After the Hollywood strikes pushed back the 2023-2024 TV season, NBC’s Law and Order devoted the first possible episode (1-18-24) to the spread of anti-Israel university protests following the horrific October 7, 2023 attack on Israel by Hamas terrorists.
Here, fictional Hudson University in New York is rocked by demonstrations during which vandals mark an X on a “Stand With Israel” Oct. 7 poster. University President Nathan Alpert tries to stop vandals and is assaulted.
His wife hears the brutal attack over a cell phone. He is found dead with a “Traitor” sign on his body and two knife wounds to his chest. His wife tells the detectives that he had been “under a microscope,” with “so many pressures about what to say, what not to say.”
Activist pro-Israel professor Phillip Klein (Jason Babinsky) says that he is glad that Alpert is dead. Klein had been slapped with a restraining order after tearing down “From the River to the Sea” signs and wonders whether he will go to prison for fighting anti-Semitism: “A college campus is a place to debate, to express opinions, but not here, not these days. You express the wrong view, you’re cancelled, unless of course you’re talking about Israel. On that topic you say what you want, the more hateful the better.”
Klein had threatened to kill Alpert, but explains that he was upset by the October 7 attacks, and by Alpert’s refusal to issue a statement against Hamas.
It is interesting that writers Rick Eid and Pamela Wechsler (producer Dick Wolf and Eid being credited with “story”), decided that the Israel-supporter had to be unhinged and, worse(?), politically incorrect. In fact, Klein “progressively” becomes more deranged. He guns down university student Chloe Esper, a social influencer with 13 million followers, whose mother was born in Gaza.
But President Alpert, it turns out, was murdered by a student with no Muslim or Middle Eastern ties who, according to Chloe’s boyfriend, was “brainwashed” along with many other students by Professor Kendra Nasser, who is “hard core” in her “extreme pro-Palestinian propaganda.” Clearly intended to be a voice of reason, Chloe’s boyfriend says of Nasser: “She thought Oct. 7 was justified. I support innocent Palestinians, but come on. It was a flat out act of terror.”
The episode’s trial scenes deal with the fascinating question: Can a professor be tried for manipulation and indoctrination that leads to violence? The writers push the envelope by having the professor explicitly suggest to a male student that he kill the university president, even providing the knife. The question is valid, but the scenario offers front stage to the professor: “If students decide to take actions based… on these facts, based on their own moral constitutions, there’s nothing I can do. He told me what he had done after the fact, and I was proud of him.”
Obviously, the writers wanted to present “both sides.” Anti-Semitic outbursts and threats to Jewish students are noted.
Professor Klein, for his part, was set off when he learned that his college roommate was murdered with his entire family by Palestinians. The episode concludes with the image not of brainwashing ideologue professors, but of a wokeness-rejecting Jewish professor now totally unhinged to the point of suicide by cop. The manipulated student and the manipulating professor are made to look “rational” in their crimes.
عباد ديرانية
Jesus Christ is King
