How odd that the Prime Minister of Israel Benjamin Netanyahu feels it’s in his place to publicly condemn American students for protesting on American soil and is demanding that university college presidents put a stop to it.
Adding insult to injury (stay in your lane, Prime Minister), U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson goes to Columbia University, chastise Americans, and gin up anger towards student protestors exercising their right to free speech because he disagrees with them. It should be noted that Speaker Johnson receives campaign money from the pro-Israel lobby AIPAC. Recently he received $95,000 in donations.
What kind of a strange situation is that we allow foreign pressure on domestic matters like campus protests. It’s apparent the U.S. establishment is increasingly unhinged that it must deflect “actual genocide happening in Gaza” which most Americans agree is occurring by insisting that “opposition to genocide” by students on campus somehow is violence that must be stopped, while the former be allowed to go unaddressed. Furthermore, in the hope of drawing public support in condemning university protests, Johnson and the like is weaponizing “antisemitism” on protestors even as – most of these protests at many universities (especially on the East Coast) are organized by Jewish students themselves.
Let’s be clear: contrary to some in the mainstream media, right-wing politicians and some on the left who are framing the recent wave of protests at universities across the nation as antisemitic, pro-Hamas or even acts of terrorism – these protests are none of those above.
Simply, student activists are calling for a ceasefire and an end to the brutal war in Gaza. And their message is non-threatening in nature unless you find peace and pro-humanity as threats.
Real motivation for crackdowns: money The real threat and perhaps the motivation behind these crackdowns has to do with students demanding that their school divest its financial interests with Israel – which would mean interrupting large streams of income for universities.
It’s not just potentially money loss for schools, but for huge American corporate companies working with the university on tech and military research projects that benefit Israel. Some of these same corporations also place multi-million-dollar ads in corporate media — which could explain the media’s own biased framing of student protests as threatening.
School presidents and administrators at these top universities must also contend with mounting pressure from billionaire donors, pro-Israel hawks who have already been threatening to cut financial support because of these protests. This is true at Harvard and Columbia and perhaps other top universities as well.
With all these money interests in the picture, it’s no wonder why the powers-that-be are wanting to distract attention from Gaza and instead wanting the narrative to focus on a debate over free speech on campus and its limitations.
Students have the moral high ground Without question student and faculty protestors have the moral high ground in their expressed dissent when considering that already 34,000 Palestinians have been killed, 77,800 wounded (more than half of whom are women and children) and over a million are starving and at the brink of famine.
It’s not just in this anti-genocide campaign that students have a moral high ground. University student protests have been a long tradition. Remember that it was the university student’s movements of the past that have helped to end the Vietnam war, pass landmark civil and women’s rights legislations, and end apartheid through their calling for U.S. boycotts on then apartheid South Africa.
Student protest movements were also met back then with often violent suppression and over-policing, particularly during the 1960s campus clampdowns. Looking back, we now know who was on the right side of history, the students who were brave enough to put a moral check on humanity.
Fast forward 20 years, it will be the same. Speaker Johnson and the protest suppressors will just be a footnote in history while this historic student protest movement against genocide will be remembered as heroic.
After just over a week of mostly peaceful protests at colleges and universities from Connecticut to California (to name a few: Columbia, NYU, Harvard, Yale, MIT, Princeton, George Washington University, Emory, Brown, University of Michigan, University of Minnesota, University of Chicago, Northwestern University, University of Texas at Austin, University of Texas at Dallas, Arizona University, Stanford, UC Berkely, UCLA, USC, etc), there have been over 800 student arrests. Many witnesses on the scene report that most protests were peaceful until police were called in. With social media live streams, we know that some of these eyewitness reports appear to be accurate accountings.
Hope for humanity With a majority of Americans favoring an end to this war in Gaza, these protests are viewed as a hopeful refresher for our humanity – that our sense of humanity is still alive and that what we are witnessing in Gaza is in fact abominable. It also makes sense that the university community — known to be the conscience of humanity – are those who are saving us from ourselves and indifference to war crimes and genocide. Kudos to students. We support “peaceful” and robust dialogue and the exercise of free speech at universities.
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