UNIVERSITIES OF HYPOCRISY: Revolt, Repression & Censorship In American Academia
History will not be kind to most of us. But it will bless and revere these students.
Where Have All the Flowers Gone - by Mr. Fish
“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.”
By Chris Hedges
The Chris Hedges Report (4/25/24)
PRINCETON, N.J. — 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.
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.
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. …
(Editor’s Note: Chris Hedges teaches in a Rutgers University prison education program. — Mark Taylor)
NETANYAHU HAS GIVEN THE ORDER: The Crackdown Of Protest On US Campuses Has Begun
Illustration and first cartoon by Mark Taylor / DeMOCKracy.ink
“But there has to be more. More has to be done.”
By Mark Taylor
DeMOCKracy.ink (4/25/24)
The news this morning is filled with reports of police crackdowns and arrests across the country of college protesters opposing the US/Israeli genocide in Palestine and university financial entanglements with Israeli corporations and the war industry.
To understand why this is happening now, you need to see Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Wednesday direction to the United States government and law enforcement giving the order to crackdown on protest. Seriously, Netanyahu has said enough is enough, shut down the protests. If you haven’t seen the order you can see it in the April 24 broadcast of Judging Freedom with Andrew Napolitano and Jewish-Canadian journalist Aaron Mate. The two-minute Netanyahu clip begins at the 6:16-mark of the interview:
After a perverse up-is-down, black-is-white Alice In Wonderland topsy-turvy rewrite of history, truth and current events and suppression of free speech in America, Netanyahu is blunt in his order to American government and law enforcement: “But there has to be more. More has to be done.”
And we’re seeing it. From Columbia University to University of Texas Austin and University of Southern California, thuggish waves of armed riot police have moved onto college campuses to beat, arrest and haul away peaceful protesters — many of which are Jewish students and faculty — and rip up encampments on university public spaces.
Faculty and members of the press have been arrested. US and Israeli attacks on the media and the free press are not limited to Gaza. …
So chilling