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We Owe Student Protesters Our Gratitude

10 9
28.04.2024

It's beginning to look like the rallying cry of 1960s-era student radicals—"Bring the War Home!"—is becoming a reality on many American campuses.

I visited the University of Maryland on Tuesday, as students protested the genocide in Gaza and their university’s role in it. The big news story that day was the police crackdown at Columbia University. Today, protests and crackdowns are occurring across the country. Predictably, the news coverage has been heavily skewed toward alleged antisemitism, downplaying the students' moral stand and the horror they're protesting.

That's no accident. These students are on the front line in a conflict between global forces, a conflict that most of us have yet to fully grasp. Israel’s assault on Palestine is the tip of the spear for the Global North's attack on those nations and peoples it sees as a threat. That has always included people inside the Global North who oppose its militarism.

The parallels can be striking. A phalanx of armed police in Texas looks like an occupying army. The barriers and checkpoints surrounding Columbia echo the ones enclosing Palestine. And in a faint but haunting echo of the horror in Gaza, the University of Minnesota has reportedly cut off the water supply to buildings used by demonstrators.

The University of Maryland was quiet by comparison. "We're quite not at the Columbia level," one protester told me apologetically. But what matters is presence, not mass; witness, not volume. Witness is immaterial, without weight or momentum. But, like a catalyzing atom in chemistry, a single act of witness can change everything. It can be the fraction that transforms the whole.

Two days later, we are already seeing signs of a larger transformation.

That's exactly what the people who run this system fear the most. They understand the threat that popular movements pose to them, often before the rest of us do. That's why they go to extreme lengths to suppress them. It's also why they attempt to smear an entire movement with false accusations, in this case of antisemitism. Consider, for example, the observations of NBC News correspondent (and Emmy Award winner) Antonia Hylton as she covered the Columbia encampment:

An open society doesn't smear, discredit, and outlaw an entire group over the actions of a few—or for the actions of what might be agents provocateurs. That's not what democracies do. It is, however, a common totalitarian tactic. Nazis in Germany and antisemites in the U.S. used the same tactic to smear Jews as an unpatriotic, subversive "fifth column" working to undermine their country. White supremacists used it in the 1960s when they said that civil rights workers were Soviet-led Communists and "outside agitators." Racists use it today to imply that all Black people are criminals.

Decent people aren't supposed to behave this way.

Somebody should tell Joe Biden. "I condemn the antisemitic protests," the president said. But which "antisemitic protests" are those, Mr. President? Where is the evidence for "antisemitic protests"? The president’s phrasing slanders the brave young souls who are calling for justice and an end to the slaughter. It also aligns him with far-right Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.),........

© Common Dreams


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