Tin soldiers and Nixon’s coming

York University, forever suffering from an inferiority complex due to the remote location of its Keele campus, can now claim to be the current hotbed of the meta-protest. Rallying moonbats from the school’s Grassroots Anti-Imperialist Network (GRAIN) couldn’t resist the occasion of the U.S. presidential inauguration last Thursday to holler about York’s alleged financial ties to the likes of Lockheed Martin – and because it was so damn frigid outside, they weren’t going to gather on the lawn, which meant assembling inside Vari Hall. The prohibition of protest in that echo-prone rotunda has been enforced since a bout of nasty business last year, where undergrad Daniel Freeman-Maloy’s megaphone-wielding ways toward fellow Jewish students who don’t share his contempt for Israel. Freeman-Maloy was expelled from York for three years, but his mounting an elaborate legal defense and PR campaign against school president Lorna Marsden resulted in the decision being overturned. It’s no surprise he was among the members of GRAIN braying against York’s “ties to war, occupation and oppression throughout the world”, even if Freeeman-Maloy wasn’t one of the five activists arrested for throwing punches at paid-duty officers, pouring coffee on one of them and attempting to grab a constable’s Glock. But those arrests begat another rally the next day, allowing for Freeman-Maloy to dust off his bullhorn in solidarity with those who’d been dragged into the paddywagon. And, on Monday, there was a third event, where the media were invited to hear the denouncing of force against peaceful activists. Based on the estimates floating around, the turnout for the protests built from 20 to 300 to 500 – at these exponential rates, all 45,000 students at York will be protesting en masse by the end of the academic year, if only they can find a common cause.

The account from Isabel Macdonald posted at Rabble provides only the most breathless play-by-play account of the fuzz’s barbarism: “Then they began to move toward us, making a bee-line for the student with the megaphone. He was knocked down. I saw him lying on the ground with his hands raised protectively around his head, to defend himself from the cops’ fists and batons. I had trouble keeping my video camera focused, my arms were shaking so much,” she writes. “We followed as Greg was pulled down the hallway by a few cops, one of whom waved his bayonet in the air. I could hear him calling out, his small frame dwarfed by the burly officers on either side of him, ‘They called me “fag”!’ … Outside the classroom-cum-torture chamber, the crowd was growing. As at the scene of a morbid car accident, passers-by slowed down, curious and horrified, to find out what was unfurling in the hallway. ‘Why did the police attack the students if they were only speaking?’ I heard one woman exclaim. ‘Why?’ But nobody could answer.” The concurrent discussion thread casts aspersion on exactly what’s depicted in the choppy video “evidence” – shrieks of “Shame!” segueing into chants of “Cops off campus!” and the event’s ringleader being physically removed from Vari Hall while offering the time-honored rhetorical comment: “What the fuck is this?” The fact that several of the six officers have uncovered heads suggests the hats were flipped off amidst the fracas. Canadian Federation of Students unionists are now demanding legal fees from the university to compensate for police aggression, even if York’s internal security video depicted palm-outward police requests for the GRAINiacs to disperse.

A blogging York student, Dan Levy, a card-carrying GOP member from Florida with a site called The NeoCon Nexus, raises the obvious absurdity of peace activists trying to grab away a gun, while noting the aforementioned Freeman-Maloy might not have been speaking at the initial protest, but he was the junior Zapruder filming the confrontation. Yet another Daniel flails in pursuit of a more rational perspective on his own Das Blog, noting the cops didn’t intervene until being subject to at least a half-hour of law-breaking behavior: “I’d like to imagine if these cops had any sense, they wouldn’t throw the first punch. You know who would? A naive, idealistic 20-year-old student activist who’s watched too many cop shows and played too many video games, who thinks resisting arrest will make his situation better.” He also wishes for a Hegelian synthesis between police and protesters, lest you think OSAP money is just paying for more weed.