"Americans are losing our rights and freedoms gradually, and every time I work with organizations outside of democratic countries, I’m reminded that once rights and freedoms are gone, they’re incredibly difficult to regain.
This has been top of mind all week as I’ve watched University and College Administrations call on police to break up protest encampments."
I'm going to say again: If you want to claim that you occupy the moral high ground as you side with Donald Trump and the Republicans (and, yes, some centrist Democrats) when you attack the rights of students to protest, then you need to think again.
You are on very shaky moral ground, indeed, and claiming the protests are all about antisemitism when they're not makes that moral ground no firmer. Others can see who you are as you stand with Trump.
"“The mayor’s inflammatory comments about my mother’s brief visit to Columbia are being used to justify the heavy-handed and repressive police raid of the student protest,” said Laila Al-Arian"
Robert Reich sketches the context, the troubling period of history, in which students are graduating from college:
"My students are graduating at a tremulous time.
The largest campus protest movement of the 21st century. The first criminal trial of a former U.S. president. The most restrictive abortion laws in the nation. Two horrific wars."
"It is increasingly going to take the batons of police to enforce this consensus of US support for #Israel, which itself has a limited ceiling [..] Many of these students have crossed the fear barrier" - #YousefMunayyer
I don’t know which #student protestor needs to hear this but you do NOT need to be peaceful when counter protestors attack you. Completely descend upon paid Zionist thugs and beat them back. #StudentProtests
"#AntiwarProtests sweep across university campuses in the United States. The police response – the violence – has been shocking and so has some of the reporting from the US #MainstreamMedia."
With: Paula Chakravartty,
Noura Erakat, Adel Iskandar,
Elijah Kahlenberg
With the campus attacks on Jews going essentially unreported by "polite company", allows them to call these protests peaceful, which then provides moral justification for them to continue.
The existence of Jews who are being physically assaulted, who are blocked from accessing their dorms or classes, who are terrorized with threats of violence and murder, all of this is so easily dismissed to allow for the label of peaceful protest. In fact, they might argue it's the presence of Jews who make it non-peaceful.
It's a modern day interpretation of a "First They Ignore You, Then They Laugh at You' that feels very 1930s Germany.
First They Marginalize You. Then They Ignore You. Then They Exterminate You.
The crackdown on Columbia University students by the NYPD was spearheaded by Rebecca Weiner, who is a faculty member of the school. Weiner, a Columbia professor, heads an NYPD intelligence division that operates an office in Tel Aviv.
Weiner attributed the need for the violent raid to the students' rhetoric.
BREAKING: super proud and excited to share that our formidable students were not only amongst the first to start a #Palestine#Gaza occupation back in February - the occupation has now been resolved in the following agreement! There will be Palestine scholarships, a review of investments, and more!
UCR Riverside.
Al this is so important, even beyond Gaza. More transparency and oversight of university Investments will mean less fossil fuel Investment etc., too. I hope.
I am adding Brown but currently not 100% sure whether this amounts to a commitment to divestment - although it is the same “reviewing of investments” as elsewhere. Which perhaps some would interpret as none of these being real, definite divestments - but it’s an important beginning and students will get a say here at Brown, too, so let’s count this as a victory, too.