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Campus Activists and Pro-War Bigots: Lo in the Eye of the Storm
04/09/2003

Instapundit has been following a reported incident of pro-war aggression at Yale. In summary, according to Yale Daily News, Yale student Katherine Lo returned from an anti-war rally (which one?) over spring break and hung a United States flag upside-down out of her window. Expecting to attract the attention of those who might seek her out for debate, she placed a note on her bedroom door defending "her right to express herself." The next day/night, March 27, a "group of males" (identified by sound from her room) entered Lo's suite. She locked her bedroom door. The group tried to open the door and, not having any success, scrawled a hateful note on her message board, including the phrase, "I hate you, GO AMERICA." Lo spent the night hiding in her room and, in the morning, notified the dean of her college and the campus police, the latter at 10 a.m. Exactly a week after the incident, on April 3, a fellow activist emailed a Yale Peace mailing list about the incident.

If true in entirety, the intruders certainly deserve some form of discipline, and I would stress that any acts even hinting at violence are a poor — and unrepresentative — reaction to anti-war activism, even if the method of activism is offensive. Based purely on the facts offered by the Yale Daily News, however, it isn't clear how drastic the perps' punishment ought to be. The paper reports that they had a wooden board, but there seems little beyond trespassing and intimidating pseudo-graffiti on which to base charges. The posts by Josh Chafetz on OxBlog that Instapundit has been following, however, add reasons for prosecution but, partly for related reasons, instill a modicum of skepticism in me.

Chafetz's initial post, on April 6, was built around an email from a friend of his at Yale. Chafetz calls for prison time and vehemently condemns the perpetrators based on the following additional information (the "[sic]" note is in the original email):

Fortunately, they were unsuccessful in breaking down the door to her bedroom, but they left a violent and intimidating note including such inspiring quotes as "as [sic] muslims must die."

This student took down her flag and is currently moving out of her suite. This story is going to hit the YDN (hopefully with names this time) in a few days, after she's safely moved.

On April 8, Chafetz posted an email from Ms. Lo (cc'ed to Instapundit Glenn Reynolds), choosing, at that time, to remain anonymous. This letter is what really raises my suspicions.

Thank you for making the effort to get this story out. I am writing from an anonymous Yahoo account because I would like to remain anonymous with regards to this incident. I realize that my anonymity may give skeptics grounds for dismissing the story as false or exaggerated, but I insist on it for the sake of my safety and right to privacy. I believe that this incident has implications that range further than my name or who it happened to, because what happened affects not only Yale as a community of alleged freedom of expression and speech, but this country as a place where our constitutional rights are rapidly being undermined and our right to dissent is threatened or discouraged.

Note the "official" tone and the quick transition to Lo's politics by way of reference to the broad implications of her story. In the following full paragraph, she explains that requests from the authorities were the reason that there had been no media coverage, with no mention of her moving based on the incident (as the Daily News did not mention it). Next, Lo emphasizes the "blatant racist sentiment" within the "current political climate" and places her incident in the context of the travails of Muslims, making use of the strange language of educated activism:

I would like to say that there will be response actions occurring in solidarity with the incident, and that certain Muslim students have felt physically threatened and vulnerable to attack and that this incident only further proves that such violent attacks are feasible at a place like Yale.

"Response actions" in "solidarity with the incident"? Separated from the issue at hand, the phrase "response actions" sounds as if it is meant to excuse whatever those "actions" might be (tying up city traffic and attempting to block supply shipments to troops, for example) because it is only a "response." As for "solidarity with the incident," well, I'm not really sure what that means in English or what its usage might imply. In partial contrast with this sterilized verbage, Ms. Lo offers Chafetz (and Instapundit) the text of the message that the intruders left, with the personal sentiment that "This note is so horrible and inhuman that I could hardly bear typing this up, let alone making it up in an attempt to spread a falsified story!":

I love kicking the Muslims ass bitches ass! They should all die with Mohammad. We as Americans should destroy them and launch so many missiles their mothers don't produce healthy offspring. Fuck Iraqi Saddam following fucks. I hate you, GO AMERICA.

Frankly, I would hope that even drunk Yale students could produce better writing. But among the crudity and the evidence that the author was averse to neither curses nor ugly imagery, this phrase stands out: "their mothers don't produce healthy offspring." That sounds like a phrase of resort when one either lacks a sense of American English idiom or, as in a comedy sketch of a nice boy among bandits, is too timid to speak as roughly as the concept requires.

The more I think about the incident, the more I have to admit that something just doesn't fit. I suppose the Yale Daily News's sources could have had reasons not to mention whether a separate witness noticed the group (and the 2 x 4). And there are certainly explanations as to how non-students could have gotten into the building without ID or students could have entered without being noticed or recorded. But the note, the circumstances of the incident, and the predictability of the reaction (except for Ms. Lo's waiting until 10 a.m. to contact the police after a night of hiding, frightened, in her room) all seem a little too in line with the particulars of Erin O'Connor's sampling of faked campus hate crimes.

I should note that it is entirely possible that the incident happened as described and with the implications suggested. However, it is also possible that there's more to the story than we now know. Ms. Lo is certainly concerned about being accused of fabrication, and she may have been made to serve in the ploys of others. Whatever the case, this is certainly a story on which to keep an eye.

Posted by Justin Katz @ 12:32 PM EST

1 Comment

What I utterly detest about the reaction to this incident is that it is not being reported as a criminal harassment and a third-degree burglary but as an attack on freedom of speech. One would think that Ms. Lo would be more concerned about people breaking into her room, not the fact that some guys were mean to her because she hung an American flag upside-down. Note that the police still will not confirm that the incident occurred.

Yale alumnus @ 04/11/2003 11:19 AM EST