SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
student protests
Knowledge Is Power. Gaza War Supporters Don’t Want Students to Have Either
Silence is complicity, and that’s the way Israel’s allies like it.
Sep 05, 2024
With nearly 18 million students on U.S. college campuses this fall, defenders of the war on Gaza don’t want to hear any backtalk. Silence is complicity, and that’s the way Israel’s allies like it. For them, the new academic term restarts a threat to the status quo. But for supporters of human rights, it’s a renewed opportunity to turn higher education into something more than a comfort zone.
In the United States, the extent and arrogance of the emerging collegiate repression is, quite literally, breathtaking. Every day, people are dying due to their transgression of breathing while Palestinian.
The Gaza death toll adds up to more than one Kristallnachtper day—for upwards of 333 days and counting, with no end in sight. The shattering of a society’s entire infrastructure has been horrendous. Months ago, citing data from the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, ABC Newsreported that “25,000 buildings have been destroyed, 32 hospitals forced out of service, and three churches, 341 mosques and 100 universities and schools destroyed.”
Not that this should disturb the tranquility of campuses in the country whose taxpayers and elected leaders make it all possible. Top college officials wax eloquent about the sanctity of higher learning and academic freedom while they suppress protests against policies that have destroyed scores of universities in Palestine.
The ongoing atrocities by the Israel “Defense” Forces in Gaza, killing a daily average of more than 100 people—mostly children and women—have galvanized many young people to take action in the United States.
A key rationale for quashing dissent is that anti-Israel protests make some Jewish students uncomfortable. But the purposes of college education shouldn’t include always making people feel comfortable. How comfortable should students be in a nation enabling mass murder in Gaza?
What would we say about claims that students in the North with southern accents should not have been made uncomfortable by on-campus civil rights protests and denunciations of Jim Crow in the 1950s and 1960s? Or white students from South Africa, studying in the United States, made uncomfortable by anti-apartheid protests in the 1980s?
A bedrock for the edifice of speech suppression and virtual thought-policing is the old standby of equating criticism of Israel with antisemitism. Likewise, the ideology of Zionism that tries to justify Israeli policies is supposed to get a pass no matter what—while opponents, including many Jews, are liable to be denounced as antisemites.
But polling shows that more younger Americans are supportive of Palestinians than they are of Israelis. The ongoing atrocities by the Israel “Defense” Forces in Gaza, killing a daily average of more than 100 people—mostly children and women—have galvanized many young people to take action in the United States.
“Protests rocked American campuses toward the end of the last academic year,” a front-page New York Times story reported in late August, adding: “Many administrators remain shaken by the closing weeks of the spring semester, when encampments, building occupations and clashes with the police helped lead to thousands of arrests across the country.” (Overall, the phrase “clashes with the police” served as a euphemism for police violently attacking nonviolent protesters.)
From the hazy ivory towers and corporate suites inhabited by so many college presidents and boards of trustees, Palestinian people are scarcely more than abstractions compared to far more real priorities. An understated sentence from the Times sheds a bit of light: “The strategies that are coming into public view suggest that some administrators at schools large and small have concluded that permissiveness is perilous, and that a harder line may be the best option—or perhaps just the one least likely to invite blowback from elected officials and donors who have demanded that universities take stronger action against protesters.”
From the hazy ivory towers and corporate suites inhabited by so many college presidents and boards of trustees, Palestinian people are scarcely more than abstractions compared to far more real priorities.
Much more clarity is available from a new Mondoweissarticle by activist Carrie Zaremba, a researcher with training in anthropology. “University administrators across the United States have declared an indefinite state of emergency on college campuses,” she wrote. “Schools are rolling out policies in preparation for quashing pro-Palestine student activism this fall semester, and reshaping regulations and even campuses in the process to suit this new normal.
“Many of these policies being instituted share a common formula: more militarization, more law enforcement, more criminalization, and more consolidation of institutional power. But where do these policies originate and why are they so similar across all campuses? The answer lies in the fact that they have been provided by the ‘risk and crisis management’ consulting industries, with the tacit support of trustees, Zionist advocacy groups, and federal agencies. Together, they deploy the language of safety to disguise a deeper logic of control and securitization.”
Countering such top-down moves will require intensive grassroots organizing. Sustained pushback against campus repression will be essential, to continually assert the right to speak out and protest as guaranteed by the First Amendment.
Insistence on acquiring knowledge while gaining power for progressive forces will be vital. That’s why the national Teach-In Network was launched this week by the RootsAction Education Fund (which I help lead), under the banner “Knowledge Is Power—and Our Grassroots Movements Need Both.”
The elites that were appalled by the moral uprising on college campuses against Israel’s slaughter in Gaza are now doing all they can to prevent a resurgence of that uprising. But the mass murder continues, subsidized by the U.S. government. When students insist that true knowledge and ethical action need each other, they can help make history and not just study it.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Nobel Laureate Yunus Accepts Call to Lead Bangladesh's Interim Government
"The courage of this youth is boundless," said the microcredit pioneer known as the banker to the poor. "They have made Bangladesh proud and shown the world our nation's determination against injustice."
Aug 06, 2024
The leader of student protests over jobs and economic injustice in Bangladesh in recent weeks said Tuesday that Nobel Peace Prize laureate Muhammad Yunus had accepted the students' call for him to take over the country's interim government, following the resignation of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina.
A spokesperson for the country's president, Mohammed Shahabuddin, told the Associated Press that Yunus would lead the interim government and that other political leaders would be decided soon.
Yunus, an economist who won the Nobel prize in 2006 for establishing the microcredit institution Grameen Bank, has been called the "banker to the poor" for helping to lift millions of people in Bangladesh out of poverty through small loans.
Nahid Islam, who led the protest movement last month over quotas in government jobs and unemployment, said Tuesday that the movement would not accept a government led by General Waker-uz-Zaman, the chief of army staff who announced on Monday that Hasina had fled the country and stepped down, and who took temporary control of the country.
"We have given our blood, been martyred, and we have to fulfill our pledge to build a new Bangladesh," Islam said. "No government other than the one proposed by the students will be accepted. As we have said, no military government, or one backed by the military, or a government of fascists, will be accepted."
"No government other than the one proposed by the students will be accepted. As we have said, no military government, or one backed by the military, or a government of fascists, will be accepted."
Yunus said he was "honored by the trust of the protesters who wish for me to lead the interim government."
"If action is needed in Bangladesh, for my country and for the courage of my people, then I will take it. The interim government is only the beginning. Lasting peace will only come with free elections. Without elections, there will be no change," said Yunus.
Shahabuddin announced on Tuesday that Parliament had been dissolved and said new elections would soon be held.
The protests began in July in Dhaka, with students outraged over the reinstatement of a job quota policy that reserved 30% of government jobs for descendants of military veterans of Bangladesh's 1971 war for independence from Pakistan—most of whom had ties to Hasina's Awami League party.
About a quarter of jobs were reserved for women, people with disabilities, and ethic minorities, leaving about 3,000 jobs open for 400,000 graduates to compete over.
Bangladesh has a high unemployment rate, with about a fifth of the population of 170 million people out of work, exacerbating anger over the job scheme and economic distress.
Hasina was elected to her fourth term as prime minister in January, but was accused of rigging the election, clamping down on opposition politicians and dissent, and arranging extrajudicial killings. She denied the accusations.
Student protesters took to the streets, chanting, "One, two, three, four, Sheikh Hasina is a dictator."
Police responded by cracking down violently, with more than 180 people killed and hundreds of people hit in the eyes by pellets that security forces deployed—potentially blinding them permanently.
The country's Supreme Court rescinded the job quota policy on July 21, opening jobs to 93% of applicants, but students continued to rally, demanding that Hasina step down.
Yunus expressed pride in the student protesters who led the movement.
"Youth have voiced their need for change in our country," the 84-year-old banker said. "The prime minister heard them by leaving the country. This was a very important first step taken yesterday. The courage of this youth is boundless. They have made Bangladesh proud and shown the world our nation's determination against injustice."
Keep ReadingShow Less
Trump Vows to Set Student-Led Peace Movement 'Back 25 to 30 Years'
"In Trump's version of America, dissent will not be allowed unless he agrees with it like the January 6 attack," said one observer.
May 28, 2024
Former U.S. President Donald Trump reportedly told a group of donors at a recent campaign event that he will crack down on pro-Palestine demonstrations on college campuses and deport foreign student protesters if he's elected to a second term this November.
The Washington Postreported the presumptive GOP nominee told the group of predominantly Jewish supporters at the May 14 roundtable in New York City that the pro-Palestine protest movement sweeping college and university campuses across the country is part of a "radical revolution" that "has to be stopped now."
"One thing I do is, any student that protests, I throw them out of the country. You know, there are a lot of foreign students. As soon as they hear that, they're going to behave," Trump said, according to event attendees. "If you get me elected, and you should really be doing this, if you get me reelected, we're going to set that movement back 25 or 30 years."
Trump—who as president repeatedly encouraged police to brutalize protesters during the nationwide wave of racial justice demonstrations following the May 2020 murder of George Floyd—praised the New York Police Department for violently clearing a pro-Palestine student encampment and occupation at Columbia University last month.
The Columbia camp was one of dozens of encampments launched by students in response to Israel's obliteration of Gaza, a 235-day campaign that has left more than 128,000 Palestinians dead, maimed, or missing, according to Palestinian and international officials. Around 9 in 10 Gazans have been forcibly displaced. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians are either suffering famine or are on the brink of starvation.
Last week, International Criminal Court Prosecutor Karim Khan announced that he is seeking arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, and three Hamas leaders for alleged crimes including extermination committed on and after the October 7 attack on Israel in which more than 1,100 people were killed and over 240 others kidnapped.
Meanwhile, the International Court of Justice is weighing whether Israel's conduct in the war constitutes genocide, as alleged by South Africa and over 30 countries and regional blocs. Earlier this month, the ICJ ordered Israel to immediately halt its invasion of Rafah. However, Israel has ignored the order and in recent days its military has carried out a series of strikes that have killed and wounded hundreds of Palestinians.
Trump—who previously said Israel should "finish up" its Gaza campaign and "stop killing people"—told attendees of the New York roundtable that the U.S. ally has a right to continue "its war on terror."
"I'm one of the only people who says that now," he said.
Trump, who is facing 88 federal and state felony charges across four cases, is expected to face off against President Joe Biden in November.
The Biden administration—which has approved billions of dollars in new U.S. military aid to Israel—is assessing whether Israel's Sunday bombing of a refugee camp in southern Gaza violated the president's shifting "red line" in Rafah.
Trump's vow to crush pro-Palestine protests tracks with his November pledge to "root out" those he called "radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country," but it stands in stark contrast with his promise to pardon supporters convicted for violently storming the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021 in support of his "Big Lie" that the 2020 presidential election was "stolen."
"In Trump's version of America, dissent will not be allowed unless he agrees with it like the January 6 attack," liberal political commentator Dean Obeidallah—who is of Palestinian descent—said Tuesday on social media.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Most Popular