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Notes -
This is already the norm for legally-sanctioned protests, though, right? As I mentioned in other replies, it is common for police to prevent counter protestors from intruding on the space of protestors and vice versa.
The video looks like it is taken at a courtyard, one of a dozen around the University. They aren’t holding captive the main amphitheater at Columbia or something, where yeah there would be a concern regarding the reasonable use of university amenities. Ironically, you could even argue that the courtyard is seeing greater facility during this protest, given the population density from the looks of it. But I’m not familiar with the layout of the university and where the video is taken.
That's actually a fun question! The rules for how police can separate protestors and counterprotestors are complex. And this clearly flops many important prongs of that test.
This thread is south of this video, which was from Yale, about access to a building. And I buy people being blocked from just a few public fora about as much as I buy someone being a 'little bit pregnant'.
It was great, for the one side able to use it, isn't the most compelling argument for neutral access to public fora.
I had asked the OP for evidence regarding Columbia but yeah, the video in the Twitter thread is from a Yale courtyard. There is no evidence he is being blocked from entering a building (at 9pm).
No, it is clearly a courtyard. We would need a longer video to prove anything more than that.
You would have to argue that regarding the obvious and clear special concerns of a student-led protest movement
Well, Meinecke did not engage with any counter-protesters and had his own location where he was protesting.
Are you going to spell them out, or just make vague motions about the horror or someone taking video of a public protest, or of someone in a stupid hat smirking at them?
You want to try that, again?
If you had read your own link, you would have found that Meinecke settled in a protesting location and subsequently counter protestors came to his location to disrupt him. We can turn on our thinking caps and realize that in our example at Yale, the Palestinian protesters are the original protesters.
and
If you continued reading your link, you would have found that one of the Court’s advised remedies was to make the counter-protestor step back from the original protestor.
These are the same actions taken by the original protesting unit to prevent confrontation with the Jewish student: he can counter protest mere steps away from the protest, just not where the original protestors are packed like sardines protesting. They self-barricaded themelves to prevent confrontation. It is commendable, but not exactly surprising, that these intelligent Yale student performed the exact actions that a Court had recommended to a police department, while using completely non-aggressive means (holding hands chained together). As to why there weren’t police officers doing this already, that’s a significant question that the admins should answer.
Do you really think that if the police were there to ensure the safety of student both protesting and counter-protesting, that they would have allowed both protestors and counter-protestors to stand side by side in a dimly lit courtyard? I just find this totally unreasonable, as there is no benefit at all to that, unless you are neurotically obsessed with the idea of punishing protestors who don’t get their little protest stamps confirmed for not following legal minutiae.
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