Chris Hedges: Revolt in the Universities
April 25, 2024
University students across the country, facing mass arrests, suspensions, evictions and expulsions are our last, best hope to halt the genocide in Gaza.
Where have all the flowers gone? – Mr. Fish
By Chris Hedges
in Princeton, N.J.
Substack
Achinthya Sivalingam, a graduate student in Public Affairs at Princeton University did not know when she woke up this morning that shortly after 7 a.m. she would join hundreds of students across the country who have been arrested, evicted and banned from campus for protesting the genocide in Gaza.
She wears a blue sweatshirt, sometimes fighting back tears, when I speak to her. We are seated at a small table in the Small World Coffee shop on Witherspoon Street, half a block away from the university she can no longer enter, from the apartment she can no longer live in and from the campus where in a few weeks she was scheduled to graduate.
She wonders where she will spend the night.
The police gave her five minutes to collect items from her apartment.
“I grabbed really random things,” she says. “I grabbed oatmeal for whatever reason. I was really confused.”
Student protesters across the country exhibit a moral and physical courage — many are facing suspension and expulsion — that shames every major institution in the country. They are dangerous not because they disrupt campus life or engage in attacks on Jewish students — many of those protesting are Jewish — but because they expose the abject failure by the ruling elites and their institutions to halt genocide, the crime of crimes.
These students watch, like most of us, Israel’s live-streamed slaughter of the Palestinian people. But unlike most of us, they act. Their voices and protests are a potent counterpoint to the moral bankruptcy that surrounds them.
Not one university president has denounced Israel’s destruction of every university in Gaza. Not one university president has called for an immediate and unconditional ceasefire. Not one university president has used the words “apartheid” or “genocide.” Not one university president has called for sanctions and divestment from Israel.
Instead, heads of these academic institutions grovel supinely before wealthy donors, corporations — including weapons manufacturers — and rabid right-wing politicians. They reframe the debate around harm to Jews rather than the daily slaughter of Palestinians, including thousands of children.
They have allowed the abusers — the Zionist state and its supporters — to paint themselves as victims. This false narrative, which focuses on anti-Semitism, allows the centers of power, including the media, to block out the real issue — genocide. It contaminates the debate. It is a classic case of “reactive abuse.” Raise your voice to decry injustice, react to prolonged abuse, attempt to resist, and the abuser suddenly transforms themself into the aggrieved.
Princeton University, like other universities across the country, is determined to halt encampments calling for an end to the genocide. This, it appears, is a coordinated effort by universities across the country.
The encampment at George Washington University in Washington D.C. (Joe Lauria)
The university knew about the proposed encampment in advance. When the students reached the five staging sites this morning, they were met by large numbers from the university’s Department of Public Safety and the Princeton Police Department.
The site of the proposed encampment in front of Firestone Library was filled with police. This is despite the fact that students kept their plans off of university emails and confined to what they thought were secure apps. Standing among the police this morning was Rabbi Eitan Webb, who founded and heads Princeton’s Chabad House. He has attended university events to vocally attack those who call for an end to the genocide as anti-semites, according to student activists.
As the some 100 protesters listened to speakers, a helicopter circled noisily overhead. A banner, hanging from a tree, read: “From the River to the Sea, Palestine Will be Free.”
The students said they would continue their protest until Princeton divests from firms that “profit from or engage in the State of Israel’s ongoing military campaign” in Gaza, ends university research “on weapons of war” funded by the Department of Defense, enacts an academic and cultural boycott of Israeli institutions, supports Palestinian academic and cultural institutions and advocates for an immediate and unconditional ceasefire.
But if the students again attempt to erect tents – they took down 14 tents once the two arrests were made this morning – it seems certain they will all be arrested.
“It is far beyond what I expected to happen,” says Aditi Rao, a doctoral student in classics. “They started arresting people seven minutes into the encampment.”
Statue of George Washington draped in Palestinian flag at protest on Thursday at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. (Joe Lauria)
A Threat
Princeton Vice President of Campus Life Rochelle Calhoun sent out a mass email on Wednesday warning students they could be arrested and thrown off campus if they erected an encampment.
“Any individual involved in an encampment, occupation, or other unlawful disruptive conduct who refuses to stop after a warning will be arrested and immediately barred from campus,” she wrote. “For students, such exclusion from campus would jeopardize their ability to complete the semester.”
These students, she added, could be suspended or expelled.
Sivalingam ran into one of her professors and pleaded with him for faculty support for the protest. He informed her he was coming up for tenure and could not participate. The course he teaches is called “Ecological Marxism.”
“It was a bizarre moment,” she says. “I spent last semester thinking about ideas and evolution and civil change, like social change. It was a crazy moment.”
She starts to cry.
A few minutes after 7 a.m, police distributed a leaflet to the students erecting tents with the headline “Princeton University Warning and No Trespass Notice.” The leaflet stated that the students were “engaged in conduct on Princeton University property that violates University rules and regulations, poses a threat to the safety and property of others, and disrupts the regular operations of the University: such conduct includes participating in an encampment and/or disrupting a University event.” The leaflet said those who engaged in the “prohibited conduct” would be considered a “Defiant Trespasser under New Jersey criminal law (N.J.S.A. 2C:18-3) and subject to immediate arrest.”
A few seconds later Sivalingam heard a police officer say “Get those two.”
Hassan Sayed, a doctoral student in economics who is of Pakistani descent, was working with Sivalingam to erect one of tents. He was handcuffed. Sivalingam was zip tied so tightly it cut off circulation to her hands. There are dark bruises circling her wrists.
“There was an initial warning from cops about ‘You are trespassing’ or something like that, ‘This is your first warning,’” Sayed says. “It was kind of loud. I didn’t hear too much. Suddenly, hands were thrust behind my back. As this happened, my right arm tensed a bit and they said ‘You are resisting arrest if you do that.’ They put the handcuffs on.”
He was asked by one of the arresting officers if he was a student. When he said he was, they immediately informed him that he was banned from campus.
“No mention of what charges are as far as I could hear,” he says. “I get taken to one car. They pat me down a bit. They ask for my student ID.”
Sayed was placed in the back of a campus police car with Sivalingam, who was in agony from the zip ties. He asked the police to loosen the zip ties on Sivalingam, a process that took several minutes as they had to remove her from the vehicle and the scissors were unable to cut through the plastic. They had to find wire cutters. They were taken to the university’s police station.
Sayed was stripped of his phone, keys, clothes, backpack and AirPods and placed in a holding cell. No one read him his Miranda rights.
He was again told he was banned from the campus.
“Is this an eviction?” he asked the campus police.
The police did not answer.
He asked to call a lawyer. He was told he could call a lawyer when the police were ready.
“They may have mentioned something about trespassing but I don’t remember clearly,” he says. “It certainly was not made salient to me.”
He was told to fill out forms about his mental health and if he was on medication. Then he was informed he was being charged with “defiant trespassing.”
“I say, ‘I’m a student, how is that trespassing? I attend school here,’” he says. “They really don’t seem to have a good answer. I reiterate, asking whether me being banned from campus constitutes eviction, because I live on campus. They just say, ‘ban from campus.’ I said something like that doesn’t answer the question. They say it will all be explained in the letter. I’m like, ‘Who is writing the letter?’ ‘Dean of grad school’ they respond.”
Sayed was driven to his campus housing. The campus police did not let him have his keys. He was given a few minutes to grab items like his phone charger. They locked his apartment door. He, too, is seeking shelter in the Small World Coffee shop.
Sivalingam often returned to Tamil Nadu in southern India, where she was born, for her summer vacations. The poverty and daily struggle of those around her, to survive, she says, was “sobering.”
“The disparity of my life and theirs, how to reconcile how those things exist in the same world,” she says, her voice quivering with emotion. “It was always very bizarre to me. I think that’s where a lot of my interest in addressing inequality, in being able to think about people outside of the United States as humans, as people who deserve lives and dignity, comes from.”
She must adjust now to being exiled from campus.
“I gotta find somewhere to sleep,” she says, “tell my parents, but that’s going to be a little bit of a conversation, and find ways to engage in jail support and communications because I can’t be there, but I can continue to mobilize.”
There are many shameful periods in American history. The genocide we carried out against indigenous peoples. Slavery. The violent suppression of the labor movement that saw hundreds of workers killed. Lynching. Jim and Jane Crow. Vietnam. Iraq. Afghanistan. Libya.
The genocide in Gaza, which we fund and support, is of such monstrous proportions that it will achieve a prominent place in this pantheon of crimes.
History will not be kind to most of us. But it will bless and revere these students.
https://consortiumnews.com/2024/04/25/c ... versities/
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Netanyahu calls for crackdown on pro-Palestine protesters in the U.S.
By Dave DeCamp (Posted Apr 26, 2024)
Originally published: Antiwar.com on April 24, 2024 (more by Antiwar.com)
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Wednesday called for a crackdown on Americans protesting against Israel’s slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza at college campuses across the United States.
“What’s happening in America’s college campuses is horrific. Antisemitic mobs have taken over leading universities,” Netanyahu said. His comments echoed President Biden, who labeled the demonstrations “antisemitic protests.”
At some American universities, police have arrested and dispersed protesters, but Netanyahu said more should be done. “Now, fortunately, state, local, federal officials, many of them have responded differently but there has to be more. More has to be done,” Netanyahu said.
Israeli Opposition leader and former Prime Minister Yair Lapid also called for a crackdown on the protests. “What’s happening on American college campuses is unforgivable,” he wrote on X.
It is antisemitism, it is support for terrorism, it is support for Hamas which murders LGBT people and oppresses women. The administration cannot stand by, it has to intervene.
Texas state troopers broke up a protest at Texas University in Austin on Wednesday and reportedly arrested at least 10 students. The protesters were demanding that the university divest from manufacturing companies that supply weapons to the Israeli military.
Israel supporters in the US have also falsely labeled the demonstrations across the country as “antisemitic,” but many Jewish students are involved in pro-Palestinian activism on college campuses, including at the protest at Columbia University. Netanyahu took the smear a step further and claimed the protesters wanted to “kill Jews.”
“We see this exponential rise of antisemitism throughout America and throughout Western societies as Israel tries to defend itself against genocidal terrorists, genocidal terrorists who hide behind civilians,” Netanyahu said.
https://mronline.org/2024/04/26/netanya ... n-the-u-s/
Who in the fuck does he think he is? Oh, never mind...
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Free Speech on the Ropes: Legislation to Revoke Not-for-Profit Status of Organizations that Support Palestine Protests Passes in House
Posted on April 26, 2024 by Yves Smith
Chuck L alerted me to an important tweetstorm by Lara Friedman of the Foundation for Middle East Peace about legislation that is designed to drop a hammer on not-for-profits that are deemed to be supporting pro-Palestine protests by revoking their not-for-profit status. As Friedman explains, this bill, H.R. 6408, also removes pretty much all due process rights, so its targets have effectively no recourse. The pretext is that pro-Palestine protests are supporting terrorist organizations, as in Hamas.
This measures is so far under the radar that so far, only Friedman and Matthew Petti at Reason seem to have noticed it. And Petti has pointed out that the Secretary of the Treasury can designate any organization to be “terrorist-supporting organization,” so the does not think, as Friedman seems to, that any other measures are needed to allow an Administration to try to financially cripple not-for-profits engaging in wrong speech.
Note that the messaging depicting Hamas as somehow behind the campus protests has increased:
Speaker Mike Johnson, claiming that Hamas supports the pro-Palestinian protests at Columbia University and other U.S. colleges, has threatened congressional intervention, including pulling federal funding from the institutions.
And Aljazeera has already produced evidence of Zionist groups trying to stoke confrontations at the demonstrations (hat tip Erasmus):
PROOF Pro-Israel groups pay "protestors" 50k to smear students and activists
Footage from an undercover Al Jazeera investigation leaked after getting blocked from being released in the US shows pro-Israel demonstrations of American college students astroturfed from the… Show more
Mind you, not-for-profits are already subject to mission and censorship pressures by large donors, witness the billionaires who loudly said they would halt donations to Ivy League schools if they “tolerated anti-Semitism,” as in did not quash criticism of Israel. But as you will see, this is a whole different level of censorship.
First, we are hoisting Friedman’s entire tweetstorm. She stresses that not only does this bill create a star chamber when existing laws allow for crackwdowns on terrorist supports, but that it could be easily extended to other types of establishment-threatening speech.
Petti at Reason is more pointed. From This Bill Would Give the Treasury Nearly Unlimited Power To Destroy Nonprofits:
A bipartisan bill would give the secretary of the treasury unilateral power to classify any charity as a terrorist-supporting organization, automatically stripping away its nonprofit status….
In theory, the bill is a measure to fight terrorism financing…
Financing terrorism is already very illegal. Anyone who gives money, goods, or services to a U.S.-designated terrorist organization can be charged with a felony under the Antiterrorism Act and the International Emergency Economic Powers Act. And those terrorist organizations are already banned from claiming tax-exempt status under section 501(c)(3) of the tax code. Nine charities have been shut down since 2001 under the law.
The new bill would allow the feds to shut down a charity without an official terrorism designation. It creates a new label called “terrorist-supporting organization” that the secretary of the treasury could slap onto nonprofits, removing their tax exempt status within 90 days. Only the secretary of the treasury could cancel that designation.
In other words, the bill’s authors believe that some charities are too dangerous to give tax exemptions to, but not dangerous enough to take to court. Although the label is supposed to apply to supporters of designated terrorist groups, nothing in the law prevents the Department of the Treasury from shutting down any 501(c)(3) nonprofit, from the Red Cross to the Reason Foundation.
Petti explains that an initial target appears to be Students for Justice in Palestine, which he says have not had enough of an attack surface to be targeted under current law; in fact, Florida governor DeSantis had to shelve a plan to shut down Students for Justice in Palestine when confronted with a lawsuit.
Petti explains that his concerns are not unwarranted:
Under the proposed bill, murky innuendo could be enough to target pro-Palestinian groups. But it likely wouldn’t stop there. After all, during the Obama administration, the IRS put aggressive extra scrutiny on nonprofit groups with “Tea Party” or “patriot” in their names. And under the Biden administration, the FBI issued a memo on the potential terrorist threat that right-wing Catholics pose.
The Charity and Security Network, a coalition of charities that operate in conflict zones, warned that its own members could be hindered from helping the neediest people in the world.
“Charitable organizations, especially those who work in settings where designated terrorist groups operate, already undergo strict internal due diligence and risk mitigation measures and…face extra scrutiny by the U.S. government, the financial sector, and all actors necessary to operate and conduct financial transactions in such complex settings,” the network declared in November. “This legislation presents dangerous potential as a weapon to be used against civil society in the context of Gaza and beyond.”
Recall how the US has fired on Médecins Sans Frontières staff who were according to the US, assisting bad guys in their relief efforts? Financial sanctions are so much tidier.
I urge readers, and particularly donors, to alert the fundraising and executive staff at not-for-profits, particularly the journalistic sort, so they can object to this legislation. It would likely not survive a Supreme Court challenge in its current form, but that’s an awfully heavy load to have to carry, plus the legislation might not be subject to an injunction in the meantime..
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2024/04 ... house.html
As most non-profits with serious assets are tools/playthings of the rich I dunno how much worse this could make things. Might provide some positive polarization.
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Empire Managers Say Russia, China And Iran Are Tricking Students Into Opposing Genocide
It is a very dark kind of hilarious to see imperial spinmeisters falling all over themselves trying to spin the campus protests as a product of imaginary foreign interference even as police launch violent crackdowns on those very same protesters across the United States to advance the interests of a foreign government.
Caitlin Johnstone
April 26, 2024
Empire managers and propagandists are losing their minds about student protests against the genocide in Gaza on university campuses, so naturally we’re seeing a mad push to frame this as the result of interference by Russia, China, Iran and Hamas. These demented conspiracies of foreign influence come even as Israel’s prime minister openly calls for the US government to quash the university protests by any means necessary.
In a speech supporting the ban of TikTok this past Tuesday, Senator Pete Ricketts said the protests are an example of “the Chinese Communist Party using TikTok to skew public opinion on foreign events.”
“Look what’s happening in our college campuses right now around this country,” Ricketts said. “Pro-Hamas activists are taking over public spaces and making it impossible for campuses to operate.”
“Why is this happening?” Ricketts continued. “Well, let’s look at where young people are getting their news. Nearly a third of adults 18 to 29, these young people in the US are regularly getting their news exclusively from TikTok. Pro-Palestinian and pro-Hamas hashtags are generating 50 times the views on TikTok right now despite the fact that polling shows Americans overwhelmingly support Israel over Hamas. These videos have more reach than the top 10 news websites combined. This is not coincidence. The Chinese Communist Party is doing this on purpose. They are pushing this racist agenda with the intention of undermining our democratic values. And if you look at what’s happening at Columbia University and other campuses across the country right now, they’re winning.”
These comments from Ricketts are repugnant and deceitful in a whole host of ways, but let’s touch on the big ones.
The senator’s claim that TikTok is being manipulated to artificially amplify pro-Palestine content is false, as evidenced by the fact that TikTok’s US-based rivals Facebook and Instagram have been showing the same massive gaps between the popularity of pro-Palestine content and the popularity of pro-Israel content. His argument is as logically fallacious as claiming that flat earth content is being artificially suppressed because it’s not as popular as round earth content. Pro-Israel content is just less popular, because it sucks and people don’t like it.
Ricketts’ assertion that “polling shows Americans overwhelmingly support Israel over Hamas” is deceitful; polling shows a majority of Americans oppose Israel’s actions in Gaza, regardless of whether they “support” the Palestinian militant group Hamas.
Also noteworthy is the way Ricketts just comes right out and acknowledges that TikTok is presenting a problem because its pro-Palestine content has been going viral among young people in ways the legacy media can’t compete with. This amounts to an admission that empire managers like Pete Ricketts really just want TikTok to be banned because young people are using it to share unauthorized ideas and information with each other, and would support its elimination even if they couldn’t justify it under the pretense of fighting China.
It’s probably also worth noting that Rickets has received at least $159,000 from the Israel lobby.
Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi repeated the fartbrained opinion she’s been voicing for months that anti-genocide demonstrations can be attributed to Russia, telling RTÉ News this past Wednesday that opposition to President Biden’s backing of an active genocide has “a Russian tinge to it”.
Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi suggests some pro-Palestinian protests, especially those against President Biden, have “a Russian tinge to it.”
“It's in Putin's interest for 'What's His Name' to win, and therefore I see some encouragement on the part of the Russians.”[/img]
“It’s in Putin’s interest for ‘What’s His Name’ to win, and therefore I see some encouragement on the part of the Russians,” said the longtime Democratic Party leader in reference to Donald Trump.
Anti-Defamation League president Jonathan Greenblatt says it’s actually Iran who’s tricking all these university students into thinking genocide is bad, telling MSNBC that the two main organizations behind the demonstrations — the Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace — are actually “campus proxies” of Iran.
“Iran has their military proxies like Hezbollah, and Iran has their campus proxies like these groups like SJP and JVP,” Greenblatt proclaimed on literally no basis whatsoever.
The Wall Street Journal tells us that rather than China, Russia or Iran, it’s actually Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis who are behind the university campus protests.
In an article titled “Who’s Behind the Anti-Israel Protests,” subtitled “Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis and others are grooming activists in the U.S. and across the West,” The Wall Street Journal’s Steven Stalinsky makes another one of his signature chowderheaded arguments based entirely on vague insinuations, shoulder-socket-jeopardizing reach, Gish gallop fallacy, and no real evidence of any kind.
“Six months after the attack on Israel, Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis and others aren’t merely cheering those protesting in the streets,” writes Stalinsky. “They are working with and grooming activists in the U.S. and the West, through meetings, online interviews and podcasts.”
No no, not meetings, online interviews and podcasts! No wonder they were able to hypnotize university students into opposing daily massacres against a walled-in population driven by ethnically motivated hatred.
Stalinsky runs a think tank called the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), which was literally founded by a former Israeli intelligence officer. Pro-Palestine activist and academic Norman Finkelstein has accused MEMRI of using “the same sort of propaganda techniques as the Nazis,” and even brazenly unprincipled empire propagandist Brian Whitaker has written that MEMRI “poses as a research institute when it’s basically a propaganda operation.”
All this drooling imbecility about completely fictional foreign interference being responsible for these campus protests looks even more ridiculous as the Israeli prime minister unabashedly flexes his nation’s extensive influence over US politics to call for a crackdown on campus demonstrations.
“What’s happening in America’s college campuses is horrific. Antisemitic mobs have taken over leading universities,” Benjamin Netanyahu said in a statement, addressing the American public in his perfect American English.
“It has to be stopped,” Netanyahu continued. “It has to be condemned and condemned unequivocally. But that’s not what happened. The response of several university presidents was shameful. Now, fortunately, state, local, federal officials, many of them have responded differently but there has to be more. More has to be done.”
It is a very dark kind of hilarious to see imperial spinmeisters falling all over themselves trying to spin the campus protests as a product of imaginary foreign interference even as police launch violent crackdowns on those very same protesters across the United States to advance the interests of a foreign government.
It’s also a big loogie in the eye of any self-respecting free thinker. Unless your brain has been turned into bean curd by empire propaganda, the idea that young people would need to be manipulated into opposing the incomprehensible horrors that are being inflicted upon human beings in Gaza is an appalling insult to your intelligence.
But that just shows how desperate these freaks are getting. More and more people are waking up from the lies they’ve been fed about their government, their nation and their world as western institution after western institution completely discredits itself in the eyes of the mainstream public trying to defend the most indefensible things imaginable.
They’re frantically scrambling to try to remedy this PR crisis they’ve created for themselves, but everything they’ve tried so far has been a pathetic failure that has only made things worse for them, turning an entire generation into wide awake radicals whose bright young eyes will never, ever unsee what they have seen.
https://caitlinjohnstone.com.au/2024/04 ... -genocide/