The problem with wading into a complex issue with incoherent, ill-informed dissent is that one wastes insightful people's time dealing with the noise and foolish ideas.

You turn up the gain, but you add static, distortion, and clipping. And, ironically, in this case the net effect has been to focus a lot more attention on the protests themselves than what is happening in Gaza right now.

I've looked through the signs protestors have been displaying in multiple protests, including Columbia. It isn't remotely hard to actually express extreme concern for Palestinian civilians--or heaven forbid, all civilians. The signs almost never are about that, though. It's very hard to respect the moral virtue of using language that calls for ethnic cleansing, releasing murderers, making light of the hardships of others, and so on. There are plenty of signs like that.

I would like to be inspired by the students' passion, because you need a lot of passion to have the will to enact the difficult steps that could actually lead to a drastically more humanitarian approach to dealing with Hamas (without simply failing to deal with it).

But mostly I'm just depressed by the groupthink.