When does a protest stop being a protest? YMMV, but one could say that the line gets crossed when 'protesters' trap people inside a building, barricade the exits, and commit false imprisonment and arguably kidnapping, along with theft and destruction of public property. 

That isn't just an academic hypothetical, although academic certainly applies. A group of people that both ABC and the LA Times call "pro-Palestinian protesters" have blocked off all the points of egress from an administration building at California State University, Los Angeles, trapping workers inside overnight. Reportedly, CSULA president Berenecea Johnson Eanes is among those being held against their will. ABC's local affiliate has both video and a written report:

Pro-Palestinian protesters have barricaded a building at Cal State Los Angeles, where the president of the campus is apparently stuck sheltering in place in her office, Eyewitness News has learned.

Protesters had already set up encampments on another section of campus more than a month ago. But on Wednesday a group broke off and started piling up furniture, overturned golf carts and tables to create barriers in front of the Student Services Building and surrounding plaza.

They also removed copy machines and furniture from inside the building to continue reinforcing the barricade late into the evening. ...

"I can confirm that there are still a small number of administrators in the building," campus spokesperson Erik Hollins said. "We are working through options to bring this fluid situation to the best resolution possible."

Emphasis mine. The LA Times uses the same nomenclature, again emphasis mine:

After nearly six weeks of a peaceful encampment at Cal State Los Angeles, a group of pro-Palestinian protesters took over a campus building on Wednesday afternoon, stranding employees on an upper floor who were told to shelter in place for hours.

The office of Cal State L.A. President Berenecea Johnson Eanes is in the building. A university spokesperson would not confirm whether Eanes was one of the people inside the barricaded building, but said a small group of administrators who remained there late Wednesday night were staying “to handle the situation.”

The protesters blocked off entrances and exits to the student services building in what university officials called an “unauthorized” action. 

Ahem. These are not "protesters"; these are people conspiring to commit several crimes, with the intent to impose their political will by force and violence. We have a word for that in English: terrorism. Calling these people "protesters" delegitimizes lawful demonstrations conducted responsibly, which constitute the vast majority of public advocacy events -- or at least it has.

Confusing protests with terrorism resets all the incentives. If this is what passes for legal protest in the US, we should gird our loins for a lot more of it in the months and years to come. The reason we differentiate between legal demonstrations and riots/mobs/terrorism is to punish the latter to allow for the former. 

Language matters. Using the euphemism "pro-Palestinian protesters" to describe masked terrorists taking hostages serves to normalize the crimes being committed. For that mattter, CSULA's euphemism of "unauthorized protest activity" is just as egregious. It makes it sound as though the object is that a group forgot to file a permit application for use of public space. This isn't protest activity -- it's a crime scene.

Speaking of which ... where are the police? Nowhere, because the school hasn't called them:

There did not appear to be many campus police, or any officers from outside agencies, in the area. LAPD told Eyewitness News they have not been asked to get involved.

That excuse only goes so far. CSULA is not a private school like Columbia; it is a state-operated university, and the property is public rather than private. If the LAPD turned on the television, they could literally witness several crimes in progress. They have a duty to respond and intervene. They are choosing not to do so, out of the same pusillanimous impulse that causes the school and the media to euphemize terrorism taking place on the campus at the moment.

That has costs, and we are seeing those now in the escalation of intimidation campaigns at these so-called "demonstrations." Free Press reporter Olivia Reingold went to cover a pro-Palestinian protest in New York City's Union Square against the IDF's rescue operation that freed four hostages from central Gaza. Despite being on public property, the "protesters" threatened and intimidated Reingold because she is Jewish:

I had been at this particular protest in Union Square for about 45 minutes, watching and taking notes, when a man wearing a neck gaiter, sunglasses, and a Hezbollah flag fashioned as a headscarf suddenly pointed at me. “She’s a Zionist!” he shouted. “Get her out of here.”

Immediately, dozens of protesters swarmed me, hoisting their keffiyehs high in the sky and boxing me in to block my view. Many of them were completely shrouded in keffiyehs and masks. A chorus of voices surrounded me, shoving me. “Get the fuck out,” a woman yelled into my ear. “The people are saying we don’t want you here.”

One man fired an air horn into my ears. A girl lurched at my notebook, grabbing it and ripping apart the metal spine. “You’re not writing anything down,” she said, tearing the pages and throwing them into the air. “Get the fuck out—get the fuck out!”

In the context of these protests across the country this week, this was very mild. For anyone visibly Jewish who happens to be near one of these mobs, or anyone like a security guard trying to keep peace, the interactions are often much more harrowing.

Reingold goes on to list a few more recent anti-Semitic rallies, which demonstrates the escalating intimidation and threatened violence they generate. This is a direct result of the euphemizing conducted by media, Academia, and other progressive elites intended to normalize plain, old-fashioned terrorism and gangsterism. The disincentives toward that behavior got dismantled four years ago in the BLM/Floyd riots, and now the rabid anti-Semites on the Left are forcing an even worse retreat from public order and lawful engagement. 

Stop calling these CSULA thugs, and all of the other intimidation mobs, "protesters." They're terrorists, domestic or otherwise, and it's high time we begin treating them as such. 

Of course, we can't expect the Protection Racket Media to tell the truth about the nature of these "protests." They're too complicit in the radical-Left nihilism that drives these terrorist events, and too much in favor of the agenda that those seek to impose. It takes independent voices to call this out -- like the Free Press, and like us and the Townhall Media Group. Many of our readers have joined the fight as part of our VIP and VIP Gold membership, and they have been crucial to our operations as an independent platform and the ability to debate all of the issues honestly.

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