Alex Jacobs
4:50:43
My name is Alex Jacobs.
4:50:45
I wanna begin by saying I'm not a CUNY student or a faculty member, so my comment is strictly made as New Yorker, and I can't speak to anyone's experience on campus.
4:50:52
And I have very little desire to engage on the inside baseball student activism, but I can talk on what's been shared and advocated for in the report and in this meeting.
4:51:01
First, judge Lippmann's report seems mostly focused on the structural and procedural hurdles that some people have to reporting hate crimes and seems agnostic on any specific protest.
4:51:11
So I'm a little bit confused on how a mask ban promotes safety.
4:51:15
The report is also somewhat silent on this, but the council, for some reason, wasn't.
4:51:19
I think it's mighty big of council member Vernicoff to be so concerned with safety and what people bring to protests when we know that she brings a gun to them.
4:51:26
So masks are apparently this terrifying thing, an impediment to public safety.
4:51:30
But our takeaway should be that to councilor Vernicoff, guns are fine.
4:51:35
But since so many council members seem more concerned on making political polemics, let's recognize the report notes that the different definitions of anti semitism have multiple shortcomings.
4:51:44
The obvious issue being the antisemitic conflation of Israel and Zionism with Jewish people.
4:51:49
For what it's worth, there are more Christian Zionists in this nation than Jewish, so I'm not sure how Zionist should be a protected class or conflated with being a Jew.
4:51:57
But that aside, I'm not sure why anti Israeli propaganda is the subject of a discussion on antisemitism to begin with.
4:52:03
Israel is a country.
4:52:05
To be clear, it's a country that's perpetuating as a genocide and has been doing so for multiple decades.
4:52:13
I'm a little bit sick.
4:52:14
A Jew is a person.
4:52:15
A Jew is not a Zionist or an Israeli.
4:52:18
Zionism is a racist genocidal project.
4:52:20
Hillel isn't only a Jewish organization.
4:52:22
It's a Zionist organization.
4:52:24
It's wholly irrelevant if someone holds it to be a fundamental part of their identity because you're not justified to feel safe just because you claim racism is an immutable part of who you are.
4:52:34
And it's abundantly clear that council members are not really concerned with protecting Jews, students, or protest.
4:52:39
In fact, council member Yeager has said Palestine does not exist, but apparently, that's not hateful.
4:52:44
But God forbid that somebody supports the
