The Students for Justice in Palestine called for a campus shutdown (of sorts) at UC Irvine today, the one-year anniversary of the October 7, 2023 attack and massacre of over 1,200 Israelis. Not to commemorate the Israeli victims, mind you, but rather to honor their own Hamas and Hezbollah "martyrs". Even the Houthis of Yemen were honored with several Yemeni flags alongside those of Lebanon and the mythical Palestinian state. In addition, there were a couple of representatives of the National Lawyers Guild present in their lime green caps, presumably to safeguard their constitutional rights.
All in all, instead of the campus-wide shutdown, they had envisioned, a few dozen protesters showed up wearing keffiyahs and chanted their tired old slogans. They called for revolution and intifada. They chanted from the river to the sea, they accused UCI Chancellor Howard Gillman of funding genocide, and they railed against the "military-industrial complex". As usual, it was young women leading the chants. For some reason, they seem to prefer to put their women out front at these events. After a half hour of this, they took off marching around Ring Road like the Pied Piper and the children of Hameln. I only stayed for the chants and took a few videos and photos before calling it a day.
Hillel, for its part, set up a table down the road with posters giving the names of the hostages in Gaza along with a description of their kidnapping on October 7. A young female student sat "tied" to a chair with a yellow ribbon taping her mouth shut and playing the part of a hostage. In addition, the names of the hostages were scrawled in chalk along Ring Road near the flagpoles (obviously not by the pro-Hamas crowd). Interestingly, there was no mention of who attacked them, murdered them, raped them, and took them hostage (Hamas).
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