university investments and purchases, a major demand from supporters of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement.
Previously, protesters had reportedly prevented some students and faculty from entering buildings and engaged in property damage.
The Daily Northwesternreported the details of the deal and noted
“The University has committed to provide a conduit for students to engage with the Investment Committee of the Board of Trustees. It will also re-establish an Advisory Committee on Investment Responsibility this fall, which will include students, faculty and staff.
…
In addition, the University committed to some support for Palestinian students and faculty in the agreement. NU will ‘support visiting Palestinian faculty and students at risk,’ and will provide the cost of attendance for five Palestinian undergraduates to attend Northwestern.
…
The University also committed to providing an ‘immediate temporary space for MENA/Muslim students’ — a longtime demand from students on campus — and will provide and renovate a house for MENA/Muslims students as soon as possible. The final house is expected to come in 2026.”
It also includes a commitment of the university to intervene with employers to guarantee that students suffer no consequences for participating in protests in their jobs and internships.
Northwestern (my alma mater) has always chosen the path of least resistance when it comes to protesters, including at times surrendering core academic functions. I have been particularly critical of the loss of freedom of speech and academic integrity on campus.
Students previously succeeded in cancelling a speech by former U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions. Student Zachery Novicoff embodied the rising intolerance to free speech on campus. He is quoted as saying “There’s a limitation to free speech. That ends at overtly racist old white dudes.”
During his tenure, the university often seemed a mere pedestrian to mob action taken against dissenting voices. For example, we previously discussed a Sociology 201 class by Professor Beth Redbird that examined “inequality in American society with an emphasis on race, class and gender.” To that end, Redbird invited both an undocumented person and a spokesperson for the Immigration and Customs Enforcement. It is the type of balance that is now considered verboten on campuses.
Members of MEChA de Northwestern, Black Lives Matter NU, the Immigrant Justice Project, the Asian Pacific American Coalition, NU Queer Trans Intersex People of Color and Rainbow Alliance organized to stop other students from hearing from the ICE representative. However, they could not have succeeded without the help of Northwestern administrators (including Dean of Students Todd Adams). The protesters were screaming “F**k ICE” outside of the hall. Adams and the other administrators then said that the protesters screaming profanities would be allowed into the class if they promised not to disrupt the class. Really? They were screaming profanities and seeking to stop the class but would just sit nicely as the speaker answered questions?
Of course, that did not happen. As soon as the protesters were allowed into the classroom, they prevented the ICE representative from speaking. The ICE official eventually left, and Redbird canceled the class to discuss the issue with the protesters that just prevented her students from hearing an opposing view.
The comments of the Northwestern students were predictable after being told by people like Schapiro that some offensive speech should be treated as a form of assault. SESP sophomore April Navarro rejected that faculty should be allowed to invite such speakers to their classrooms for a “good, nice conversation with ICE.” She insisted such speakers needed to be silenced because they “terrorize communities” and profit from detainee labor. Here is the face of the new generation of censors being shaped by speech-intolerant academics like Schapiro:
“We’re not interested in having those types of conversations that would be like, ‘Oh, let’s listen to their side of it’ because that’s making them passive rule-followers rather than active proponents of violence. We’re not engaging in those kinds of things; it legitimizes ICE’s violence, it makes Northwestern complicit in this. There’s an unequal power balance that happens when you deal with state apparatuses.”
Last year, the Northwestern student body banned press from meetings to protect students from the harm of media coverage. The students also have previously frozen funds of conservative groups.
The Northwestern journalism faculty is little better. Steven Thrasher, the Daniel H. Renberg Chair of social justice in reporting at Northwestern, who trashed a reporter who waited for the facts before reporting on a police shooting.
Of course, it is not just conservative speakers that the students want to ban. In 2021, they called for the removal of the President of the Board of Trustees. Despite being a major donor and supporter of the school, J. Landis Martin was denounced as a Republican who donated money to former President Donald Trump.
The university issued a statement that “This path forward requires the immediate removal of tents on Deering Meadow, cessation of non-approved use of amplified sound and a commitment that all conduct on Deering and across campus will comply with all University rules and policies. Compliant demonstration can continue at Deering Meadow through June 1.”
The university has long lacked the fortitude to stand up to students engaging in disruptive protests. The danger of such passivity is evident on our campuses. As Henry David Thoreau warned, “all rivers and most corrupt men follow the path of least resistance.”
Professor Shai Davidai, an assistant professor at Columbia Business School, was reportedly denied access to the main campus on Friday as his school ID was “deactivated” during the recent protests over the Israeli-Gaza conflict. What was equally concerning is that the university did so for his own protection out of concern that, as an outspoken Jewish faculty member, he could not walk around the campus safely. It was reminiscent of the recent controversy of a man in London threatened with arrest because being “quite openly Jewish” would trigger pro-Palestinian protesters.
The most basic obligation of a university is to ensure the safety of its faculty and students from physical assaults. If there is a problem on campus, it is found in those students or faculty who would threaten a Jewish professor if he were to walk on campus.
This is not part of the debate over what language is considered a threat or hateful rhetoric. This is barring a professor because his status alone makes his presence inflammatory or dangerous. I cannot imagine how the solution was barring the potential victim of religious-based bigotry and violence.
We have not heard from Columbia University on the “deactivation.” Unless Professor Davidai is lying, someone cut off his access in the university. The university owes him and the Columbia community an immediate explanation. Indeed, University President Nemat “Minouche” Shafik should have issued a statement yesterday.
There are calls for Shafik to resign. That position is not helped by the silence on the barring of a faculty member. If the accounts are untrue, Shafik needs to say so. If they are true, she needs to explain the basis for this extraordinary action. I cannot imagine the basis for such a deactivation since Shafik has not been accused of any threatening conduct himself.
As major donors like Robert Kraft pull their financial support from Columbia, the school will need to respond more quickly and transparently to such controversies. That can start by reactivating the card of Professor Davidai and supplying whatever security is needed to allow him and others to walk around campus without fear of assault.
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American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
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