My new video!
How bad is Antisemitism on campus?
Will Leftist college students give me money to kill Jews?!!! pic.twitter.com/32hMNAOpMO— Ami Horowitz (@AmiHorowitz) December 21, 2023
Ami Horowitz
@AmiHorowitz
My new video!
How bad is Antisemitism on campus?
Will Leftist college students give me money to kill Jews?!!!
The video linked to in the tweet starts with a clip of Horowitz talking to a San Francisco State University student whose back is facing us. Horowitz says,
“…And we want to fund operations against soft targets, schools, hospitals, Jewish cafes…“
The video then cuts to Horowitz talking straight to camera. He says,
“I’m Ami Horowitz and anti-semitism is rising precipitously across the globe. How bad is it? I’m here at San Francisco State University, one of the most left-leaning instersectional schools across the country.
I’m here to raise money to kill Jews.”
Horowitz, who, in case anyone is unclear on this point, is not actually trying to raise money to murder Jews but to warn how commonplace support for the murder of Jews has become at American universities, proceeds to politely stop various young people who are walking along the paths in the SFSU campus and solicit their support for terrorism against Jews. There is no obfuscation about “Zionists” or “Israelis”; Horowitz says “Jews” throughout and is abundantly clear that he is talking about physical violence. In the sequence starting at 1:02 he says, “Attack, blow things up … blow shit up … all we have a rockets and suicide bombers”. The SFSU students are fine with that.
I can sympathise with Rebecca Levin who said in the replies,
Can you release any full conversations without breaks? I find this a bit hard to believe even as a Jew who recently graduated from college and editing can be deceptive and well, I’d really like for you to be a fraud vs this actually being real.
I, also, would really like this not to be true.
It would be a good thing for Horowitz to release the full videos. Deceptive editing is on my mind right now. Remember the way that George Eaton of the New Statesman was nice as pie when he went to interview Sir Roger Scruton and then maliciously edited Scruton’s words to make it seem that Scruton believed that each Chinese person is “a sort of replica of the next one”, when what Scruton had actually said was how frightening it was that the Chinese Government was trying to force each Chinese person into being a replica of the next one? Remember how Eaton posted a picture of himself swigging champagne to celebrate how he had got Scruton fired from an unpaid government role?
Well, that same George Eaton is celebrating again now. He has just been made Senior Politics Editor of the New Statesman. Deceptive editing does happen and is no bar to a successful career in journalism. At least… not if the journalist is left wing, a protection that Mr Horowitz does not have.
Like Rebecca Levin, if Mr Horowitz’s video were to be revealed to be deceptively edited, the moment of annoyance I would feel of seeing left wingers gloat at the “gotcha” would be far, far outweighed by the relief of knowing that it was not really the case that 28 out of 35 San Francisco State University students Horowitz spoke to expressed support for killing Jews and 17 out of 35 students Horowitz approached pledged money to kill Jews.
But, even though I would like to see the full unedited videos, it is difficult to see how the girl with the black bag could claim to have misunderstood Horowitz when he told her at 0:36 that he was raising money to strike Jews “around the world, in France, in Germany, in Britain, wherever they are”. Conceivably he could have edited out her horrified objections to this proposed terrorism, but could he really have made her appear to say, as she does say at 1:14, “Because it’s like, part of their religion. Like, they wanted to take over”? She then pledges him $30.
Given that the presidents of Harvard, MIT and the University of Pennsylvania, three of the top universities in the United States, found it tricky to say whether calling for the genocide of Jews was against the rules of their respective universities, I suppose we should not be surprised that San Francisco State University (“SF State prepares its students to become productive, ethical, active citizens with a global perspective”) wants to follow their lead.
Is contributing money that one has been explicitly assured (0:55) will be used to blow up “cafe’s, hospitals, Jewish schools, Jewish buses, synagogues, that kind of thing” legal in the United States? Whether it is or not, is there any good reason why the anonymity of sweetie with the black bag and the others who openly put their support, and in many cases their money, down for some Jew-killing should be preserved?
The full video should indeed be released.
I hope it has NOT been deceptively edited – but deceptive editing should be condemned, including deceptive editing by my own side.
As for the general situation – Marxism (which is what “intersectionalism” really is – “Woke” means MARXIST and if anyone does not like me pointing that out, that is their problem not mine) teaches that inequality is caused by “exploitation and oppression” so if “Palestinians” (a term that Muslims started to use for themselves only a few decades ago) are poorer than Jews, the Jews (by definition) must be “exploiting and oppressing” them.
“Woke” Marxism, like all forms of Marxism, can not be reasoned with, and trying to compromise with it is suicidal, it-must-be-rejected.
“But Paul the leading Corporations on the planet now push these doctrines”.
I know they do. My statement is still correct.
The Corporate State has to go – the doctrines it pushes are both false and evil.
This is one of the reasons why such conservatives as Jonah Goldberg are utterly mistaken – they still think that we should “defend the institutions” – they do not grasp that the institutions are corrupted and now serve the opposite of what they were created to serve.
It is not a matter of a “threat to the institutions” by this or that person – it is the institutions themselves, the system itself, the corruption has already taken place – the institutions now serve evil, they are evil, and they must be defeated.
“But the FBI….” “but the Justice Department…..” – including the FBI, including the “Justice” Department.
I trust that Ami H. did not introduce himself by his real name.
I looked at the video partly to see whether i could identify him as a Jew. (Not that i am much good at that.) He reminded me of Ryan Reynolds with dark hair — but if you disagree, i won’t argue.
Just to play Devil’s advocate: he could have messed up with the temporal order of the clips.
Release the tape!
Is there not some California state law, analogous to the one that believe criminalises recording a phone conversation without permission, that would enable the little vermin to sue him should their identities be revealed?
I was wondering about the legality of this, too. Despite the protections of the First Amendment, if the law were strictly applied, Ami Horowitz could probably be prosecuted for solicitation to murder, or some such. Meanwhile the people who said they would give him money to kill Jews could probably be prosecuted for conspiracy to murder, or commit acts of terrorism. (Disclaimer: I’m not a lawyer.)
Certainly, if someone approached me in the street and asked me for money to kill Jews – or anyone else, for that matter – I would go to the police. OK, it would probably be a joke, albeit a very sick joke, but he might also be serious. After all, after a mass shooting all too often it becomes clear the shooter had had violent fantasies and had talked of killing people – like yesterday’s shooter in Prague.
I also think he should also release the full tape. FWIW, I think that journalistic obligation means that they should ALWAYS release the full tape just as any scientist has an obligation to release ALL his experimental data — and when they don’t you immediately smell a rat. He did, in fairness, give a numerical summary at the end.
If I were ever interviewed by the press I would do what a lot of right wing people are starting to do — namely make my own independent, full tape of the interview.
Nonetheless, I often see these “on the street” interviews — commonly on Fox News — about how dumb Americans don’t know basic things like who wrote the Declaration of Independence or who we fought in 1776. But I am sure if I interviewed enough people and selectively edited I could get a news piece where people didn’t left from right or what day it was, or what holiday we celebrate this Monday coming.
And on that note a Merry Christmas to all Samizdata-ers.
If ejecting the Israelis from Gaza and the West Bank and/or wiping Israel off the map is that important of a cause, all those students have to do is hop on a plane and go there. I have no doubt Hamas would be more than happy to hand the future martyr a AK-47 and a couple magazines and send them to go do the necessary things. But it’s not about doing things, it’s about feeling like they’re doing things by protesting. It’s safe to raise money, just like Teddy K did in Boston to fund the IRA during the Troubles. It’s safe to protest in a country where the cops and army aren’t going to roll in with machine guns. It’s safe to make statements where the most that happens if you have to scrub your social media feed if someone notices that you’ve been calling for mass murder.
Someone else needs to do the fighting and killing and dying. I’m doing the important work of carrying a sign. It’s the same mindset of the people who send homicide bombers into a market or temple.
Straining every sinew to be fair, if someone asked me to put money towards terrorism against an ethnic group, or any similar activity, I wouldn’t give them money but I might well say something noncommittal out of fear – both the lesser fear of getting into an unpleasant confrontation and the greater fear of getting attacked by someone who had just demonstrated they believed in terrorism. Then, having extricated myself, like Schrödinger’s Dog said, I’d go to the police. If any of those students can show they contacted the police or the campus authorities, I would not hold what they said at the time in order to get the nutter to go away against them.
That was a sickening video to watch. Calling the police was the least anyone could do. I would have hoped, at first, that someone would have detained the interviewer first, with whatever violence that took, and held him until the police arrived. Then I wondered about the deniability of these interviews. That makes it more complicated. At least an accoustic recording would help, plus gathering names of others who had been interviewed. And then, what? To discover it had been a hoax from the start? Pretty infuriating. But that is conjecture, the awful ‘actuality’ remains, as captured by those video clips. Utterly dreadful.
Anonymity of his interviewees is valuable to Horowitz insofar as it lets him avoid the “false light” defamation lawsuits that each individual student could start once their initial embarrassment wore off. (Not “win” – “start”. But it’s still expensive for Horowitz to prevail over them.) He doesn’t need to show their faces in order to make his point, so why introduce that element?
As for “show your work!” – if he was showing everyone’s faces, and facing the resultant lawsuits, he’d likely have a gapless recording running, so that he could prove what happened every second he was out there. As he’s structured things, his legal risk is low, so his need for proof is low.
His desire for proof is different from his legal need for proof, of course. But he could never satisfy everyone. He could have every second of interaction recorded, and some people are going to accuse him of fabricating the vid through AI.
Here we see the sad fact of reality that stems from the fact that these deracinated feckless children really have no damn idea at all what they are supporting when they say those words.
It’s an artifact of the left; they’ve no grasp on the reality of things. They’ve never, ever experienced real life.
They want the criminals all treated luvvy-duvvy style, with no bail and no jail time for heinous crimes of violence. Yet, they themselves have never experienced crime, let alone violent crime. They’ve never been held up at knifepoint for a few bucks, their lives threatened by some drug-using POS. They’ve never had someone stick a gun in their face at their jobs, demanding the few bucks out of their till. They’ve never gone bankrupt, or know anyone who did, because their little mom-and-pop grocery store was robbed so many times. To them, life is just a game, a Sim with better fidelity than the one on the computer screen.
Some of them never break through to reality. Those are the same ones demanding that the killers of their friends not be punished. There are others, however, that change their minds with a stunning rapidity, once it’s all brought home to them personally.
And, understand this: This is the very same thing that happened after 9/11. You had literal decades of Americans, particularly servicemen and women, getting killed by al Qaeda and other terrorist groups overseas. Nobody cared, nobody reacted. Then, they kill a few thousand investment bankers in a New York City tower complex, and it’s “Oh, holy sh*t, this is real, this coulda been me, not some lower-class scum that had to enlist…”
I’ve recently come to the conclusion that it was a mug’s game, putting my life on the line to defend these people for twenty-odd years of my life. Their kids are the ones you see there on the screen, agreeably willing to support killing Jews. Same sort of people that told me, when I was a recruiter, that their kids were “…meant for better things…” than the common defense.
Kinda reminds me, in a way, of the John Cleese interview where he bemoans the death of “traditional Britain”, after having spent a lifetime of tearing it down via comedic mockery. Many of the Jewish cultural figures that I can think of, Bari Weiss among them, spent some considerable time tearing down traditional America. Witness now the fruits of their labor…
I’d laugh if it weren’t so damn unnecessary and so tragic. We’re going to see pogroms in this country, and I guarantee you that the Jews getting the blades stuck in are not going to be the ones who participated in it all, and they’re also not going to understand that there were a lot of Jews complicit in setting the conditions for those pogroms. They keep voting for their actual enemies, while those enemies nod along with them, lulling them into a sense of security. Again, tragicomic illustration of the old Aesop about the Scorpion and the Frog. Anti-Semitism is baked into a lot of leftist thought, because most of the people who invented it were self-hating Jews. Like their favorite failed godlet, Marx.
It’s also all of a piece with the post above this one in the queue. The left shifts meanings of words the way you used to have to shift a manual transmission, and the way “Zionism” now equates to “Nazism” in all too many minds is a perfect example of that. As well, the way these blithe little children discuss “striking” at Jews? That’s all totally consonant with calling Lockerbie a “disaster”, when we all know damn well what they really mean by it.
Because it’s like, part of their religion. Like, they wanted to take over
You got the wrong religion, lady.
Ironic really when you consider the actual religion that wants this.
Natalie.
Would you really go to today’s police?
I’m afraid I genuinely believe what would once have been simple and unthinking good citizenship has become a crapshoot.
Depending on the ethnicity or sexuality of the person you are reporting in good faith are you 100% confident that, as a soft target with zero intersectional points, you will not be the one under investigation for a non-crime hate incident?
Anyway in this instance none of the student scum actually handed over any money. Even the worst lawyer would have a field day defending his or her young unworldly clients who (as you have already said) merely did whatever they thought necessary to placate the scary man who, and here’s the kicker, was saying horrible antisemitic things about those poor Jews that everyone on campus supports (takes out large onion).
I’ve known SF State and the people who go there for many decades. The video looks totally legit.
SF State has people like Angela Davis as faculty. Yes, that criminal psychopath fraud. State is a really depressing 1960’s campus located in a nowhere place beside a shopping mall right by where 19’Ave turns into the 280 freeway. Most of the students are either ESL students from Asia. Too busy studying to have political opinions. People trying to build class credits to transfer to a real university but cannot afford UC fees etc. Or the idiot kids of the affluent suburbs who take class credits at State so they can tell their parents they are going to collage and can keep getting their allowance / family money / etc. Some of the “students” at State have been taking a few credits each year for years but have still not graduated. Kind of a local joke.
So very easy to find at State these “students” and I might add faculty who would be more than willing to give money to kill Jews. Because of “oppression” and what not. And yes, these people are really that ignorant, stupid and low information. And have the smug superciliousness that goes with this profound ignorance.
As for the legality. Its illegal under California law to record private conversations. But something like this, a voluntary interview in a public place, that would probably have implicit consent. So looks legally kosher. So to speak.
it’s more likely they interviewed many more people than appeared in the video then just cherry picked who was shown. this is a standard technique with these kind of street interviews.