By Bruce S. Ticker
PHILADELPHIA, Pennsylvania — It is no surprise that Mel, a spokesperson for a pro-Palestinian group, would declare, “We were definitely surprised about the charges being filed.”
Perhaps that is because her pals, specifically members of IfNotNow, assumed they would get away with striding onto the 110 freeway in downtown Los Angeles and sitting down on the asphalt, abruptly blocking rush-hour traffic for miles on Hannukah on Dec. 13, 2023 – a quarter-mile south of the notorious Four Level Interchange that is featured in movies and photographs.
City Attorney Hydee Feldstein Soto is now pursuing misdemeanor charges against 31 members of the Jewish left-wing group who urged a cease-fire between Israel and Hamas. They blissfully ignored the fact that the Oct. 7 slaughter of 1,200 Israelis violated a cease-fire that was created to end a previous military confrontation. “Mel” asked a reporter from Spectrum News 1 to only identify her by her first name, which typifies the cowardice of these people.
Soto’s legal actions should be replicated by every prosecutor whose jurisdiction has been disrupted by anti-Israel demonstrators. Also setting a commendable example is The Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law, which on Friday filed federal lawsuits addressing assaults against two janitors at Columbia University in upper Manhattan and threats against Jewish students at the University of California-Los Angeles.
Advocates for the Palestinians have the right to protest, but they have no right to violate our laws. They are disrupting life for all citizens and even endangering people’s lives. They should be prosecuted and, if they are foreign students, they should be deported. Police and prosecutors have been lax in bringing charges in response to illegal protests.
“Until we acknowledge that these protests were part of a larger web of radical antisemitism,” says Brandeis chairman Kenneth L. Marcus, “and until we hold the perpetrators actually carrying out this abuse accountable, these vicious attacks will continue. And Jewish students and faculty – and those who stand up for them – will continue to suffer.”
Both Soto and Marcus’s approaches can also bolster President Trump’s initiative to deport protesters here on student visas. Though IfNotNow is a Jewish organization, charges filed against foreign students in other incidents will strengthen Trump’s cases. So far, Trump has been seizing foreign students with skimpy evidence, even when they could likely build solid cases if they only tried.
Brandeis, which has filed a series of similar civil suits before last Friday, could produce evidence that the administration can use.
As The Forward news site reports, Soto’s office charged the protest suspects with failure to disperse, unlawful assembly, failure to comply and obstruction of a street. Obstruction of a street? Right there, Soto is understating the case. Footage of the scene suggests that 110 southbound spans six or seven lanes.
The blockade, which began shortly after 9 a.m. on Dec. 13, also amounts to reckless endangerment. The sit-down would have prevented emergency vehicles from moving. Some waiting motorists could have been stricken with a heart attack. I spotted two school buses in the footage several feet back from the blockade line, which could cause turmoil if any students were crowded aboard for a field trip.
As it stands, motorists left their vehicles, proceeded to pull the protesters out of line and scuffled with them. A motorcyclist busted through the line; he could have struck someone in the process.
The Brandeis center, based in Washington, D.C., reported in a news release that the latest lawsuits were filed on Friday in the U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York, and the U.S. District Court, Central District of California, “alleging that student groups and other national organizations at Columbia and UCLA orchestrated a professional, coordinated campaign of egregious acts of racial exclusion, intimidation and assault against Jewish students and others viewed as sympathetic to Jews.
“These professional organizations…planned, constructed, supplied and recruited for the encampment knowing that its purpose and effect was to further Hamas’ goals to harass, vilify and exclude Jews.” Encampments were illegally installed in April 2024 first at Columbia and then on campuses throughout the nation.
Brandeis and Torridon Law PLLC’s alleges that at Columbia the “pro-Hamas group The People’s Forum, Inc. and numerous individuals…were responsible for brutalizing two janitors during the takeover of Columbia’s Hamilton Hall. These two janitors have not been able to return to work and suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder.”
The news release adds that a half-dozen non-defendant “pro-Hamas organizations” “directly or indirectly supported the seizure of Hamilton Hall…“In April 2024, members of a highly coordinated mob used violent, masked tactics reminiscent of the Ku Klux Klan to storm…Hamilton Hall,” the release states.
“Armed with rope, zip ties and crow bars, the masked invaders smashed their way through the doors and windows…and encountered two janitors – one Latino and one African-American, neither of whom are Jewish – who were working the overnight shift cleaning the building’s classrooms and bathrooms. The mob terrorized the two men, assaulted and battered them, held them against their will (and) mocked and derided them as ‘Jew-lovers’ and ‘Zionists’.”
The UCLA suit also alleges seizure of a campus building and erection of an encampment that resembled a fortress that included a “Jew exclusion zone.”
Mahmoud Khalil, the most conspicuous foreign student to be detained in Trump’s deportation strategy, negotiated on behalf of Columbia University Apartheid Divest with university officials. CUAD is identified by Brandeis as one of the groups which “directly or indirectly supported” the seizure of Hamilton Hall.
Perhaps Trump could cite Khalil’s CUAD role as evidence. Brandeis’ suits might offer more evidence against other foreign students who committed criminal offenses.
Feldstein Soto’s case was distracted last week by accusations of biased prosecution, prompting Judge Mark Windham to find “some evidence” of that. He ordered her to hand over memos, emails, text messages and all other records. Colleen Flynn, attorney for IfNotNow, is currently reviewing the records, according to Spectrum News 1.
Flynn said that activists who block traffic are rarely charged, noting, “The only cases we’ve seen where protesters have been filed on recently are pro-Palestine protests.”
Flynn told the court of a now-deleted tweet in which Feldstein Soto, whose father is Jewish, condemned the Oct. 7, 2023, attack on southern Israel and added, “Every nation and every moral person must support Israel in defending her people.”
Perhaps she engaged in selective prosecution, but the protesters still obstructed traffic. Videos and photographs alone attest to that, and I cannot think of a more dangerous spot to stop traffic.
They committed a crime and must answer for it.
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Bruce S. Ticker is a Philadelphia-based columnist.