Democrats Need a Programmatic Alternative to Mass Deportation, Not Just “Resistance”

This op-ed was first written in May 2025 and then modified over the month of June as President Trump’s detentions of unauthorized immigrants began to increase in intensity and as the “No Kings” demonstrations of June 14 attracted millions to their day of protest. A shortened version appeared in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette on July 12, 2025 under the mostly misleading headline, “On Immigration, Trump and the Democrats both went too far.” The latter headline implied that the op-ed was a piece of detached analysis, when it was really meant as a call to political action for the Democratic party.

---

The recent focus on President Trump’s provocative and possibly illegal militarization of the immigration issue has obscured the vulnerability of his underlying policy on the subject itself. Democrats would do well to refocus attention on that policy. With the number of new unauthorized arrivals now down to near zero, the moment is ripe for Democrats to advance a broad proposal for bipartisan immigration reform that substantially accepts the Trump-era restrictions on new border crossings and visa violations – which began during the final year of the Biden administration – while urging a path to citizenship for the millions of illegal immigrants, other than convicted criminals, who are already here.

In brief, Democrats should say yes to border restrictions, no to mass deportations. There are strong reasons to believe that a majority of Americans would support such a middle position.

The more the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency shifts its attention away from alleged gang members and foreign student radicals and begins to detain the likes of nonthreatening workers from car washes or locally-popular proprietors of family-owned businesses – as has happened in the Philadelphia area, where I live – or restaurant workers, as just happened outside of Pittsburgh, the more likely will opposition develop to such inhumane and seemingly incomprehensible practices. The same goes for more nationally publicized raids on garment, construction, and landscape workers in California, Florida, and Massachusetts, which have often resulted in painful separations between family members. These actions, notwithstanding the president’s latest pledge to avoid going after agricultural and hospitality workers, are creating an opening for more sensible immigration proposals to be considered.

Despite Mr. Trump’s repeated assertions that voters delivered him a “mandate” for all his actions on immigration, there are signs that a solid majority of Americans oppose mass deportations on both humanitarian and practical grounds. As one Trump supporter in a rural part of Missouri explained her decision to aid a recently-jailed restaurant coworker, a forty-five-year-old woman who came to the United States from Hong Kong on a tourist visa twenty years ago and now has three American-born children, “I voted for Donald Trump, and so did practically everyone here [in Kennett, Missouri]. But no one voted to deport moms. We were all under the impression we were just getting rid of the gangs….” The detained woman’s church has organized a prayer vigil for her, and hundreds of local residents have signed petitions to bring her home.

A recent national poll conducted by the centrist organization Third Way found that while 90% of voters agreed that “We should deport any immigrant who is convicted of a violent crime,” fully 75% also stated that “We need to establish a pathway to citizenship for hardworking immigrants who have been living and working here for years, even if they came here illegally.”

Democrats can look to several past precedents for models of a programmatic alternative to the president’s policies. The most promising initiative came in June 2013 when the Senate passed a comprehensive immigration reform bill by a 68-32 vote, with 14 Republican senators (including Marco Rubio and Lindsay Graham) joining 52 Democrats and 2 Independents in favor. The bill promised strict border security; it reorganized visa preferences for legal immigrants, including temporary workers; and it established a five-year path to citizenship for “Dreamers” (children who arrived illegally in the U.S. under age 16) and a 13-year path to citizenship for those immigrants who arrived illegally as adults. The latter path required applicants to pay a $1000 fine for having broken the law when they first entered the country or overstayed their visa, to pass English-language proficiency and United States history and civics tests, to be free of a criminal record, and to pay an additional $1,000 in processing fees for the verification of their applications. Unfortunately, the effort died when the House rejected the bill.

More recently (2023-24), a bipartisan group of 38 Congressional representatives (30 Democrats and 8 Republicans), including three Pennsylvanians (Democrats Chris Deluzio and Chrissy Houlahan and Republican Brian Fitzpatrick) proposed the Dignity Act, which called for strong border security and a streamlined, 60-day asylum process, along with a path toward legalized residency for Dreamers and other undocumented immigrants. To be legalized, these immigrants would have to pass a criminal background check and pay $6,000 in fines and restitution fees.

Given President Trump’s hold over the current GOP, it might seem foolish to aim for bipartisan legislation. But that assessment fails to reckon with what the coming months may bring in terms of chaos and likely clashes between extremists on the right (including within the federal government) and left. We have already seen plenty of evidence of such extremism in Los Angeles. Under these changing circumstances, it is critical that Democrats hold out a civically responsible path toward sensible immigration reform, to which disaffected Republicans, even if small in number at first, might gravitate. Such an approach will pave the way for significant gains in the 2026 midterm elections. Prying just 10% of Trump voters away from the Republicans on this issue would likely bring Congress back under Democratic control.

Democrats are absolutely correct to be vocal in condemning the Trump administration’s violations of due process rights of detained students and other immigrants, along with its other likely infractions of the law. These high-profile cases touch on important legal and moral principles. But these cases are mostly a side show for the general population. Because of the unpopularity of most targeted student radicals and alleged gang members and the resort to vandalism by the most extreme protesters, the president even uses these few examples to build support for the far wider deportations he has now set in motion. Democratic “resistance” cannot substitute for programmatic opposition that will actually cut into the wider base of support for President Trump’s immigration policy.

Democrats also need to acknowledge where they went wrong from 2016 through 2023, when they overlooked the negative consequences of far too many people entering or remaining in the country illegally. Only by making this admission will they regain the trust of American voters. On this basis they can then return to their party’s more longstanding and valuable commitment to a controlled flow of legal immigrants. Democrats must not shy away from explaining why immigration is good for America’s future, both economically and demographically, provided the flow of newcomers can be kept within limits and conducted with sensitivity to occupational competition and settlement patterns. With these principles in mind, Democrats can forcefully proclaim that there is no good reason to deport the very same kinds of people today who have always added so much to our nation’s wealth and character.

The “Settler Colonial” Trap for Israel

A review of Adam Kirsch’s On Settler Colonialism: Ideology, Violence, and Justice (Norton, 2024)

This extended review of Adam Kirsch’s book, On Settler Colonialism: Ideology, Violence, and Justice (Norton, 2024), appeared in Athenaeum Review, Issue 11 (Spring 2025): 66-71. Among the journal’s minor changes to my article was the omission of parenthetical page references to Kirsch’s book. I have retained these page references from my original draft in the copy reprinted here. The footnotes are the same in both versions.

---

Adam Kirsch’s new book, a powerful critique of the concept of settler colonialism as applied to the history of Israel, could not have arrived at a more timely moment. Kirsch outlines a number of essential points that collectively show the shallowness of viewing the establishment of the state of Israel through the lens of this concept, one that has become ubiquitous on college campuses. Moreover, he demonstrates how the concept has been adopted by pro-Palestinian and anti-Israeli activists not for its value as a term of scholarly analysis but rather as a component of a political ideology aimed at undermining Israel’s legitimacy. At a length of a mere 140 small-sized pages, the book’s brevity and lucidity make it readily assignable for undergraduate and graduate courses (and even for high school social studies classes), thus addressing exactly the audience of idealistic, yet naïve and hot-headed students (and teachers) who today are most in need of reading it. Along with these achievements, however, Kirsch’s book exhibits two shortcomings that point in the direction of further work needed to complete the task the author has so forcefully begun.

The term “settler colonialism” emerged in the 1960s and ’70s among academics interested in studying the phenomenon of African and Asian decolonization, a process that unfolded with great rapidity following the end of World War II. Scholars used the term to distinguish between colonies like India and Vietnam, where the European mother country sent few of its own people to settle there, and those like Rhodesia or Algeria, where European settlers came to comprise significant minorities of the population. However, by the 1980s and ’90s the concept had become a pejorative label – really, little more than a slogan – with which to stigmatize the nation of Israel, itself formed during the same era.

As Kirsch points out, almost none of the characteristics common to settler colonies fits the history of modern Israel’s creation. There was no “mother country” which “sent” its Jewish inhabitants to the Ottoman Empire’s Syrian and Sidonian (later, Beirut) provinces or its Jerusalem district (together including the area referred to intermittently as Palestine)1 when the Zionist movement began in the 1870s and ’80s. Jews fled the Russian Empire and other countries of Eastern and later Western Europe as refugees from the persecution of pogroms and then the Holocaust. They came on their own steam, in any way they could muster, though helped by the philanthropy of well-to-do Jews in Europe and the United States. They bought land from Turkish and Arab landowners. These newcomers to the place that had given birth to both Judaism and Christianity, moreover, could make their own justifiable claim to being its indigenous people, a term frequently employed by today’s settler-colonial ideologues in an attempt to draw a sharp distinction between those said to be the original inhabitants of an area and its later colonial invaders. Not only had the ancient kingdoms of Israel and Judah and then the kingdom of Judea persisted from early in the first millennium BCE until the Romans killed or enslaved and carried off the great majority of the region’s Jews (perhaps about one million in number) in the first and second centuries CE, but Jewish people trickled back and continued to live in Jerusalem, Safed, Hebron, and other Palestinian towns and villages, sometimes in substantial numbers, during the many centuries following the conquest of the area by Arabs and Islam in the seventh century.2

Even when the British endorsed the Zionist project by proclaiming their support for a “Jewish homeland” in Palestine with the Balfour Declaration of 1917, this important decision did not mean that the British would now call all the shots there. The growing Jewish population in Palestine faced off with the British on numerous occasions during the period of the British Mandate (1920-1948) over the issue of how many Jewish immigrants would be allowed in. Indeed, the British ultimately turned their back on the Jews in 1939. Were it not for the moral pull, particularly on President Truman and the Americans, exerted by the Holocaust and especially by the plight of more than 100,000 displaced European Jews who had survived the Second World War, the modern nation of Israel might never have come into existence.3

Since Kirsch’s book centers on how the notion of settler colonialism serves a broader ideology, some of the book’s strongest parts go toward identifying that ideology, which turns out to be a species of revolutionary leftism that adopts a particularly uncompromising, almost nihilistic stance. The clue to understanding this outlook resides in the fact that once a country has been labeled a settler colonial society, there are no remedies to ameliorate this oppressive situation short of complete decolonization. Yet, significantly, the ideology began by taking aim at nations like the United States, Canada, and Australia, countries in which the earlier inhabitants had been reduced in number – typically, these theorists assert, through genocide – to tiny minorities next to the huge populations of settlers and their descendants, who, of course, no longer think of themselves as settlers or colonists. Since there is no possibility of removing the invaders from these countries, the only outcome for those among the settlers’ descendants who become aware of their nations’ terrible histories is to feel the guilt that comes with having committed an original sin. The current practice, for example, of “land acknowledgments” to Native American groups that once occupied the territory on which a museum or university now sits, offers but a poor substitute for any genuine atonement. “The goal,” Kirsch writes, “is not to change this or that public policy but to engender a permanent disaffection, a sense that the social order ought not to exist” (34). 

Naturally enough, beneath such a deep sense of cultivated alienation often lurks the potential for violence, or at least for the glorification of violence, since few people can sustain a sense of severe personal guilt without experiencing a corresponding desire to do something cathartic to remove that stain from themselves. Enter the case of Israel. Here, to these ideologues, one confronts a fairly recent example of a new nation seemingly formed through the displacement of most of its original inhabitants, and one in which the roughly equal number of Jews and Arab Palestinians (about 7 million each) in the lands of the former British Mandate (Israel, Gaza, and the occupied West Bank) make imaginable the theoretical, if thoroughly unrealistic, possibility of “decolonization.” For leftists of many stripes, from anti-capitalist and antiracist fighters to environmentalists, feminists, and gay rights activists, the Israel-Palestine conflict provides, as Kirsch puts it, “a local address to a struggle that can otherwise feel all too abstract” (85). It was but a short step from accepting this premise to the corollary of numerous groups and individuals on the left cheering on the murderous actions of Hamas on October 7, 2023.

Kirsch is hard-hitting against this ideology. He condemns its all-or-nothing, purist stance toward perceived social injustice, arguing instead for such moderate, reform-minded strategies of amelioration as those adopted in the past by the organizations of the civil rights movement of the 1960s or the National Congress of American Indians from the 1940s up through today. Such groups recognized that everything good and everything bad do not line up neatly on two separate sides in any conflict. Extremist ideologies like that of settler colonialism fail to see that migrations of people and displacement (or partial displacement) of one group by another, whether by force or by assimilation (or, as in the case of the Americas, Kirsch omits to add, principally by the inadvertent spread of disease), have been a common occurrence throughout human history. Naturally, such upheavals in the past were not carried out in ways that would meet today’s standards of human rights and dignity; indeed, brutality and cruelty were more often the rule than the exception. But when revolutionary ideologies have occasionally taken power (as they did in eighteenth-century France and twentieth-century Russia and China), their attempts to radically restart history in the name of utopian ideals only succeeded in producing new atrocities atop the ones they believed they were avenging. Such disastrous ends would surely be the result if the settler-colonial ideologues’ goal of “decolonizing Palestine” were to be put in motion. Hamas on October 7 offered a preview of just such a result.

Given that Kirsch has so plainly – and correctly, it seems to me – identified the settler-colonial misreading of the history of Israel and Palestine with the historic left, it is peculiar that he chooses to end his book with a mostly laudatory treatment of an essay, “On the Concept of History,” written by the German Jewish Marxist theorist Walter Benjamin in 1940 while Benjamin was living in Paris, on the run from the Nazis. What Kirsch likes about this essay is Benjamin’s reliance on the concept of despair to describe what history has meant for the majority of the world’s people. Such a bleak vision of the past could certainly make sense for someone writing in the face of fascism’s successful early conquests in Europe at that moment. But, in truth, the essay itself reveals Benjamin’s outlook to derive less from his immediate circumstances and more from his commitment to what he calls historical materialism, the Marxist diagnosis of history as a record of “barbarism,” a “tradition of oppression,” against which only a decisive, revolutionary break with the past will deliver relief. All attempts to produce slow but steady “progress,” Benjamin writes, are illusory and doomed to failure.4 This is exactly the same extremist stance as that adopted by today’s settler-colonial activists toward the social ills of the United States and Israel, with far less apparent justification than Benjamin’s precarious position in 1940 might have provided.

Kirsch does in the end depart from Benjamin’s maximalist outlook, so why privilege him with such extended treatment in the book’s final chapter? I think Kirsch’s decision to do so stems from a desire to add a religious dimension to his discussion. Benjamin was an unusual thinker of his era in astutely recognizing a religious longing beneath Marxist doctrine, even going so far in his “Concept of History” essay as to call historical materialism a puppet – he meant this as a positive characterization – whose strings were being pulled by theology. He was similarly at home in referring to his hoped-for revolution as the coming of the Messiah, an event he imagined as modeled after past moments of apocalyptic renewal that would wipe away all the despairs of history.5 Kirsch clearly finds Benjamin’s religio-political vision, based on the weighty notion of despair, compelling, but Kirsch rejects it in favor of what he calls a different kind of despair, one linked to a future that can find hope in repairing past wrongs through partial means of improvement. Kirsch believes he can find this second understanding of despair in portions of the Talmud, which, he relates, speak of the despair owners of lost or stolen articles like a garment, a donkey, or some coins, feel of ever recovering their possessions, especially once they have been passed along or resold to new and innocent parties. The Talmud’s ancient rabbis urge the original owners to accept compensation of some other sort for these goods so as not to create new injustices.

The discipline of religious studies has names to apply to these two different visions of despair and redemption: premillennialism and postmillennialism. In the first, there can be no justice (no thousand years of happiness) until after the Messiah has come. In other words, the Messiah must appear before the millennium can begin; all is dark before that apocalyptic moment arrives, delivering its Day of Judgment. In the second, justice (the thousand years of happiness) comes gradually through small steps of improvement, culminating in the Messiah’s return almost as an afterthought or reward. As Kirsch’s entire critique of the settler-colonial ideology makes clear, the author sides with the second of these redemptive visions, entailing a need for human beings to grasp the particulars of perceived social injustice with care and to proceed deliberately toward gradual changes that will produce more good than harm. But it is not evident to me how framing this choice in religious terms, as Kirsch does, helps bring about his admirable goal. If anything, the history of conflict in the Middle East suggests how frequently competing religious authorities have made compromise and small improvements difficult to achieve.

Kirsch’s turn toward religion at the end of his book, not to mention his elevation of Walter Benjamin’s thought, also obscures his earlier identification of the settler-colonial ideology as part of a longstanding leftist political tradition. This tradition owes more to the romantic distortions of psychological alienation from modern, capitalist society, to which intellectuals have so often been susceptible, than to any genuinely religious impulse. The discomfort left-wing intellectuals, often well-to-do themselves, feel from their participation in modern Western societies best explains the ideology’s underlying guilt and the way in which Israel has come to function as a convenient and vulnerable stand-in for these activists’ more powerful home nations.

Instead of leaving readers with a choice between two different religious approaches, I suggest that Kirsch’s work points to the need for a renewed focus on the political and social history of the Israel-Palestine conflict. Throughout his study, Kirsch alludes to a number of counter arguments taken from The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917-2017 (2020), by Rashid Khalidi, probably the most prominent American historian writing about the conflict from a pro-Palestinian perspective. Yet Kirsch fails sufficiently to rebut these arguments (a lack of precise footnotes doesn’t help his attempts). Two favorable reviewers of Khalidi’s book, both established scholars in the field of Middle Eastern Studies, have called it the best “single book” that they would now recommend both to students and general readers in order to understand the Israel-Palestine dispute.6 His book has also made it onto The New York Times’s weekly best-seller list consistently since October 7, 2023.7 Khalidi’s observations deserve careful evaluation and explicit rebuttal, if only because his book has brought the settler-colonial ideology to countless readers and will continue to do so. There have been several critical reviews of the book, including a strong one by Benny Morris in Jewish Review of Books, but a much greater volume of critical commentary is needed in terms of both scope and influence in order to avoid losing this vital contest of ideas over Israel’s legitimacy as a nation.8

Kirsch states at the outset of his study that he will not be addressing either the conduct of the current war in Gaza – an important subject of its own – or how to resolve the Israel-Palestine conflict itself (x). However, toward the end of the book he does rather ambiguously endorse the idea of a future two-state settlement, presumably based roughly on the divisions of 1967 (116). Indeed, this vision offers the only foreseeable way to resolve peacefully a dispute between two equally legitimate moral claims to the same piece of land, given the existing record of previous armed conflict. Khalidi, by contrast, endorses either the idea of a single Palestinian state in which Jews and Arabs somehow live together as equals or two separate states based roughly on the boundaries, drastically different from those within the region today, of the 1947 United Nations partition plan9 – both thoroughly unrealistic prospects. Bridging this gap in goals and expectations will require intense negotiations, now pushed well into the future owing to Hamas’s horrifying attack and the violence of the subsequent war in Gaza. Whenever these negotiations do begin, however, they will require the support of sober historical understanding, not the partisan distortions of ideology.

---

¹ Rashid Khalidi, Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness, (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), pp. 218n37, 28, 34, 221n69.

² Howard M. Sachar, A History of Israel from the Rise of Zionism to Our Time, 2nd edit., revised and updated (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996), pp. 18-20.

³ Sachar, pp. 287-295.

⁴ Walter Benjamin, Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. Hannah Arendt (Boston: Mariner Books, 1968), pp. 196-209, esp. pp. 200 and 202.

⁵ Benjamin, pp. 196, 205-206, 209.

⁶ Reviews in Journal of Palestine Studies 51.4 (2022):109-112, by Laila Parsons, Professor of Modern Middle East History, McGill University; and in Journal of Islamic and Muslim Studies 8.2 (2023), by Michael Vicente Perez, Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Memphis, TN.

⁷ Khalidi’s book had been on The New York Times’s best-sellers list for 33 weeks, as of June 2, 2024. See www.nytimes.com/books/best-sellers/2024/06/02/paperback-nonfiction/

⁸ Benny Morris, “The War on History,” Jewish Review of Books, Spring 2020. See also the valuable review by Michael Rubner in Middle East Policy 27.2 (Summer 2020): 173-177.

⁹ Rashid Khalidi, The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917-2017 (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2020), p. 251 outlines four possible options, but the weight of the book’s overall argument falls on the third and fourth of these options, the two noted in my text.

“Hate” Was Not the Problem at Penn (or Other Universities), Radicalism Was and Still Is

This essay appeared in slightly altered form on the website of Tablet Magazine on April 1, 2024 under the title, “Jew-Hatred Is Not the Problem at Penn (or Other Universities). Radicalism Is.”

---

Late last year Pennsylvania’s Governor Josh Shapiro interjected himself forcefully into the uproar over former University of Pennsylvania president Liz Magill’s Congressional testimony (in which she failed to say that calling for “the genocide of Jews” would necessarily violate the school’s code of conduct) and the events on the Penn campus that would soon culminate in her resignation. The governor came out strongly against antisemitism in all its forms – never bad in itself. But Shapiro’s widely reported speech on Sunday, December 10, 2023, at Philadelphia’s Rodeph Shalom synagogue, in which he proclaimed, “Hate has no place here,” misnamed the chief problem that had plagued Penn and a number of other universities this past fall. That problem was not the expression of group hatred toward Jews, of which only a handful of examples have existed on most American campuses for many years now, but rather the radical politicization of higher education to the detriment of the free expression of ideas, which constitutes the lifeblood of any college. Threatening in this way to undermine the very idea of a university, political extremism may also predictably endanger the safety and well-being of individuals – Jews among them – who live, study, or work at one.

In the flood of commentary that followed President Magill’s ouster, right-leaning columnists fairly pilloried elite institutions like Penn for their hypocrisy in scrupulously defending the legal principles of free speech on campus concerning criticism of Israel while ignoring years of restrictions on faculty and outside speakers whose views challenged “social-justice” norms on race, gender, religion, and other topics. Meanwhile, left-leaning columnists properly warned of dangers to academic freedom if wealthy donors, politicians, or other self-interested parties can bypass normal university procedures to influence educational content – in this case, in the name of opposition to antisemitism. Neither side in this clash has been keen to acknowledge its own contributions toward undermining academic freedom and diversity of thought at universities, turning the conversation into yet another skirmish in the “culture wars.” A focus on what has provided the stimulus for so many recent campus controversies, the perception of speech and actions that are considered hateful, may offer some clarity toward useful university reforms and an assessment of the current moment’s dangers for Jews.

Incidents of reported antisemitism at Penn this past fall received a boost from two singular events – a high-profile conference showcasing Palestinian literature and political activism, which took place on the campus in late September, and the savage assault by Hamas on Israeli civilians on October 7, precipitating the ongoing war between Israel and the terrorist organization in Gaza. As a result, the record of these incidents (detailed in the next three paragraphs), while at first glance startling in number, on further examination of what’s known about their circumstances suggests somewhat less cause for alarm. Overall, this record comports with the general findings of the Anti-Defamation League for two recent years, which downplay the significance of universities as settings for antisemitic attacks. For both calendar years 2021and 2022, the ADL found that just under 6% of the total number of antisemitic incidents occurring throughout the United States (which rose to its highest number on record in 2022 at 3,697 incidents; no doubt that number will be far higher for 2023) took place on college campuses. And most of the recent ones at Penn, as we will see, are best classified as political in nature.

The record for Penn this past fall is as follows: On September 13 students discovered a swastika painted on an inside surface of Penn’s Stuart Weitzman School of Design, with no apparent leads turning up as to the identity of the perpetrator or the significance of the precise target. On September 21 Penn’s Division of Public Safety apprehended a man for entering the campus’s Hillel building, overturning some furniture, and shouting, “F—k the Jews. They killed JC.” The man, who the Penn police said was “experiencing a crisis,” had been spotted earlier overturning trash cans on a nearby city street. His relationship to the Penn community has never been clarified. (The Washington Free Beacon, citing an unnamed Hillel spokesperson, reports that the intruder was a Penn student, but all other sources refer only to “an individual.”) As part of the three-day “Palestine Writes” conference, held on the campus September 22-24, speakers excoriated Israel from multiple angles [see link at paragraphs 6, 115], including as a nation of “settlers from Europe” who became “occupants of our country.” 

On September 27 the display of a foliage-covered booth for the Jewish holiday Sukkot, erected by Penn’s Chabad organization, was desecrated with unreadable graffiti, but Penn’s police did not consider the incident antisemitic. On October 16 a pro-Palestinian demonstrator, not affiliated with Penn, told students in a pro-Israeli counter-demonstration that they should “leave us in peace or go back to Moscow or Brooklyn.” He later pushed a bystander and ripped down pictures of Israelis held hostage by Hamas, for which he was apprehended by Penn’s police. Two days later a Penn library staffer also tore down pictures of the people assaulted and taken captive by Hamas. When confronted by a Jewish student over what he was doing, words were exchanged and the staffer swore at the student [see link at p. 17]. On October 20 students at the off-campus Jewish fraternity Alpha Epsilon Pi found the phrase, “The Jews R Nazis,” written on the door of an adjoining empty building (owned by a Jewish landlord). There are no leads as to the perpetrator(s).

On October 28 an Israeli flag was ripped down and taken from an off-campus residence hall for Orthodox Jewish students. The perpetrator was found to be a Penn student involved in the campus’s anti-Israel group, Penn Against Occupation [see link at p. 18]. On the night of November 8 Penn Against Occupation projected pro-Palestinian slogans, including “Let Gaza live,” “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” “Zionism is racism,” and “Penn funds Palestinian genocide,” onto the faces of a number of campus buildings, messages which President Magill denounced the next day as “vile” and “antisemitic,” promising a full investigation by the Penn Police. Throughout this period (with dates unspecified), according to Penn Hillel’s rabbi, “a small number of Penn staff members” received hateful, antisemitic messages and violent threats that targeted the recipients’ personal identities [see link at p. 21]. And on December 3 in a citywide protest, some 500 pro-Palestinian demonstrators ended a march by spray painting graffiti on several Penn properties and stores that line the campus.

Even a single one of these reprehensible incidents is one too many. But overall, how should we understand this record? Among these roughly ten incidents (leaving aside the “Palestine Writes” conference), two of the perpetrators were identified as Penn students (or a student group), a third as a Penn employee, and a fourth as holding an unspecified relationship to the campus community. A fifth perpetrator was an off-campus community radical. The perpetrators of four more of these incidents remain unknown, and one incident may not have been antisemitic at all. In terms of its content, despite the presence of occasional generic symbols of antisemitism, this record of attacks on Jewish targets is best described as an extremist outgrowth of political radicalism stemming from the longstanding Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The political character of most of these attacks is underscored by the fact that the Jewish population at Penn, by no means weak at 16% of the undergraduate student body, sponsored a variety of its own public, political stands, most supportive but some critical of Israel, during this same period. None of this interpretation goes to minimize the potential for violence against Jews embodied in the anti-Israeli radicalism at Penn (as I will turn to in a moment). Rather, it serves to name the threat in a manner that connects it to the dominance at so many American colleges today of radical left-wing ideology on behalf of causes said to represent such “oppressed groups” as African Americans, other people of color, and a variety of sexual minorities. At Penn, as at other college campuses, Palestinians, not Israelis or Jews, are considered an oppressed group.

For universities, the fact that these incidents derive more from radical political sentiments than from traditional Jew-hatred points the way toward how these institutions should handle the problem. It is lucky that ethnic hatred per se does not lie at the root of today’s campus woes, because colleges are not – or should not be – in the business of inculcating moral values or teaching civics. Those responsibilities are best left to families, lower-level schooling, religious bodies, and voluntary organizations. Universities exist for the purpose of furthering higher education and fostering the pursuit of truth through advanced research, both of which goals demand wide open forums for the presentation and discussion of ideas. At the same time, universities must proceed with internal rules that enable their mission to go forward and not be impeded by illiberal elements (whether arising from among faculty, students, administrators, or outside parties) who would disrupt their educational and research functions.

For many years now, universities have been doing exactly the opposite of what is required to support these goals. They have restricted the free-flow of ideas by “canceling” presentations they think might offend an “oppressed group,” while allowing protesters presumed to represent “oppressed groups” to take over campus buildings, block pathways, or interfere with quiet learning environments. Examples abound, from left-wing students at Middlebury College in 2017 shouting down sociologist Charles Murray’s guest lecture on cultural and genetic differences among social groups, to Penn’s own ongoing disciplinary investigation of law professor Amy Wax for, among other things, inviting a white supremacist to make a presentation to one of her classes. If anyone believes that radicals on the political right might not act similarly to restrict the speech they dislike, were they to be in control of these same universities, one need only glance at the attempt to institute more conservative tenets of orthodoxy in the teaching of American history at colleges in Florida.

As it happens, the threat to university life posed by political radicalism can best be mitigated by colleges adhering to these twin principles of encouraging wide-open speech – excluding foul language or any true threat of violence or intimidation directed at an individual or group (which would include, for example, any “call for the genocide of Jews”) – and placing strict physical limits on campus protests. There is no reason why, for example, the claim that Israel has committed “genocide” against the Palestinian people, or even that the nation of Israel should not exist as a refuge for Jewish people, abhorrent as these ideas are to me and many others, should be ruled out of order at a university. The best way to discredit such radical misconceptions and convictions is precisely by airing them to reasoned criticism and debate, including by experts in related fields of study, through lectures, classes, teach-ins, and written work. That’s what universities are for. The problem with the “Palestine Writes” conference was not that it was allowed to take place but rather that the faculty who set it up made no effort to seek balance or diversity in the perspectives and expertise that were represented on its panels. Meanwhile, plenty of college rules and criminal laws already exist for prosecuting anyone committing acts of disruption, vandalism, harassment, or personal assault on a college campus. They need to be enforced.

In responding to the recent increase in reported incidents of antisemitism, universities should resist the temptation simply to add “antisemitism awareness” to the list of topics already covered in the mandatory DEI (“Diversity, Equity, Inclusion”) orientation sessions that have become commonplace on campuses. There is little evidence that such efforts at overt moralizing accomplish their stated aims, while they more reliably inhibit the expression of unpopular views. Given that the greatest threat to the universities today stems from political radicalism, a far more effective counter to the ugly manifestations of campus protests lies in demonstrating the shallowness and dangers of the radicals’ ideas and rhetoric.

For Jews, the fact that recent campus actions perceived as antisemitic proceed from left-wing political beliefs as opposed to ages-old myths about the Jewish people, or, for that matter, as opposed to newer, right-wing political ideas like the “great replacement” theory, which holds Jews responsible for encouraging illegal immigrants to come to the United States, may offer little comfort. After all, acts of vandalism, shoving and swearing at individuals, or leaving anonymous, threatening messages are frightening and intimidating regardless of their perpetrators’ motives. Radical beliefs, which so often arise from misplaced anger and poorly understood historical relationships, also have a way of migrating from one side of the political spectrum to the other. Marx, for example, contributed an early, derisive text on Jewish commercialism (On the Jewish Question) that figured in the later evolution of European fascist thought. Additionally, at any point along the way a mentally ill individual might act on these radical ideas to produce terrible violence, or mob psychology might take hold of a portion of a radically engaged crowd, resulting in similar consequences. The latter development never happened at Penn this fall, but it almost did at New York City’s Cooper Union College, where pro-Palestinian demonstrators banged on the glass windows of the campus library, frightening some of the Jewish students inside, as a security guard kept the door closed.

Moreover, in the current era of collegiate-based pro-Palestinian radicalism, which appears to have arrived at Penn as early as 2015 with the rise of groups pushing the goals of the “Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions” campaign [see link at paragraphs 56-90], there really is an element of hatred involved. This is the hatred of Israel. One has only to witness the fury expressed by so many of the speakers at pro-Palestinian campus rallies to recognize that for most of the leaders, if not the followers, at these rallies, Israel is perceived as an illegitimate nation, whose majority Jewish population is living on stolen land that rightfully belongs to Palestinian refugees. This anger toward Israel not infrequently spills over into attacks on Jews who have no immediate connection to Israel. “[B]ecause you have never known the sanctuary of a home,” one presenter at Penn’s “Palestine Writes” conference put it, “…it’s no wonder you want our land for your own.” Who is the “you” in this sentence if not worldwide Jewry? And how else to explain the Penn rally speaker’s retort, noted above, to American Jews in the crowd to “go back to Moscow or Brooklyn,” or the target of one of the threatening messages, also noted above, in this instance conveying a bomb threat aimed at the Lauder College House, Penn’s newest, large dormitory, which was named for its biggest donors, Jewish family members of the Estée Lauder estate? One cannot read the 84-page civil complaint, filed in December by two Jewish students at Penn, alleging that Penn has allowed a hostile environment for its Jewish students to be created on its campus, without acknowledging the genuine sense of fear that evidently gripped many of these students (over 200 placed their names on one petition), as they watched and heard boisterous displays of anti-Israeli sentiment and received occasional antisemitic slurs week after week throughout the fall [see link at paragraphs 2, 101, 104, 107, 141-145, 161, 165-173, 191]. 

And yet, it would be a mistake to think the recent events at Penn and other American college campuses signify a true resurgence of virulent antisemitism akin to the widespread abuse Jews suffered during the 1930s in the United States, let alone in the cities of Europe. A number of factors serve to limit the current wave of anti-Jewish sentiment, but perhaps the main one is that the hostility at present really is focused on Israel, not on Jewish people as such. (See Eitan Hersh’s valuable observations about this distinction, as revealed in attitudes held by far left-wing as opposed to far right-wing college students.) It is probably not an accident that the lead student plaintiff in the civil lawsuit against Penn is a dual Israeli-American citizen [see link at paragraph 15], for he has reason to fee l particularly vulnerable to attack under these circumstances. And while this young man succeeded in obtaining the signatures of roughly 200 Penn students on a petition to prod the university to curtail pro-Palestinian activism, that number is still a relatively small fraction (about 12%) of Penn’s overall Jewish student population. It is likely that a majority of Jews at Penn did not feel personally threatened by the events of last fall. (Two post-October 7 surveys that purport to show widespread fear and anxiety among Jewish college students have drawn their respondents from those students with particularly strong attachments to Israel, in one case from a pool of young adult Jews who had applied to Birthright Israel, in the other case from students who appear to have been selected by Hillel campus organizations [see note on methodology at end of link]. A more relevant recent survey, one specifically designed not to exclude students with more minimal Jewish identities, found that roughly one third of all Jewish students expressed anxieties about being visibly Jewish on campus, about the same proportion who said they had been personally targeted by antisemitic comments, slurs, or threats. That proportion rose to somewhat less than two-thirds when respondents were asked if they believed Jewish students “pay a social penalty” for supporting Israel as a Jewish state.)

Indeed, some of Penn’s Jewish students conspicuously joined in many of the pro-Palestinian demonstrations, either in formal groups or as individuals. One Jewish student group found itself in a confrontation with the university administration, when it insisted on going ahead with showing a documentary film critical of Israel’s West Bank policies despite the university’s decision to delay the showing until passions on the campus had cooled. We should not be surprised by this split among Penn’s Jewish students, because American Jews under the age of forty hold considerably more critical opinions about Israel’s general policies toward Palestinians than do those older than forty. 

The demographic characteristics of the campus protesters, so far as can be determined by second-hand observation, also fit with the demonstrators’ focus on Israel. Palestinian Americans appear to have dominated the protests at Penn, both as the leading speakers at rallies and in the make-up of the supporting crowds. Some are even Palestinians attending American colleges as foreign students – the Penn student who ripped down the Israeli flag from above the Orthodox Jewish student residence hall appears to belong to this category. Many are likely to be in contact with relatives and friends living in the West Bank or Gaza. To some extent, the radicalism of these ethnic Americans, focused on harsh legacies from “the old country” and fueled by the desire for upward mobility in the face of perceived prejudices in their new country, resembles past waves of second-generation immigrant radicalism (among, for example, Irish, Italian, Jewish, and Mexican Americans) common throughout our country’s history. Knowing this history, however, doesn’t make anger-driven radical actions any the less worrisome for institutions, such as universities, that require openness and reasonability to operate, or for individuals, who may easily be demonized as “enemies of the people.”

Radical movements tend to suffer from an unwillingness to look inward and to recognize the failings of their own group’s past leadership, choosing instead to place all blame on their historical antagonists and the latter’s perceived representatives in the present. The pro-Palestinian campus radicals clearly suffer from this flaw, as they have uncritically carried forward the tragic failings of past Palestinian leaders to seize numerous opportunities since 1947 to build a Palestinian nation alongside Israel. As today’s pro-Palestinian radicals have attracted support from among young black, feminist, and other radicals, they have allowed themselves to demonize Israel, just as the Black Lives Matter movement and certain gender radicals have demonized white people as “privileged racists” or men as “cis-gendered patriarchs.”

As a species of scapegoating, antisemitism is inherently unpredictable in its trajectory. It is well to be on guard to see if in the future today’s political antisemitism may burst out of its current anti-Israeli boundaries or spread beyond college campuses, their adjacent youthful urban enclaves, and Arab-American ethnic communities. For now, this worry remains muted by the firewall of sorts that exists in the overwhelming support for Israel shown by most Americans after the attack of October 7. However, the threat posed by left-wing political radicalism itself, particularly to college campuses, is real enough and must be countered by reasoned argument and the enforcement of lawful behavior.

Anti-racist Lens Distorts History on New Jersey "Freeholders"

This opinion essay was published on History News Network on September 27, 2020. Internal citations for this article are available on request. Contact Tony Fels.

---

I grant there is no compelling reason for New Jersey’s counties to retain the traditional term “chosen freeholders” as the name for their elected officials. In a bill signed into law by Governor Phil Murphy on August 21, the title of these lawmakers will become “county commissioners” at the beginning of 2021. The new term certainly conveys better than “chosen freeholder” what these elected representatives do.

But there is little basis for tying the older term to the history of slavery or racial prejudice, as many of New Jersey’s political leaders have done. Governor Murphy, for example, lent his support to the legislation by tweeting, “let us tear down words born from racism”. State Senate President Stephen Sweeney (D., Gloucester) claimed the title “is mired in the language of slavery”. And Felicia Hopson, Director of Burlington County’s Board of Freeholders, linked retiring the term to the goal of “[c]ontinuing our work to end systemic racism…by eliminating an antiquated title from an era when slavery and racism [were] tolerated…”. 

The term “freeholder,” first brought to the American colonies from England in the early seventeenth century, meant only a person who owned land (or other property) free of debt. The holding did not have to be a particularly large estate; by the mid-eighteenth century farms as small as half an acre were likely adequate to qualify. The idea was that such people, by virtue of their property ownership, would have the economic independence to be free from the influence of more powerful figures and could therefore be trusted with the vote. The “chosen freeholders” were simply the people selected by the freeholders at large to make the administrative decisions for a county until the next election came around.

The freeholders had a profoundly positive effect on the early development of liberal democracy, and nowhere more so than in New Jersey. A remarkable document, “The Concessions and Agreements of the Proprietors, Freeholders and Inhabitants of the Province of West Jersey in America” (1677), for example, established for the new settlements around Burlington the principle of rule by consent of the governed. Signed by 150 individuals, this early constitution contained a bill of rights, guaranteed religious liberty, and proclaimed it had “put the power in the people.” On its basis, the province’s first representative assembly, elected by the freeholders, convened at Burlington in 1681. Two other elected assemblies had begun even earlier in East Jersey. Once East and West Jersey came together to form the Crown colony of New Jersey in 1702, the freeholders continued to stand up for their rights against the royal governor and his council all the way until the American Revolution.

Who were the freeholders? Certainly, nearly all were men. And because Europeans had founded the colonies, the freeholders were overwhelmingly white. By the mid-1700s, Black Africans comprised about 7% of New Jersey’s population, the great majority of whom were enslaved, including by some of the freeholders.

But another unique feature of New Jersey’s history points to a way in which the ideal of freeholder democracy challenged even these limitations. New Jersey holds the distinction of being the only state, just after the start of the American Revolution, to have allowed both some white women (single and with a certain amount of property) and some Black men and women (those who were free, owned property, and, if female, unmarried) to vote. This unusual development in the history of American suffrage, which lasted for about thirty years, began without fanfare, indeed without any special notice at all – which in turn suggests that single, propertied women, both free Black and white, and free Black men of property had likely joined the ranks of the freeholders for some stretch of years prior to the Revolution.

The world of the colonial period was not the same as ours today. Their world was one based on a principle of social hierarchy that remained largely unquestioned. Racial distinctions, at least in the northern colonies, did not lie at the center of this social system. A sizable minority -- including the wealthy and the middle-class freeholders – occupied positions of independence. Beneath them stood a number of dependent classes: married women, tenant farmers, wage workers, servants, slaves, and the poor. And just as today we cherish the principle of freedom from arbitrary arrest (what came to be known as habeas corpus) that a group of English lords, who probably cared little about anyone other than themselves, won from their king back in 1215 with the Magna Carta, we can similarly pay tribute to the significant, if still limited, gains the freeholders of New Jersey made toward the expansion of popular participation in government.

No, Christine Blasey Probably Isn't Behaving Like the Children Who Leveled False Accusations in the Salem Witch Trials

This article was originally published on History News Network on September 25th, 2018

Note: This opinion essay was written on the eve of Christine Blasey Ford’s and Brett Kavanuagh’s public testimonies before the Senate Judiciary Committee considering Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court. The title was not my own (which was “Salem Analogy Misapplied to Christine Blasey”) but was supplied by the editor of the History News Network, reflecting his belief, even before both antagonists had presented their cases, that Ford was telling the truth and Kavanaugh was not. (I managed to get the editor to insert the word “Probably” into his title to soften the strength of his conviction.) The point of my essay was not, at this moment in the unfolding controversy, to pass judgment on Ford’s claim but rather to call attention to the historical advances in legal proceedings since 1692 (the time of the Salem witch hunt) that provided both sides in such conflicts a reasonably fair hearing. The Salem lessons for me, unlike for Wall Street Journal columnist Lance Morrow, whom I was addressing in this piece, lay not in quickly validating one side or the other but rather in not rushing to judgment. Had I written this essay after Ford’s and Kavanaugh’s public testimonies, however, I could have embraced more fully the perspective implied by the existing title.

---

President Trump isn’t the only one citing the Salem witch hunt to shape public opinion these days. Reference to the infamous witch hunt of 1692 has again entered public discourse to explain psychology professor Christine Blasey’s accusation that Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her when both were teenagers. Columnist Lance Morrow used the Salem analogy in a Wall Street Journal opinion essay to cast doubt on the truth of Professor Blasey’s charge, likening it to the wild imaginings of the Salem girls and young women whose accusations of witchcraft led to the execution of twenty innocent women and men (five others died in prison awaiting trial). For Morrow, ideological extremism – religious in nature for Salem’s seventeenth-century Puritans, political for today’s progressives supposedly behind Professor Blasey’s effort to derail Judge Kavanaugh’s nomination – offers the common denominator in the analogy to Salem.

Morrow’s reasoning is plausible, but the lessons of the Salem events for this bitter conflict of today lie deeper and point in a different direction.

The plausibility of his interpretation begins with the adolescent aspect to the charges. The core group of about seven Salem accusers were girls and young women ages 11 to 20, just as Christine Blasey has, in effect, returned to her own age of 15 to recall what she says happened to her on the night in question. We know further from the controversy over recalled memories of sexual abuse that broke out in the early 1990s that memories of childhood traumas, as “recovered” by sessions with psychotherapists much later in life, can be filtered through distortions of multiple sorts, making the truth of such claims suspect.

The Salem accusations of witchcraft, moreover, came forth within a social context of local, village grievances that often stemmed back generations to the belief that a mother or grandmother of the accused had also been a “witch,” who had earlier injured members of the accuser’s extended family. The upper-middle-class world of suburban Washington D.C. in the 1970s and 1980s may similarly be regarded as a relatively self-enclosed “village,” in which most people knew one another by sight or reputation. And, as several sources have reported, Professor Blasey’s parents suffered an adverse legal ruling at the hands of Brett Kavanaugh’s mother, also a judge.

Add to these circumstances the political penchant today to assign stark labels of good and evil to public figures with whom one agrees or disagrees, and the parallel to the Salem events appears quite compelling. At Salem the witch hunt gathered its greatest momentum when a former minister of Salem Village, Reverend George Burroughs, stood accused (he would soon be executed). Similarly, to bring charges of sexual assault against a man who has been a highly respectable judge for many years may be seen as an act of great audacity, raising the “Me-Too” movement to its highest profile yet.

On the other hand, the truthfulness of Professor Blasey’s charge is just as plausible. The fact that she only very slowly and over a long period of years gained self-awareness about the alleged attack – sufficient even to know what to call it – is a common feature of the stories of genuine sex abuse victims. Her process of coming to terms with the trauma of this alleged event from her teenage years is corroborated by what she confided to her psychotherapist and husband, beginning in 2012, six years before anyone knew that Judge Kavanaugh would become a Supreme Court nominee. That she wavered over the past couple of months before making her identity known reflected real fears that she and her family would be seriously threatened with reprisals, a fear that has been fully borne out by the harassment she has suffered from the public in the few days since her anonymity ended. She and her family have even been forced into hiding for their own safety. She now faces the prospect of a grueling public appearance before a congressional committee that is likely to include strenuous attempts by Brett Kavanaugh’s supporters to discredit her, not to mention the judge’s own forceful denial of her account. In short, she seemingly has nothing to gain from her public accusation of Judge Kavanaugh except precisely what she claims is her only motive: to do her civic duty in preventing a man who is not as upstanding as he appears from gaining a seat on the nation’s highest court.

This is where the Salem events from 1692 offer some valuable lessons for today. Those lessons do not come down to raising doubts about the veracity of Professor Blasey’s charge against Judge Kavanaugh, since at this moment we simply don’t know enough about her accusation to be able to determine who is telling the truth. One forgets from the vantage point of today just how rational the charge of witchcraft seemed to nearly everyone, whether educated or not, in seventeenth-century New England. Nearly all believed in a cosmos of spirits, including good spirits (or angels) and bad spirits (or demons). Given this practically universal belief, it was perfectly reasonable to think that some individuals might be enlisted by Satan to help carry out his plans to overturn the pious Puritan commonwealth. It was not the accusers’ beliefs (or delusions, depending on your point of view) that are the hallmark of the Salem witch hunt but rather the rush to judgment by a fearful community intent on finding scapegoats to punish for perceived misfortunes. That this community would utilize its own beliefs to do so is no more unusual than later communities or nations using their own beliefs to persecute innocent people or groups.

What is different between the events of Salem and today is that the legal system of seventeenth-century Massachusetts had few safeguards against such perversions of justice. Criminal defendants were not yet entitled to the aid of counsel. Judges did not see themselves as neutral upholders of legal ground rules but rather entered into the proceedings on one side or the other. Examinations and trials lay vulnerable to the emotions of the crowd. And non-empirical evidence was ruled admissible in court. A congressional committee is not a court of law, but if it fails to take advantage of modern legal protections for both sides in this dispute, we will find ourselves back in a horrifying era which we thought we had outgrown.

"Occupy" Movement Must Move to the Center

This opinion essay was published in the San Francisco Chronicle (print) on December 13, 2011. It appears on the SFGate website at the same date.

---

The Occupy Wall Street movement has reached a tactical dead end. This much has been apparent for weeks. Remarkably, its fundamental message of seeking a more equitable distribution of wealth in America has not been lost, despite the extremism and eccentricity of the protests.

The message clearly resonates with a majority of Americans, as many polls have indicated. The problem is not that the movement needs a sharper focus or a more detailed list of demands. Social movements do not have to make policy, much less write legislation. They simply need to articulate the strength of feeling in the population for a change of course.

The more all-embracing its message, the better. But how can the latent sentiments that so many Americans feel today for a return to the principles of fairness and equality of opportunity be expressed in all their fullness?

An analogy might be found in the movement to end the war in Vietnam in the 1960s. Protests against the war were started by small minorities of radicals among students, religious figures and draft-age youth. But in 1967 an umbrella organization calling itself the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam (nicknamed the "Mobe") formed to sponsor huge marches against the war in New York, Washington D.C., and other cities.

Somewhere between 300,000 and 500,000 people marched down Fifth Avenue in New York on April 15, 1967, to protest U.S. involvement in the war. Another 100,000 or more showed up at the Lincoln Memorial in October of the same year. In November, 1969, half a million people again demonstrated in the nation's capital to speed up the process of bringing the troops home.

Because these rallies were thoroughly peaceful protests, conventional in form and held on weekends, they attracted the widest range of participants, including thousands of middle- and working-class families.

Today's movement for economic fairness would equally benefit from a tactical turn toward the center. In fact, there is no good reason to continue to refer to it as an "occupation."

Americans do not want to live in tents; they want to live in their own houses with mortgages that are reflective of their homes' actual value and that can be paid off at reasonable terms. Americans do not want to form "affinity groups"; they want to be able to spend time with their families and friends without the anxieties of having to hold on to their jobs for dear life or being without work at all. Americans do not want to gather nightly to make political decisions by consensus; they want their traditional, representative form of democracy to work for them in an honest, straightforward manner.

There may not be 99 percent of the population ready to join a march on a Sunday to "tax the rich." But if even 30 percent showed up, that would create quite a stir.