The moderator of the panel was kat yang-stevens, the bellicose bully who taunted and cursed at pro-Israeli students during last Wednesday’s SJP rally on Ho Plaza. One pro-Israeli student reported that yang-stevens stood so close to him–“one centimeter” away–he was effectively spit on as she tried to provoke him into hitting her. She is not a student.
With the help of Legal Insurrection, this incident has reached national news outlets and personalities, namely The College Fix, The Blaze, and Mark Levin.
Yang-stevens runs a professional protesting organization called Groundwork for Praxis, which she claimed to be representing before the panel discussion began. The Africana Center has not responded to an initial inquiry into whether she was paid for moderating Thursday’s event.The Cornell Review is also investigating whether she was paid for her services at Wednesday’s rally. In today’s edition of the Cornell Daily Sun, SJP members claimed yang-stevens and other non-student protesters present at Wednesday’s SJP rally were, in fact, unaffiliated with SJP.
The panelists for the Resisting Domination event were of the radical, Alinskyite left-wing variety. They were not the run-of-the-mill LBJ or FDR big-government liberals. In fact, they distaste President Obama more fervently than most conservatives. Needles to say, this type of left-wing is very, very different from the mainstream.
It truly required a rewiring of the mind in order to fully understand what the panelists were trying to convey as they took turns speaking to questions concerning privilege, settlers vs. settled, the evils of non-profits, etc. One must quickly adapt to hearing suffixes like “-ism,” “-ist,” and “-phobia” attached to every other word, for example. One must view the world through the master-slave dialectic, with a keen eye on the pernicious flow and concentration of “international capital.” One must think of oneself and others primarily in terms of superficial characteristics like gender, sexual orientation, race, and ethnicity, rather than in terms of values, merits, and content of character. Indeed, most panelists first introduced themselves with a string of identifiers like “cis-gendered.” Those who were of Native American descent first introduced themselves in their native languages before crossing over to English.
Over one hundred students and older people attended the panel. The event was sponsored by a number of student groups, including Students for Justice in Palestine, Grrrls Fight Back!, and MeCHA (a Mexican student group), as well as an academic apartment, Africana Studies.
One of the panelists, Amanda Lickers of Montreal, was also present at the Wednesday SJP rally. She is the one who yelled “F*** you zionist scums!” at counter-protesting Jewish and pro-Israeli students (caught on video, see above). When your correspondent and another Review member entered the Africana Center and made eye contact with Ms. Lickers, we heard her whisper to a friend something that began with “Those two were at the [event/rally] yesterday…” Clearly, she recognized us too.
Though her bio in the event pamphlet (link) does not mention it, Lickers’s claim-to-fame was the destruction of a 9/11 memorial last year at Middlebury College in Vermont. She reportedly confessed to pulling up 2,977 American flags placed on a campus lawn because she found the display offensive to Native Americans. Lickers, a member of the “Turtle Clan, Seneca (Onondowa’ga) nation of the Haudenosaunee confederacy” (or, simply put, the Iroquois), claimed the campus is situated on a Native American burial site. A chief of a local Abenaki tribe said this was not true, and condemned the memorial desecration.
Perhaps Lickers just wanted to appear modest in her bio.
They’re strictly amateur agitators.