When a book titled Terrorism: A Very Short Introduction, written by the British professor and historian Charles Townshend, was found by police near the pro-Palestine student encampment at Columbia University, it was held up by New York Police Department (NYPD) Deputy Commissioner Kaz Daughtry as evidence of some kind of foreign, radicalising influence on student activism.

Apparently, for Daughtry, reading a book on terrorism is evidence of radicalisation. Knowing about terrorism makes you at risk of committing terrorism. Finding a book near a student encampment confirms that pro-Palestine solidarity is linked to terrorism.

What Daughtry was arguably trying to do was darken Palestine activism on college campuses across the United States with the association of terrorism.

But doing so did not require much ideological work. After all, Daughtry had the media establishment on his side, an industry that had been furiously working well before October 7 to ensure that Palestinian resistance was entrenched in the public imaginary as a “conflict” between so-called moderates and extremists and to set Palestinian violence as “terrorism” in opposition to Israeli violence as “self-defence”.

However, the cracks emerging in the dominant narrative – exemplified by the student-led sit-in at Columbia University – required Daughtry to pose with a college textbook in a cringe-inducing photo spectacle.

Daughtry probably did not expect his efforts to backfire so badly. Pro-Palestine activism swept like wildfire across the US to at least 553 campuses, triggering a full-blown, global student movement with encampments on at least 25 UK campuses and universities across France, The Netherlands, Germany, Spain, Finland, Denmark, and Australia.

Aside from all the eye-rolling, Daughtry’s book-staging act generated at least one very important reflection: we need to add a demand that is currently missing from the movement’s demands to universities to disclose and divest from financial ties to Israel.

It is the demand that universities across the West dismantle the academic disciplines and systems of knowledge that produce,........

© Al Jazeera