Trump’s missile strike against Syria brings out ‘anti-fascism’ protesters at Cornell

“Dozens” of demonstrators got together at Cornell University’s Ho Plaza yesterday to protest the recent US missile strikes against Syria.

Though the protesters disagreed on how to best defy President Trump’s “most significant international action,” The Cornell Daily Sun reports, “all were outraged by the launch of 59 tomahawk missiles from Navy destroyers on Thursday night.”

Of course. It’s Trump!

Protesters also appeared not to heed the words of Walaa Horan, co-founder of Ithaca Welcomes Refugees, who spurred attendees to discuss issues with folks who hold differing points of view: “This is not a political party thing.

“This is not a Trump-[Vice President Mike] Pence war, this is not a Republican war, this is across the board — Republicans, Democrats — we have been at war for over a decade with different countries,” she said.

From the article:

Young children ran around Ho Plaza as the sky turned purple and protesters chanted using a megaphone in between speakers.

“No missile strikes, no Muslim ban, no fascist U.S.A.,” they chanted as some passersby spontaneously joined the protest, which was marked with several large banners held by protesters or erected between light posts. …

Christopher Hanna ’18, co-facilitator for Amnesty International at Cornell, organized the rally with members of the national Refuse Fascism group after he noticed a lack of political representation for a Democratic, anti-war constituency.

“I was really disturbed by the airstrike and the fact that it represents an escalation of war in Syria and an escalation in U.S. participation in the conflict,” Hanna said.

“It’s not like we’re rallying just against this singular event,” he said of the strike in Syria. “We’re rallying against the political culture and political establishment that legitimizes these kinds of things.”

Morgan Walsh ’16, a volunteer touring the country with Refuse Fascism in an attempt to gain support for the organization and “drive out the Trump-Pence regime,” said she found leading Democrats’ comments disappointing in the days after the U.S. missile strike.

“I think people are in a place of confusion,” she said. “What they’re hearing from the media and from the leaders of the Democrats and Republicans is that this was the right thing to do and the only issue with Trump’s military action … was that he didn’t seek Congressional approval first.”

Of course, as Cornell’s own Elyse Semerdjian noted at the protest, no congressional approval has been sought for military action since the immediate post-9/11 era, so it is hardly a Donald Trump phenomenon.

A search of the Daily News’s archives reveals no articles about protests during Obama-era military actions.

Meanwhile over at The Daily Princetonian this morning, a large portion of its homepage was devoted to Fred Stein, “a lone guitarist” protesting the US missile attack against Syria.

This is silly enough in itself; however, this line in the article takes the cake: “The American strike marks a higher military engagement in Syria, which was condemned by allies of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad as crossing a red line.”

To be clear, that “red line” is not this one: