In Paris, Administrators Turn Down Student Demands to Cut Ties with Israel 

There has been no dithering in Lutetia. At the prestigious Sciences Po, which has educated so many members of the French elite, pro-Palestinian students and outside agitators, a great many of them Muslims, have occupied a building and demanded that the school cut ties to Israeli academic institutions. The administration has answered them with a Gallic “nothing doing.”

More on this brisk and brusque dismissal, that American universities would do well to copy, can be found here: “Paris’ Sciences Po school rejects protesters’ demand to review ties with Israel,” Reuters, May 2, 2024:

Paris’ Sciences Po university has rejected demands by protesters to set up a working group to review its relations with Israeli universities, its interim director Jean Basseres told reporters on Thursday, following a town hall with students and staff.

The townhall was one of the conditions last week for students to call off for now their protests over the war between Israel and Hamas and its allies….

The interim head of Sciences Po, Jean Basseres, held the town hall as the students requested, but only to take the occasion to let the students know that their demands on cutting ties to Israeli universities would not be cut, and were not subject to negotiation.

Students at several French universities, including Sciences Po Paris, Sciences Po Lille and Lille’s journalism school, have blocked or occupied their institutes in the wake of rallies in campuses across the United States against the conflict.

On Monday, French police moved in to clear dozens of protesters who had set up tents in a courtyard at the Sorbonne University in Paris.

However, those protests in France and elsewhere in Europe have not reached the same scale as seen in the United States.

In America, the university students pay much more to attend school, and feel more privileged, as “customers” whose parents are paying exorbitant bills, to ignore the campus rules, and to flout the laws than do university students in Europe, who know how important their education is to their future. Furthermore, many Europeans, especially the French, have had a much more disturbing experience in the last few decades with the Muslim migrants their governments have allowed into their midst, including many acts of Muslim terrorism. These include the murders of a dozen cartoonists at Charlie Hebdo, the massacre at the Bataclan nightclub, the truck running down and killing dozens of pedestrians in Nice, the torture and murder of Ilan Halimi by a Muslim gang, the murders of two elderly Jewish women, and others. Jews are now afraid to wear their yarmulkes in public, for fear of being attacked. “You can’t walk in Paris wearing a yarmulke. You’re taking your life in your hands,” says Steve Eisenberg, co-founder of the Jewish International Connection of New York. Cries of “Sale Juif” — “Dirty Jew” — can be heard in the Metro directed at anyone who “looks Jewish.” Ilan Halimi was kidnapped, tortured over several weeks, and finally murdered by a Muslim gang. Four Jews were killed in cold blood at a kosher grocery. A rabbi and three small children — two of them his, shot in front of him before he too was killed — were murdered outside a Jewish school in Toulouse. An 8-year-old boy was beaten to the ground outside his Jewish day school in Sarcelles, and a 15-year-old girl wearing a Jewish school uniform was slashed across the face by an unknown man. An 85-year-old Jewish woman, a Holocaust survivor named Mireille Knoll was stabbed eleven times and set on fire by her Muslim neighbor’s son, who had known her all his life and been befriended by her. Another elderly Jewish woman, Sara Halimi, was beaten and thrown out a window to her death by a young Muslim neighbor yelling “Allahu akbar.”

And then there are the daily encounters with Muslims not just by French Jews, but by non-Jewish French people as well. Muslims now make up 10% of the French population but 70% of the country’s prison population. It is the indigenous French who are their victims, of their crimes of violence, including rape and murder, but also of their crimes of property, including street muggings, shoplifting, armed robberies, home burglaries. The French are by now well aware that these economic migrants arrive in France not to contribute to the country, but rather to batten on the many benefits the generous French state provides, including free or subsidized housing, free medical care, free education, unemployment benefits (even without a work history in France), family allowances, and more. They do not integrate into French society, which in their view has been formed by Infidels, “the most vile of created beings.” Many French people, as a result, naturally feel no solidarity with Hamas, and the relative calm on French campuses testifies to that fact. At Sciences Po there were outside agitators, but no great groundswell of support among the students themselves. In Europe, people have been mugged by the reality of their Muslim migrants, who have made life so much more expensive, unpleasant, and physically dangerous, than would be the case without so many Muslim migrants.

That is why all over Europe less than a dozen campuses have so far seen pro-Palestinian demonstrations — and tent encampments at only two of those schools — by students and outside Muslim agitators. The lemming-like desire to be “with it” that has so affected American students on several dozen campuses from Columbia to UCLA, has not yet been displayed in Europe. And that, of course, is a good thing.