PORTLAND, Ore. — Protests against the war in Gaza have been front and center this week, not only at Portland State University, but on other college campuses across the country.
Sociologist Randy Blazak was a professor at Portland State for 20 years. He said in Portland, protest groups are often joined by others who see them as an opportunity to further a larger or different agenda.
"They can hijack it, for lack of a better word," he said. "They can kind of push the student voice out of it, and it's a real challenge when you have a campus movement to keep it a campus movement and not have it be co-opted by outside activists; sometimes those groups are the exact same people, but sometimes the student voice gets lost in that."
RELATED: 12 arrested, including 4 students, as Portland police clear Portland State University library
On Thursday, police arrested a dozen pro-Palestinian protesters, including four Portland State students, who had broken into the Millar Library and had occupied the building since Monday. The library was damaged and classes were canceled for several days.
Blazak noted the specific dynamic at Portland State: it's an urban campus, so it has been hard to tell exactly which protesters are students and which ones are not.
"Criminal behavior ... it hijacks the message a little bit instead of focusing on what the protesters hope will focus on," he said.
On Wednesday evening, protesters marched through downtown Portland, and some people smashed business windows and tried to block traffic.
Blazak also talked about incidents of antisemitism he has recently seen coming out protests of the Israel-Hamas war.
"Someone might think that a 20-year-old college kid who's Jewish has something to do with the policies that are being made on the other side of the planet, and they're to blame for what's happening in Gaza," he said. "So there's that kind of level of antisemitism that has certainly made Jewish students feel unsafe."
He said the conversation around the Israel-Hamas war is delicat,e and there's a right way to have it.
"In America ... we have to be really careful in this conversation when we're talking about something as sincere and important as human rights, if not falling into the black hole of antisemitism, and some of that sadly has happened," he said.
