The Free Press reports that a lawsuit has been filed on behalf of two janitors who were accosted and then held hostage during the violent takeover of a campus building during pro-Palestinian protests at Columbia University last year. According to the article, “the lawsuit describes the protesters, the majority of whom ‘donned masks and hoods to conceal their identities,’ as ‘reminiscent of the Ku Klux Klan.’” “It claims they ‘are part of a broad pro-Hamas, anti-Semitic network of organizations, groups, and cells that are connected through a largely untraceable underground communications system [to] promote and resort to violent and illegal tactics, and are motivated by invidious discrimination against Jews and supporters of Jews.” The Free Press reports that “The ‘occupiers’ named in Torres and Wilson’s lawsuit include leaders of Columbia’s most vocal anti-Israel groups like the Columbia University Apartheid Divest Coalition, Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voices for Peace.”

In addition, the Free Press reports on another lawsuit, “on behalf of two students, a professor, and a rabbi at the University of California, Los Angeles, alleging that several groups, including National Students for Justice in Palestine, Faculty for Justice in Palestine Network, American Muslims for Palestine, and Westchester People’s Action Coalition, engaged in ‘a coordinated campaign of egregious acts of racial exclusion, intimidation, and assault” to “intimidate Jewish students, faculty, and staff.’”

https://www.thefp.com/p/exclusive-columbia-janitors-sue-protesters

As in the case of the plaintiff in Caught in the Campus Crossfire, the janitors at Columbia are not Jewish and were just innocents at the wrong place, at the wrong time. The point is that, as in the novel, the failure of universities to protect those specifically targeted with intimidation, threats and violence in real life inevitably spreads to others.

In Caught in the Campus Crossfire, a civil lawsuit is brought against, not only the shooter, but also against the radical Muslin student organization and its leader who solicited the shooting. So, too, these two real life lawsuits arising out of Columbia and UCLA are against the radical organizations promoting intimidation, threats and violence. This may be among the best means of discouraging, if not ending, organizational promotion of criminal antisemitic conduct. Indeed, recounted in Caught in the Campus Crossfire is the real life story of a former grand dragon of the Ku Klux Klan, Tom Metzger, a figurehead in the skinhead movement who started his own organization in the mid-1980s, WAR, the White Aryan Resistance. The Southern Poverty Law Center brought a successful civil lawsuit against Metzger and WAR for being behind the 1988 murder of Mulugeta Seraw, an Ethiopian college student and father. The lawsuit effectively ended WAR in the 1990s.

Liability in civil lawsuits may be based on participating in a conspiracy. In addition, liability for criminal conspiracy may arise, including under RICO, the federal Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, and RICO-type statutes in New York and California. At least in California, appellate courts have held that a civil lawsuit may be based on the violation of criminal statutes. One such case is Angie M. v. Superior Court, a case in which this author represented a statutory rape victim.

https://law.justia.com/cases/california/court-of-appeal/4th/37/1217.html

Cutting off the head of the snake with the tools available to do so, including conspiracy law, may be the most effective way of confining campus protests to protected First Amendment speech and preventing criminal threats and violence.