Wednesday, March 08, 2006

"Your Hate Is Not Welcome On Our Campus"

Photos from a lecture Norman Finkelstein delivered on Columbia's campus this evening entitled “Israel and Palestine: Misuse of Anti-Semitism, Abuse of History.”



I mind my own business when I'm on photo assignments. This is mostly because I like working alone (I firmly believe that almost all journalists are deeply antisocial, and in fact only speak with other people in order to better make fun of them in an appropriately cynical fashion), but also because it's simply more efficient to get in, take the necessary photos, and get out. I am also a firm believer in the 'more is better' principle, which means that I walk away from any given assignment with somewhere between 100 and 600 photos.



This evening was no different. Norman Finkelstein's visit to a heavily Jewish campus only recently recovering from last year's MEALAC controversy was, unsurprisingly, not well-received. There were protestors lined up outside of Columbia's Lerner Hall, and the Roone Arledge Auditorium was filled with students wearing fliers that read "Norman Finkelstein, YOUR HATE IS NOT WELCOME ON THIS CAMPUS." Photo ops were plentiful, and my soul rejoiced.



Ordinarily, at the end of each assignment I go through the hundreds of photos and pick 10 or so that I really like and send them in to The Spectator. One runs, and the others disappear into the ethers of my hard drive. From now on, however, I think I'm going to use this blog as a place to post photo runoff (instead of at SpecBlogs, where five photos of one subject quickly become tedious).



So, voila. The Daily News' photographer may have taken better photos than me, but those won't be circulated until tomorrow morning...

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