Mimicking the tactics of the military, students of the Take Back NYU Campaign have bravely stormed the ramparts of academe and occupied the cafeteria in the super deluxe Kimmel Center — built for the students by a Jewish philanthropist.

Not for these coddled warriors is the discomfort of demonstrating in the cold outdoors — a warm cafeteria is the perfect venue for their bourgeois tantrum. Their demands include amnesty for every participant, annual scholarships for 13 students from Gaza, supplies for the university at Gaza, student representation on the Board of Trustees, public disclosure of NYU’s budget and endowment and assorted other perks for those who have done nothing to earn them. This group is joined in solidarity by more than twenty other groups including NOW, Amnesty International, Queer Union, Students for a Democratic Society and Earth Matters, to name just a few familiar ones.

You might be surprised to see the inclusion of a feminist and gay organization since these groups would never be allowed to exist in Gaza or anywhere else in the Muslim world. Individuals propounding homosexuality or feminism would be persecuted, prosecuted and sometimes executed.

Another group that has allied with these toy soldiers is the Asian Cultural Union for reasons that can only leave us baffled - perhaps the tremendous interest that the students have expressed in the appreciation of Chinese food.

Just as the oppression of blacks and apartheid were the menu du jour for students in the last century, Palestinians have become this decade’s catch-all convenient cause.

Despite the fact that millions of people have been killed in the war zones of Congo, Darfur and Sri Lanka for example, our homegrown militants care only about the Palestinians, a group that has received more financial aid from the U.S. the U.N. and Europe than any other ethnicity and for the longest sustained period of time.

Palestinians are the only refugee group to have a self-perpetuating agency at the UN (UNRWA), the only group that has never been allowed to be re-settled or re-integrated into neighboring Arab countries, from which most of them originally derived.

The response of NYU has been predictable: relieved that these fighters aren’t actually armed, the university has referred to the occupiers as “peaceful;” they have given them the use of bathrooms and have announced that they will “try to engage them in colloquy and conversation.”

As we learned in the sixties’ pandemonium on campus, appeasement of terrorists is never a good tactic, yet American universities persist in sending the wrong message and enabling the wrong kind of student protests.

In keeping with the errors of grade inflation, extensions of deadlines for graduation, imposition of speech codes, dumbing down of the curriculum, tolerance of eighth grade writing standards — the university has tolerated the intolerable.

Occupying university property is a crime and should be treated as such. Offenders should be removed, arrested and penalized. 19th century colloquy is hardly the right response for 21rst century student/guerrilas, especially those whose parents spend $40,000 a year pretending to educate them.

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