1), “Hundreds arrested and assaulted by US police as protests against Gaza genocide expand on college campuses”, Apr 25, 2024 Updated 9 hours ago, featuring Live updates (probably to be continued later today April 26, 2024), Anon, World Socialist Web Site (WSWS), at < https://www.wsws.org/en/
2). “ 'The Actual Dictatorship Beneath the Shell of US Democracy': As Seen in the Repression and Smearing of Campus Protests and More”, Apr 25, 2024, Paul Street, The Paul Street Report, at < https://paulstreet.substack.
3). “Waves of Campus Protests Against the U.S.-Backed Israeli War of Genocide Continue… and Spread”,
Apr 24, 2024, Wecome to the Revolution, at < https://revcom.us/en/waves-
Introduction by dmorista: The students at a wide variety of U.S. Universities have built tent cities and taken over university buildings and even just tried to assemble peacefully for modern day “Teach-ins”. They have been met with heavily armed police who used violent means to remove or dissuade students from protesting.
The WSWS posted a long article, with many links to videos taken at many different college campuses, in Item 1).,“Hundreds arrested and assaulted ….”. So far no sign of live updates today but probably they will follow up with a new live article or post updates to this article.
Paul Street posted a good analysis of the situation in Item 2)., “ 'The Actual Dictatorship Beneath ….”. He wrote that:
“Columbia recently hosted the openly Christian Fascist US House Speaker Mike Johnson for a speech in which he told student activists to 'go back to class' and then threatened them with the deployment of the National Guard to crush their protests at the tips of bayonets!! Translation: 'I’ll advocate for repeat Kent States!' (Emphasis added)
“Liberal-Democratic 'higher education' authorities are repressing student pro-Palestine and anti-genocide protests in the California system and across the country as I write. Fascist Texas has paraded its military state police in full horse-riding riot gear to arrest and intimidate student protesters at the University of Texas-Austin. (Emphasis added)
“Republicans and Democrats might disagree on how fascistic the politics and governance of the imperial homeland should be — no small difference — but more than enough of them in the US Congress agree when it comes to the advance of US imperialism in Israel-Palestine and other locations (Ukraine/Eastern Europe and Taiwan/East Asia and elsewhere), as is seen in the recent “national security” bill passed by the House and Senate. And if the advance of US imperial interests requires the repression of dissent and protest in the homeland’s centers of higher learning, whose presidents are clear member of the US ruling class, the dismal Weimar Dems are more than willing to play ball with the Republi-fascists. (Emphasis added)
The parallels between the early protests against the the Vietnam War, where students at Columbia University were the first to take over the University's Administration Building, are striking. The implied threats from the Theocratic US House Speaker Fascist Mike Johnson, that Street translated into a concrete statement with an allusion to Kent State, is also striking. It was not an accident that the massacre of 4 student protesters took place at a second tier state university not at an Ivy League or Prestigous First Tier State University (the most prestigous of which are now referred to as “The Public Ivies”). Lest we forget during that same time period local Mississippi Police killed 2 students at Jackson State University; and in fact had followed demonstrators from the street into a women's dormitory on campus firing over 500 shots inside the dormitory; many of those bullets were later dug out of the walls of the building. The shocking shootings at Kent State on May 4, 1970, (and to some degree also at Jackson State on May 15, 1970), actually were an important milepost on the development of society wide revulsion with the wars in S.E. Asia.
Street also criticized several Democratic Party Presidents in his article. Though in his opening paragraph he did acknowledge that:
“The election-denying and white Christian nationalist Republican Party has crossed into domestic political fascism in ways that the Democrats have not, but we should make no mistake: at the end of the day we US-Americans live under a capitalist-imperialist class rule dictatorship and this dictatorship is bipartisan, consistent with Upton Sinclair’s 1904 description of the Republicans and Democrats as 'two wings of the same bird of prey.' ”
In Item 3)., “Waves of Campus Protests ….”, an article from the website of the Revolutionary Communist Party of the U.S. reports on a variety of campus protests with some added class based analysis.
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Hundreds arrested and assaulted by US police as protests against Gaza genocide expand on college campuses
In spite of police assault and threats of expulsion, student-led encampments demanding an end to the genocide in Gaza have continued to spread on university campuses in the United States and internationally over the last 24 hours. As of this writing, over 40 college campuses across 22 states in the US have encampments or protests ongoing.
In response to the peaceful demonstrations, local and state police have been summoned by university administrators, at the behest Republican and Democratic politicians, to conduct mass arrests and assaults. As of this writing, over 400 arrests have been reported.
Those incarcerated by US police for sitting on grass or camping on pavement to voice their opposition to the genocide include many Jewish students, and even faculty.
One of the largest police actions occurred Thursday morning, at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. At least 108 people were arrested after erecting an encampment in the morning. Even though the encampment was entirely peaceful, city and state riot police viciously assaulted protesters less than four hours into the demonstration.
In one video, Georgia State Police and cops with the Atlanta Police Department are seen tackling and choking students, while another cop is heard firing dozens of pepperballs into the crowd.
In another disturbing video, a cop is shown using a taser on an already handcuffed person. As the person is being tased, two other cops pushed down on the person with their body weight.
While it appears many of those arrested at Emory were students, faculty who stood alongside their students were also not spared police repression. In one video, an Emory student documented the arrest of Noelle McAfee, chair of the Philosophy Department at Emory.
In the video, the student is heard attempting to gather information to assist Professor McAfee as she’s being led away in handcuffs by a thuggish trooper wearing a black balaclava. As McAffee gives her name to the student, the cop is seen squeezing and twisting her arm.
Another video documented Emory University Economics professor Caroline Fohlin thrown to the ground and arrested by police. Prior to assaulting the professor, one of the cops is heard yelling at her to “Get on the f***ing ground!”
The cop is shown grabbing the professor by the arm and throwing her to the concrete, causing her glasses to fall off. Another cop grabs and twists her other arm as they put in her handcuffs. A voice is heard off camera yelling at the cops, “You people are fascist!”
An Emory student told a local CBS reporter, “They got my friend, they tackled him to the ground ...It makes me feel sad, but not just for Emory University, but for the state of America. What the hell is this? It’s freedom of speech. We didn’t even do anything wrong, now people are tied up, heads down ... it’s atrocious.”
Following the police assault on the encampment, Emory University President Gregory Fenves stated in a campus-wide email that the protest was “completely unacceptable.”
The scale of the attacks against the protesters reflects the heightened nervousness of the corporate and financial backers of Emory University. This fear of the ruling capitalist class to opposition against its economic and political prerogatives is replicated throughout the entire education system in the US.
While the university advances superficial claims about “advancing racial and social justice,” Emory’s board of trustees consists of representatives from Blackrock, Goldman Sachs, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and Coca-Cola, among others. These are the real interests the university administration is beholden to and seeks to advance against the popular opposition to state-sponsored genocide.
In Boston, Massachusetts, near Emerson University, 108 anti-genocide protesters were arrested early Thursday morning after putting up an encampment in Boylston Place alley, a walkway near the college. The number of students arrested at Emerson is the same number of students who were arrested at Columbia University last week.
Video of the arrests early Tuesday morning shows police grabbing students and throwing them to the ground. While on the ground, police are observed choking and smashing students faces into the pavement.
In the morning, a student at the university recorded city workers cleaning up the blood from students following the police assault.
In Evanston, Illinois, police attempted to break up an encampment erected by students at Northwestern University. The Daily Northwestern reported that police are “getting physically violent with faculty.”
One faculty member was heard yelling at the police, “You will not touch our students.”
As of this writing, it appears police have temporarily retreated from the campus. In an interview with the Daily Northwestern, a student organizer with the encampment said they planned to continue their demonstration until university officials agreed to demands advanced by local chapters of Educators for Justice in Palestine, Students for Justice in Palestine, and Jewish Voice for Peace.
In two other major police actions, cops at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, confirmed they made 93 arrests Wednesday evening. In Austin, Texas, the Travis County Sheriff’s Office confirmed police arrested 57 people on Wednesday at the University of Austin.
“The right to protest is at stake,” Columbia student tells WSWS
Student encampments continued at Columbia and other New York City-area universities on Thursday.
Sitting on the steps of the library, a student majoring in English, told the WSWS, “The right to protest is at stake.”
Motioning toward the encampment, “It is only an anti-war protest. It has not become something more. It is not really new. Students protested Vietnam, South African apartheid. But it is growing fast and the possibilities are greater...Our voices are much stronger. But I think it is a cyclical thing, that these struggles happen in election years. Biden’s $95 billion bill with the arms it is sending out is making young people angrier.”
Another student at Columbia commented on the massive police-state response to the peaceful protests. “If it was something they weren’t so scared of, they wouldn’t send in the National Guard, the police and all of these things. The idea of people truly being liberated scares folks in positions of power.”
In addition to Columbia, protests are ongoing at City College of New York (CCNY), less than a mile north. CCNY is part of the City University of New York (CUNY) system. CUNY security attempted to remove the encampment but was repelled by a large crowd of supporters.
Winter, a graduate of the CUNY system who came out in support of CCNY students, told the WSWS, “I expected CCNY to be among the first to protest the genocide because it is more working class than Columbia or NYU. Everyone knows that CCNY students are tied to the working class. There is a need to get support from the unions but they are hierarchical and there needs to be a shift of the union workers from the Democrats. The Democrats are trying to contain the protests, trying to give us a larger cage, to pretend we have our freedom, to keep us to little protests. We need to have all of the money and time and energy divested from Israel and other imperialism. There is no reform to this system. This system is not sustainable.”
In Midtown Manhattan, protesters stormed the State University of New York’s Fashion Institute of Technology building and set up an encampment. As of late Thursday, several dozen students remained in the lobby while others protested outside.
Protests alos continued at New York University outside the boarded up Gould Plaza, the site of the student occupation Tuesday raided by the NYPD, which resulted in 120 arrests.
Hundreds of students rally against genocide in Washington, D.C.
Hundreds of students gathered at tent encampments throughout the Washington, D.C. region this week as a part of the Gaza solidarity movement to oppose the US-backed Israeli genocide.
On Monday, students occupied the lawn at University of Maryland (UMD), in the suburbs of the nation’s capital. On Thursday, students at George Washington University (GWU) built an encampment as hundreds gathered from throughout the region. Earlier in the day, hundreds of students marched at Georgetown University to protest the genocide.
World Socialist Web Site reporters interviewed students at the protests.
A philosophy student at GWU told a WSWS reporter, if the working class mobilizes against the genocide “together we will be a lot stronger.”
The student explained that the root of the genocide, like the exploitation of the workers, was capitalism. “It’s all an interconnected system… we need to work together to overthrow the system.”
Despite the peaceful character of the encampment, authorities at GWU, as they have at other universities, have moved to crack down on the protest. Previously, the school’s chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine was suspended for projecting images at buildings with slogans calling for the liberation of Palestine and for GWU to divest itself from Israeli apartheid.
On Thursday, protesters were beset by Zionist student provocateurs and faculty who were attempting to photograph and doxx participants at the school.
Ahlam, a public health student at the UMD rejected the claim the protests are antisemitic as “completely false.”
She explained the claim conflated things which were “not equivalent… anti-Zionism is a very strong political movement to stop the apartheid state of Israel and Zionism is a… racist, fascist ideology… anti-Zionism is trying to stop that.”
In an effort to limit the outpouring of solidarity and decrease the visibility of the protest, GWU administrators sought to run media reporters and supporters off the premises.
“We will not allow students from other local colleges or unaffiliated individuals to trespass on our campus,” stated GWU president Ellen Granberg in emails to campus faculty reported by the Washington Post. The Post relayed that Granberg had “requested the assistance of D.C. police officers after ‘multiple instructions made by GWPD to relocate to an alternative demonstration site on campus went unheeded by encampment participants.’”
GWU has imposed a curfew on the students which went into effect at 7:30 p.m. local time Thursday. As of this writing the encampment has only increased in size after the curfew.
Boston police forcibly remove tent encampment at Emerson College
Boston police in riot gear moved in on a peaceful encampment at Emerson College in the early morning hours Thursday, arresting 108 pro-Palestinian protesters at the “Popular University Encampment.” Videos posted on social media show police in helmets and reflective jackets forcibly dismantling the tent camp at Boylston Place Alley. Students in nearby buildings could be heard pounding on their windows as the arrests were made.
Boston Emergency Medical Services reported four people were taken to area hospitals. Boston police reported four officers injured and said no arrested protesters suffered injuries, although those on the scene said two students were injured in the assault.
According to the Berkeley Beacon, the Emerson student newspaper, shortly before 2 a.m. Thursday seven police vans arrived in front of the walkway at the Boylston Street side of the encampment, and arrests of protests soon ensued. Photos and video taken at the scene showed officers wearing helmets and visors, with some appearing to be wearing tactical gear.
A Massachusetts State Police spokesman said several troopers were also sent to the area to “maintain security” and to “assist any demonstrators not willing to be arrested.” State police reportedly did not make any arrests.
Students had occupied the walkway for several days. On Wednesday, police and fire department officials warned the protesters that the tents were in violation of city ordinances banning camping on public property and that police action was imminent. Students had described the camp as “porous” and that they had been allowing people to pass through.
Emerson officials were on scene at the time of the arrests. They said in a statement, “Of additional concern, Emerson has received credible reports that some protesters are engaging in targeted harassment and intimidation of Jewish supporters of Israel and students, staff, faculty, and neighbors seeking to pass through the alley. This type of behavior is unacceptable on our campus.” All Emerson classes were canceled Thursday.
Emerson student Adam Nuñez, who was held overnight at a police station and booked Thursday morning, described the scene to the Boston Globe: “I was pulled by my collar, pinned to a table, thrown to the floor, then dragged into the” state transportation building. Describing the scene as “chaos,” he added, “It’s stressful. But we know what we did, and we know that we’re on the right side of history.”
One supporter of the Emerson camp said, “They wanted us the hell out. The police officers had helmets, shields, clubs, and they were hitting people. People were on the ground and in chokeholds.”
Boston Mayor Michelle Wu, a Democrat, commented that “Boston is a city where upholding the right to protest is very important us,” but defended the assault on protesters saying, “Public access to this right of way was not accessible.” It appears that ordinances originally intended to target homeless people pitching tents are now being utilized against students’ democratic right to protest.
Socialist Equality Party vice presidential candidate Jerry White denounces police rampage in Austin, Texas
In response to a large demonstration at the University of Texas, Austin, far-right Governor Greg Abbott mobilized state troopers on horseback to crush the protest. In a Twitter/X post from his official social media account, Abbott declared:
Arrests being made right now & will continue until the crowd disperse. These protesters belong in jail ... Students joining in hate-filled, antisemitic protests at any public college or university in Texas should be expelled.
Student demonstrators refused to be intimidated by Abbott and his police thugs, chanting, “You will not scare us” at the heavily armed police.
University officials later confirmed to ABC News that at least 20 people had been arrested.
Jerry White, the vice presidential candidate of the Socialist Equality Party, provided live coverage and commentary on the student protests and issued a call for workers to come to the defense of the students.
White said the police attacks, ordered by Abbott, were part of the effort to “criminalize all anti-genocide protests.” These attacks, White explained, “are being fully backed by the Biden administration, working with the most right-wing Republicans.”
He added that the “right to protest is a fundamental right, and the working class must defend the rights of students at the University of Texas and elsewhere.”
After the police rampage, faculty at University of Texas at Austin released a statement condemning the state assault on protesters and pledging to strike on Thursday.
“I think that the real antisemitism is conflating the Israeli state with Jews,” Columbia faculty member tells WSWS
After Columbia University threatened to deploy the National Guard against student protesters yesterday, the university administration “extended” an ultimatum to the protesters by another 48 hours. In an openly fascist provocation on Wednesday, Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson visited the Columbia University campus. Johnson, a prominent supporter of former President Donald Trump, has echoed President Joe Biden’s smear of the student protesters as “antisemites.” Johnson was met with overwhelming hostility by the students.
On the same day, fascist Gavin McInnes was allowed access to Columbia’s campus. McInnes is the founder of the far-right “Proud Boys” organization, which was centrally involved in the January 6, 2021 attempted coup d’etat in Washington D.C. According to student organizations involved in the Columbia encampment, while on campus, McInnes harassed pro-Palestinian students, hurling derogatory slurs at the protesting youth. This is not the first time the Proud Boys and other fascist dregs have been deployed to harass and attack left-wing student and youth protesters.
WSWS reporters spoke with a faculty member at Columbia University in front of the student protest encampment on campus on Wednesday. The faculty member said much of the faculty was “inspired by the students and organizers here who are leading this effort. I think it’s very brave of them, especially knowing the history of student protest in this country.”
The faculty member continued:
Genocide is happening in Palestine. I think that the real antisemitism is conflating the Israeli state with Jews. And I think that everyone inside this encampment will tell you that. There are plenty of Jewish comrades inside the encampment who would say the same thing and that are leading these efforts and are publishing press about this that are absolutely wonderful. This is not an antisemitism issue, this is a genocide issue and it’s not a hard thing to be on the right side of generally speaking, philosophically, but to take this risk, I think, is very important.
Asked by a WSWS reporter if students should be reaching out to the working class for support, the faculty member replied:
I agree. I think that this is a labor issue, this is a class issue. And I think that anyone in the United States who is not part of the ruling class needs to be concerned about this. And the ruling class frankly should be concerned too, and they are. And that’s why you see the reaction that you see.
Of course, we’re all worried about an overreaction such as we saw at Kent State. There’s a history of violent reactions and surveillance and suppression and criminalization of people who engage in organizing. So, we know that that’s a risk here, but the reason that that is, is because this poses the threat to the ruling class’s stranglehold on the way that everybody has to live. So, this is absolutely is an issue that transcends all those matters that we care about.
Asked to comment on the Democratic Party joining with the far right to crack down on students, they replied:
The great unifier between the two parties is class and socioeconomic status and power. People in the ruling class find their niche, wherever they can fit it, wherever they can get elected, whatever they have to say to maintain power, but really the great unifier is holding onto that power. So, something like this, that threatens it, I think really does, in a very stark way, unify both Democrats and Republicans around those issues even though we are told that that shouldn’t happen.
At The New School in Lower Manhattan, protests were also ongoing Wednesday.
United Parcel Service (UPS) workers in New York expressed their opposition to the attacks on student protesters and the genocide in Gaza. One “inside” shift worker at the UPS 43rd Street facility in Manhattan said:
The attacks on these students is not right. Why should you be arrested for demonstrating on your own campus? What is going on is wrong. Students shouldn’t be arrested for protesting at all.
Another worker at the facility declared:
They are protesting! You should be able to say what you want, whatever it is. I know this is controversial, but it is over killing more than 30,000 people. They have a right to protest. What are things coming to?
At New York University, the Stern Business School’s Gould Plaza has been walled off, with NYPD stationed across the street. The library entrance is now also guarded by NYPD and campus security.
A couple of hundred students, along with some faculty, protested in front of NYU President Linda Mill’s multimillion-dollar residence. An NYU faculty member told the WSWS:
The most important reason we’re out here is to protest against the genocide that is taking place in Gaza. But it’s also because [the administration] called in the riot police on a totally peaceful protest and arrested over 120 students and faculty members.
She continued:
They always use the language of safety. Then they say it’s because it’s “antisemitic” and it’s “protection” for the Jewish students. That is really problematic for a range of reasons. First of all, there is nothing antisemitic about criticizing the state of Israel. It is a country. Even Zionism is a political ideology that has been around for less than 200 years. The Jewish religion is a couple thousand years old.
What is, in fact, antisemitic is to lump all Jews together and assume that they all believe the same thing. There are a lot of anti-Zionist Jews who are criticizing Israel and would like to see social justice and a free Palestine, but they always hide behind the rhetoric of antisemitism. They conflate the two, antisemitism and anti-Zionism. And they are completely separate things. There were a lot of Jewish students at the protest Monday. There was a Passover Seder. The language of safety is completely false. If you want to keep your students safe, you don’t call the riot police.
Asked to comment on the threat to call in the National Guard on student protesters, she replied:
There’s no need for the National Guard to come to stop students from shouting for Palestinian liberation. And of course, some of us who are old enough or have seen it, the last time the National Guard was called in to stop student protests, we saw what happened at Kent State. I don’t know that they’ve been called in since, but it’s really obscene.
Asked about the bipartisan support for war and genocide and the attacks on students, she responded:
Well, I mean, the Democrats aren’t that different from the Republicans, for one thing. I think a lot of people know that. Mayor Adams, the NYPD—the NYPD has trained with the IOF, Israel Occupation Forces, and the political machine is in bed with war manufacturers, the manufacturers of surveillance equipment. I’m not an expert on surveillance systems, but from what I’ve read, Israel is one of the world’s biggest suppliers of surveillance systems, practiced on Palestinians, and they sometimes actually advertise it that way.
Student protests against Gaza genocide, police repression, expand to Italy, France
Student protests are beginning to spread to Europe. After initial protests in Italy yesterday, students at the SciencesPo Paris took to the streets to demonstrate against the genocide and the police crackdown on students in the United States. In France, the Macron government, much like the Biden administration, has moved to implement a police state crackdown on protesters against the Gaza genocide.
LAPD conducts mass arrest at University of Southern California campus
At the University of Southern California (USC), where the speech of the valedictorian was censored last week for her pro-Palestinian views, the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) has launched a violent crackdown on a solidarity encampment. Protests by students are continuing despite the attack.
After surrounding Alumni Park in the early evening, campus police issued a dispersal order, followed by a warning that the Los Angeles Police Department would begin carrying out mass arrests. As of this writing, at least 50 arrests have been made.
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"The Actual Dictatorship Beneath the Shell of US Democracy"
Eric Adams, the dismal fascistic Democratic Party "law and order” and ex-cop Mayor of New York City, absurdly denouncing anti-genocide student protesters as “antisemitic”
Dear readers - this is a rushed piece given the pace of current events and so I have not fully hyperlinked it. If time permits later today, I’ll add some sources in the comments section.
The election-denying and white Christian nationalist Republican Party has crossed into domestic political fascism in ways that the Democrats have not, but we should make no mistake: at the end of the day we US-Americans live under a capitalist-imperialist class rule dictatorship and this dictatorship is bipartisan, consistent with Upton Sinclair’s 1904 description of the Republicans and Democrats as “two wings of the same bird of prey.”
It’s nothing new.
It was with a Jim Crow Democrat in the White House, Woodrow Wilson, that the United States undertook a top-down dry run of violent, anti-radical and racist fascism during and after World War One.
The Democratic president Franklin Roosevelt, who boasted of having “saved capitalism,” had an interesting comment after a Democratic Chicago mayor sent out police who ended up massacring steelworkers on Memorial Day of 1937: “a plague on both your houses [of labor and capital].”
The Democratic president Harry Truman responded with an iron first to the great postwar strike wave of 1946, sending in the military to take over the nation’s coal mines and authorizing the military to take over the nation’s railroads.
Democratic elected officials including the blood-soaked warmonger president Lyndon Johnson called out and sent in federal troops to suppress urban protests after the assassination/execution of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., on April 4, 1968, one year to the day after King made a historic speech against the Johnson-led American Empire’s crucifixion of Southeast Asia.
Democratic mayors and city councils worked with the Democratic president Barack Obama’s Department of Homeland Security to surveil, infiltrate, and dismantle — often quite violently, as in Oakland, California and New York City — the populist Occupy Wall Street movement in the fall and early winter of 2011.
This is just a short list.
Here we are in 2024 with the ancient Democratic president Jor Biden, a longtime imperialist (he helped lead the charge for the criminal and mass murderous invasion of Iraq from the Democratic side of the US Senate), facing a wave of righteous student protest against his continuing support (his claims of concern for Palestinian lives is pathetic attempted cover) for the Judeo-fascist apartheid state of Israel’s genocidal ethnic cleansing of Gaza — an epic crime against an already besieged open-air concentration camp (a modern day Warsaw Ghetto) that has so far killed at least 40,000 Palestinians, most of them women and children, and put millions of Gazans at risk of famine. Israel is right now murdering children and whole families with US-made bombs in the Gazan city of Rafah, to which the Israel Defense Forces have herded hundreds of thousands of desperate, hungry, and frightened Palestinians.
By my count this morning there are more than thirty US campuses currently home to student encampments opposed to Israel’s genocide and Washington’s (bipartisan) funding, equipping, and political, diplomatic, and military protection of that genocide.
Behold the bullshit of aptly nicknamed “Genocide Joe,” who took a page from Truman by invoking the Railway Labor Act to pre-empt an overdue national railroad strike in December of 2022, and who after October 7th ran to embrace Israel’s genocidal-fascist prime minister Bibi Netanyahu, offering an increase in deadly arms shipments and repeating a telling statement of his from his days in the Senate: “if there not an Israel, we ‘d have to an Israel one.” The “we” in that statement is the American Empire and the reason the Empire would “have to invent an Israel” is to serve US strategic imperial interests within and beyond the oil-rich Middle East.
The bloody-jawed imperialist Biden recently played along with evidence-free, reality-inverting Republi-fascist and Zionist propaganda that smears student opponents of racist genocide as “antisemites” who are threatening Jewish students. Never mind that a large number of Jewish students are helping lead the protest wave.
Biden has called on Americans to oppose a mythical "alarming surge of antisemitism" on US campuses. "Silence is complicity," Biden actually proclaimed in a written statement last Sunday evening, referring not to silence over the genocidal mass murder of innocent Palestinians but to silence over the non-existent “surge of antisemitism.” "Even in recent days,” Biden proclaimed without proof, “we’ve seen harassment and calls for violence against Jews. This blatant antisemitism is reprehensible and dangerous – and it has absolutely no place on college campuses, or anywhere in our country."
After speaking at an Earth Day event — an ironic venue for a president under whom the US has set new records the burning of fossil fuels! — Genocide Joe repeated this Orwellian nonsense: "I condemn the antisemitic protests. That’s why I have set up a program to deal with that," he told reporters.
(Wow, what an asshole. Biden is a low-life Weimar president who has made it impossible for leftists of conscience to do “the lesser evil” thing for him next fall. This longtime imperialist is knee deep in Palestinian blood. And now this dirty old bastard has the unmitigated gall to call the campus protests against the US-Israel Crucifixion of Gaza “antisemitic.” What slander: the kids are protesting genocidal ethnic cleansing that has been funded, equipped, and politically and diplomatically protected by Biden himself, in his role as the head of a global empire that has long considered Israel a critical imperial asset within and beyond the Middle East. More on this below. To put it bluntly, Biden values murdering Gazans more than he values blocking the Orange fascist Trump from winning a second and worse fascist presidency. He’s on board with Judeo-fascism in Gaza and he’s on board with the neo-McCarthyite Republi-fascist demonization of anti-genocide protesters as “antisemitic.”)
“Silence is complicity”….like at the “liberal” New York Times, widely read by professional and managerial class Democrats, where, as The Intercept recently reported:
‘The Times instructed journalists covering Israel’s war on the Gaza Strip to restrict the use of the terms “genocide” and “ethnic cleansing” and to “avoid” using the phrase “occupied territory” when describing Palestinian land, according to a copy of an internal memo obtained by The Intercept…The memo also instructs reporters not to use the word Palestine “except in very rare cases” and to steer clear of the term “refugee camps” to describe areas of Gaza historically settled by displaced Palestinians expelled from other parts of Palestine during previous Israeli–Arab wars. The areas are recognized by the United Nations as refugee camps and house hundreds of thousands of registered refugees…The memo — written by Times standards editor Susan Wessling, international editor Philip Pan, and their deputies — “offers guidance about some terms and other issues we have grappled with since the start of the conflict in October…While the document is presented as an outline for maintaining objective journalistic principles in reporting on the Gaza war, several Times staffers told The Intercept that its contents show evidence of the paper’s deference to Israeli narratives. “I think it’s the kind of thing that looks professional and logical if you have no knowledge of the historical context of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict,” said a Times newsroom source, who requested anonymity for fear of reprisal, of the Gaza memo. “But if you do know, it will be clear how apologetic it is to Israel.”’
Physical repression and the manufacture of consent, consent not just to imperial policy but to the repression of anti-imperial protest, are two sides of the same authoritarian and imperialist coin.
The president of Columbia University, a longtime liberal and Democratic bastion, recently called in the New York City Police Department to physically clear out and arrest student protesters. New York City’s liberal-fascistic law and order mayor Eric Adams was more than happy to provide the muscle, enlisted in service to false charges of antisemitism, not just at Columbia but also at NYU.
Columbia recently hosted the openly Christian Fascist US House Speaker Mike Johnson for a speech in which he told student activists to “go back to class” and then threatened them with the deployment of the National Guard to crush their protests at the tips of bayonets!! Translation: “I’ll advocate for repeat Kent States!”
Liberal-Democratic “higher education” authorities are repressing student pro-Palestine and anti-genocide protests in the California system and across the country as I write. Fascist Texas has paraded its military state police in full horse-riding riot gear to arrest and intimidate student protesters at the University of Texas-Austin.
Republicans and Democrats might disagree on how fascistic the politics and governance of the imperial homeland should be — no small difference — but more than enough of them in the US Congress agree when it comes to the advance of US imperialism in Israel-Palestine and other locations (Ukraine/Eastern Europe and Taiwan/East Asia and elsewhere), as is seen in the recent “national security” bill passed by the House and Senate. And if the advance of US imperial interests requires the repression of dissent and protest in the homeland’s centers of higher learning, whose presidents are clear member of the US ruling class, the dismal Weimar Dems are more than willing to play ball with the Republi-fascists.
Why, you ask? As Revcom leader Bob Avakian (who you have probably, absurdly, and tellingly been told to hate and snicker at and cancel if you are like much of the American “left”) recently explained:
‘Because fundamental interests of U.S. capitalism-imperialism are at stake. Because Israel plays a “special role” as a heavily armed bastion of support for U.S. imperialism in a strategically important part of the world (the “Middle East”). And Israel has been a key force in the commission of atrocities which have helped to maintain the oppressive rule of U.S. imperialism in many other parts of the world…And this repression is happening because representatives of the ruling class in this country have a definite sense that if youth especially at “elite” universities begin to seriously question and act against what this system is doing—if the system “loses the allegiance” of large numbers of those students—that can be a big factor in creating a real crisis for the system as a whole, as happened in the 1960s: a crisis that, now more than ever, this system really cannot afford, when the whole country is already being torn apart by deep divisions, with bitter clashes right among the ruling powers. So, at the same time as they are bitterly divided, the ruling powers of this country are firmly united in their determination to punish and intimidate especially students at elite universities who have stepped forward to protest the genocidal slaughter of Palestinians. The ruling class is desperate to prevent opposition to its fundamental interests from spreading and involving masses of people, from all parts of society.’
And:
‘All this reveals, more “nakedly” than in “normal situations,” the actual dictatorship behind the outer shell of “democracy” of this country—and it shines a light on the strategic weakness of this system, when it does lose the allegiance of major sections of the people and this has the potential to spread to all parts of society, including among the dominant institutions of this system.’
Read this for a first-rate Revcom report of and commentary on the rising wave of campaus protest currently spreading across the country (https://revcom.us/en/waves-campus-protests-against-us-backed-israeli-war-genocide-continue-and-spread?)
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Waves of Campus Protests Against the U.S.-Backed Israeli War of Genocide Continue… and Spread | revcom.us
Several hundred students and pro-Palestinian supporters rally at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, April 22, 2024. Photo: AP
Since we reported at the start of this week on the wave of protests at campuses across the country against the U.S.-backed Israeli war in Gaza, sparked by the student encampment at Columbia University in New York City, encampments, walkouts, rallies and other actions have not only continued but spread. This is a very good and important development, inspiring and challenging millions more throughout society. Here are some of these continuing and spreading campus protests—in the face of police and threats from campus administrators—in the past three days.
At Columbia University, president Minouche Shafik had called in the NYPD riot pigs last week against the protest encampment, and more than 100 protesters were arrested. When the protests continued after this vicious assault, Shafik set a deadline for Tuesday night for the encampment to disband, and then extended the deadline for another 48 hours. On Wednesday, MAGA Republi-fascist House Speaker Johnson landed on the campus to publicly call for Shafik’s resignation for not shutting down the protests immediately—and raised the possibility that the National Guard should be called in if the student encampment continues. Students met Johnson with boos and shouts of “stop the genocide” and “free Palestine.”
At other campuses in New York City, hundreds of protesters at New York University (NYU) defied threats from campus officials and set up tents at Gould Plaza. Monday night, the NYPD moved in to take down tents, push students out, and arrest dozens. At New School, students set up protest tents inside a school lobby and others formed picket lines. Asked how long they would continue, a first-year student said, “We’re demanding something. So if it doesn’t happen, we’re going to have to keep going.”
New York: Students at NYU have been protesting genocide in Palestine. April 22, 2024, the NYPD moved in to take down tents, push students out, and arrest dozens. Photo: AP
At Yale University, an Ivy League school in New Haven, CT, police moved in against campus protesters Monday, on the third night of their encampment demanding the university divest from weapons manufacturers. They arrested 47. Defying the pigs, students had locked arms and circled around the flagpole at Beinecke Plaza. Protests have continued on the campus.
At another Ivy League school, Brown University in Providence, RI, students began an encampment Wednesday morning with “more than two dozen tents pitched on the main green and roughly 75 students participating.”
American University, Washington, DC: Hundreds of students marched to the university president’s office on Tuesday to demand that the school divest from Israel.
University of Texas, Austin: On Wednesday, according to a Guardian report, “Hundreds of students walked out of class to protest against the conflict in Gaza and demand the university divest from companies that manufacture machinery used in Israel’s war efforts, carrying signs and chanting. Dozens of local and state police—including some on horseback and holding batons—formed a line to stop protesters from marching through campus. Officers pushed them off the campus lawn and at one point sent people tumbling into the street.” At least 20 were arrested, including a photojournalist.
Ohio State University, Columbus, OH: Campus administrators called on the police to forcibly kick out dozens of protesters who had occupied a campus building to call out the school’s “complicity in Israeli settler-colonialism and apartheid and the climate crisis.” They arrested two protesters, from Students for Justice in Palestine and Ohio Youth for Climate Justice.
University of Pittsburgh: There was a sit-in in support of the Palestinian people, and students and faculty members set up tents on the campus.
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor: According to the Michigan Daily, “About 40 pro-Palestine University of Michigan student protesters set up an encampment on the Diag Monday morning…”
University of Southern California (USC), Los Angeles: Students began an “occupation” of Alumni Park on the campus in support of people of Palestine and demanded ending university investments in Israel. Protesters faced off against campus cops who moved in to try to dismantle tents and remove signs. As we post this Wednesday night, the LAPD with batons and helmets have begun to arrest protesters who are refusing to leave the park. According to a New York Times report, “A few dozen protesters are standing in a circle, linking arms in the middle of the park. About 200 other protesters have moved to the edges of the park, chanting, ‘Divulge, divest, we will not stop, we will not rest.’”
California Polytechnic University, Humboldt, Northern California: Hundreds of protesters occupied Siemens Hall Tuesday night.
Hundreds of pro-Palestinian students and protesters rally in front of Sproul Hall, UC Berkeley, April 22, 2024. Photo: AP
University of California, Berkeley: On Monday night, protesters “camped out overnight in Sproul Plaza following a demonstration to demand an end to the war in Gaza and the university's divestment from companies with ties to Israel. Students occupied the steps in front of Sproul Hall and pitched tents in front of the building, calling the action a ‘solidarity encampment.’ The encampment began as a rally in solidarity with the ongoing pro-Palestinian protests at Columbia University...”
Among other campuses around the country where students are protesting: Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, MA; Boston University and Emerson College, Boston, MA; Tufts University, Medford, MA; University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; Rice, University of Houston, Texas A&M, UT-Dallas, all in Texas; University of New Mexico, Albuquerque; University of Minnesota, Twin Cities.
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