Biden, Congress, Zionist Groups, the Media and Cops Seek to Crush Campus Protests of Israel’s Gaza Genocide
Time for a reckoning about who’s truly responsible for campus violence
It’s been just over two weeks since a group of a few hundred students at Columbia University, on April 17 set up a peaceful tent city on a lawn in the central quad of the campus. Their goal was to protest the ongoing destruction of Gaza and the mounting slaughter of Gaza’s Palestinian population, with nearly 35,000 mostly women and children killed and 75,000 wounded, primarily by US-supplied weapons. They are demanding that the university divest from Israeli companies and US arms makers.
That protest might have become just a footnote in Columbia’s venerable history of protest. Instead, the university’s Board of Trustees and its feckless President Nemat Shafik, hastily summoned New York Police Department tactical units the next day to arrest over 100 of the protesting students and to tear down their tent encampment. This was followed by the outrage of her cancelling the protesters’ student status, deactivating their ID cards, evicting them from their dorm rooms, and denying them the chance to complete their semester’s classes. Those martial and repressive punitive measures almost instantly sparked an astonishing number of similar protests at campuses across the country from Boston to Los Angeles and Minneapolis to Austin.
Meanwhile, the corporate news media conglomerates were soon at their real job of spreading misleading reports falsely labeling anti-Israel statements and chants by campus protesters as “anti-semitic.” The US media largely declined to note that many of the pro-Palestinian protesters are themselves Jewish, while often quoting unidentified Jewish students as saying that the protests against Israel and its zionist government by protesters made them “feel unsafe” or that hearing what they wrongly considered to be anti-jewish chants from protesters “interfered with their concentration in their classes.”
President Biden, whose entire political career, beginning as an opponent of busing to integrate schools in his political home state of Delaware, has been as a “law-and-order” politician, stirred the pot by telling reporters. “There’s the right to protest, but not to cause chaos.”
Imagine telling that to Martin Luther King, who famously in his Letter from Birmingham Jail explaining to critics his decision to urge protesters violate a Birmingham ordinance banning public gatherings, wrote:
“There are two types of laws: just and unjust. I would be the first to advocate obeying just laws. One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that ‘an unjust law is no law at all.’”
Biden, a trained lawyer, also in his press statement, disingenuously conflated vandalism, like the breaking a glass pane on a locked door to gain entry to a campus building with “violence,” saying:
“Vandalism, trespassing, breaking windows, shutting down campuses, forcing the cancellation of classes and graduation — none of this is a peaceful protest. Threatening people, intimidating people, instilling fear in people is not a peaceful protest,”
Ahem, Joe. Your own FBI, which as you know maintains national and regional crime records, defines violent crimes as acts (usually felonies) that intentionally hurt or kill other people. Breaking windows, trespassing, vandalism such as painting slogans on building walls typically categorized as “property crimes” (usually misdemeanors) not as acts of violence. And by the way Joe, the students have not “shut down” any campus, or “forced the cancellation of any classes or graduation.” It has been college administrations who have done those things, mostly as an effort at image control for their boards of trustees, big donors, and posturing politicians trying to claim universities are swarming with crazed “activists” bent on mayhem and violence.
So what’s the state of affairs after 16 days of this so-called national crisis on what the Guardian newspaper reports is 80 US college and university campuses? Nearly 2400 arrests of peaceful protesters so far by riot police called in by either university presidents or, in the cases of some public universities. by right-wing governors like Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and right-wing mayors like New York City’s Eric Adams. In many or most of those actions, the decision to call in police has been hasty to the point of reflexive and clearly has not been justified by any violent, destructive or even disruptive behavior by protesting students.
Indeed the only real example of students being attacked by other than police officers was when a gang of 200 masked zionist pro-Israel thugs, allegedly not students or not all students, charged an encampment of protesting UCLA students and began beating them with sticks and spraying their faces with Mace, as police reportedly stood aside to let the thugs do their job for them for an unconscionable three hours. So far, while Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass has called for an investigation into the attack to discover who was involved in it and behind it, police have been silent about any effort to identify, investigate or prosecute the attackers. UCLA victims of the attack aren’t waiting; they are doing their own online sleuthing and reportedly have come up with some names by tracing vehicle license plates.
I along with a group of fellow members of Radical Elders, many of us veterans of the campus protests against the Indochina War back when we were students, made a visit on April 30 to the heavily police-secured main gate of the Columbia campus at 116th Street and Broadway. Even though some protesting students were at that point occupying Hamilton Hall (which they had dubbed “Hind’s Hall” in honor of six-year-old Hind Rajab, a Palestinian child cold-bloodedly murdered by IDF machine-gun fire along with two family members who tried to rescue her), the campus, including the re-established tent encampment, was calm. People could be seen through the gate’s bars walking and going about their business on the sidewalks on the quad, appearing calm despite the heavy police presence both on and outside the campus. They were seemingly unbothered by either the Hamilton Hall occupation or the re-established tent encampment.
As far as I can tell by researching the extensive coverage of these protests, virtually all of the violence over the past two weeks has been committed or instigated by police, who attacked peaceful students and supportive faculty by punching them, throwing them down on the ground, stomping on, beating. tasing, tear-gassing them and even at some campuses, targeting them by “flash-bang” grenades and even rubber bullets. In some cases, people have been seriously injured — not just protesting students but also faculty members who turned out at many protests to encircle with linked arms and try to protect students from harm. One professor from Southern Illinois University, who came to the Washington University campus in nearby St. Louis to support protesting students, suffered 12 broken ribs and other injuries requiring hospitalization when he was jumped on, beaten and dragged to a wagon by four riot-gear-clad St. Louis police officers. A video showed that the cops attacked him as he was attempting with his cell phone to video their assault on peacefully protesting students.
On the Dartmouth campus 65-year-old Prof. Annalise Orleck, head of Dartmouth’s Jewish Studies Program, was body slammed by New Hampshire state police goons, suffering whiplash. The 34-year faculty member at the Ivy League school was initially barree from the campus for six months by the local court’s bail commissioner for what she said was her effort to protect her students, though after a hue and cry over this, Dartmouth said she would not be barred by the school from teaching there.\
There have been, as far as I can tell, no documented physical attacks on Jewish students on campus by pro-Palestine protesters, though some who have been counter protesters or who have called protesters “terrorists,” anti-semites or ‘Hamas supporters” have reportedly been heckled back at. There have reportedly been cases of alleged harassment and threats against Jewish students of Columbia University and some other colleges, but these have occurred generally outside the campuses. Tp be sure, at Columbia and probably at other campus protests, the on-campus actions have attracted a lot of loose cannons who were kept outside the locked-down campus gates by police or private security people. But the actions of such independent actors —Jew-hating fascists, left-wing, fringe sect members who may see Hamas as a liberation force, etc. are not under the control of campus protesters.
Meanwhile a survey of college newspaper editors by Politico at 14 campuses with pro-Palestine protest actions and published on May 3, found little grounds for Jewish students to feel “unsafe” at their schools, As Jared Mitovich, an editor of the campus paper at the University of Pennsylvania , told Politico;
“In the Jewish community, there are certainly subsets of people who do feel unsafe on this campus right now, especially given the encampment — that’s created a place for them to attribute those feelings to. At the same time, you also have Jewish students who are pro-Palestinian and who want to see the university defending its Palestinian students. On the flip side, Palestinian students and their supporters do feel that the university has kind of created a state of heightened surveillance. What I know is definitely true is that they’re concerned about doxxing and their safety, given that a lot of external organizations have taken down the names of faculty, students and staff — anybody who those organizations perceived to be engaged in antisemitic or even anti-Israel conduct. Those names and faces have been plastered all over the internet. And that’s really prompted a wave of concern among those students, but also university administration, who have taken some steps to create doxxing resources and web pages.”
In other words, by and large the media coverage of this campus movement opposing Israel’s war on Gaza and its trapped Palestinian population is a gross misreporting and mischaracterization of what is actually happening. National leaders including President Biden, are calling protesters “anti-semitic” for allegedly saying things that make Jewish students fearful, when what they are criticizing is Israel’s genocide and its zionist policies, as well as US support for Israel’s war on Gaza. The people who have real reason to fear being surveilled, injured and punished with academic sanctions are the peaceful protesters of Israel’s war on Gaza, many of whom are Arab or Palestinian, and a fair number of whom are themselves Jewish.
In the first hours of early April 30 (56 years to the day of the 1968 SDS takeover of several Columbia buildings), aware that police were massing outside the urban campus of Columbia in preparation for a raid on the relocated and rebuilt tent encampment in the quad, a small number of the protesting students broke into and occupied Hamilton Hall. President Stafik promptly ordered already assembled NYPD tactical unit cops to move in on campus protesters once again. This time New York’s “Finest’ militarized thug protest-rousters, in a surprise nighttime raid that came with no first offer to the occupiers of a chance to leave the building peacefully, themselves broke into a second-floor window using a special SWAT van with a extendable platform and rounded up the occupiers, who surrendered peacefully. Terrifyingly though, one officer fired his gun during the raid, later claiming it had been an “accident.” (No explanation was given for why he had his gun out or his finger on the trigger.)
All the occupiers, after booking, were expelled, not just suspended, by the university.
Jewish Voices for Peace, an organization of some 440,000 members, has endorsed the protests, beginning with the one at Columbia University, in which a number of its own organization members have participated. JVP published a statement of support on its website. That statement said the organization’s members “stand with” the students of Columbia and the City College of New York, which also had their protest encampment raided by the NYPD on orders from New York City Mayor Eric Adams — a former NY Police Officer.
In that statement they wrote:
It will forever be a stain on Columbia that the administration called riot police on its own student body rather than divest from the brutality of war and occupation.
The blame for tonight’s violence also falls on the shoulders of politicians such as President Biden, House Speaker Mike Johnson, NYC Mayor Eric Adams, and more, who have used their power to smear anti-war protests, paving the way for police violence against students.
A personal note:
As a 1975 alumnus of Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism, and a General Studies student taking Chinese at Columbia from 1968 through 1971, as well as a Knight-Bagehot Fellow in Economic and Business Journalism in 1978-79, I am appalled by the rampant pro-zionist bias of Columbia’s president and its board of trustees. I’m particularly disgusted at the fear shown by these academic frauds who claim to stand for open intellectual engagement but toss any concern about freedom of speech and assembly out the window at the slightest threat of a lost lucrative position or a cutoff of federal funding by ignorant politicians trying to score points or wealthy donors pulling their funding. The only bright side is that Stafik’s precipitous decision to sic police riot squad goons onto her own students succeeded spectacularly in launching a national campus movement against Israel’s genocidal war on the Palestinian people under its occupation and control.
I’m also happy to learn that Wesleyan University in Connecticut, where I earned my Bachelor’s Degree as a member of the Class of 1971 and spent my college years outside of class protesting and organizing against the US imperialist war on Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, while also the scene of a significant protest encampment against Israeli genocide, has not had its administration try to stamp out the protest. Even as Wesleyan Students for Justice in Palestine, the group that organized the encampment action, is talking about mintaining their centrally located protest through the university’s graduation weekend, University President Michael S. Roth, in a letter to the campus community, said that students holding the encampment know they are in violation of university rules and “seem to be willing to accept the consequences.” He said said that as long as their protest is not violent and does not disrupt campus operations, the university will not attempt to clear the encampment.
He wrote, “"There will be many on campus who cheer on the protesters, and many who are offended or even frightened by their rallies and messages,…But as long as we all reject violence, we have opportunities to listen and to learn from one another. This may not happen during the chanting and drumming, but it can happen during some of the planned discussion sessions and deep conversations that will take place throughout the week."
The big difference between Roth’s approach and that of Columbia’s Stafik, is that the Columbia president has shown herself to have no respect for freedom of speech, instead seeing words as dangerous weapons which much be repressed by police with actual weapons, while Roth shows the wisdom of tolerance of dissent and the encouragement of open discourse, which are the proper tools of academia.