The recent Congressional hearings leading to a bloodbath of university presidents brings back memories from my teen-age years in the 1950s when everyone’s eyes were glued to the TV broadcast of the McCarthy hearings. And the student revolts incited by vicious college presidents trying to stifle academic freedom when it opposes foreign unjust wars awakens memories of the 1960s protests against the Vietnam War and the campus clampdowns confronting police violence.
I was the junior member of the “Columbia three” alongside Seymour Melman and my mentor Terence McCarthy (both of whom taught at Columbia’s Seeley Mudd School of Industrial Engineering; my job was mainly to handle publicity and publication). At the end of that decade, students occupied my office and all others at the New School’s graduate faculty in New York City – very peacefully, without disturbing any of my books and papers. Only the epithets have changed.
The invective “Communist” has been replaced by “anti-Semite,” and the renewal of police violence on campus has not yet led to a Kent State-style rifle barrage against protesters. But the common denominators are all here once again. A concerted effort has been organized to condemn and even to punish today’s nationwide student uprisings against the genocide occurring in Gaza and the West Bank. Just as the House Unamerican Activities Committee (HUAC) aimed to end the careers of progressive actors, directors, professors and State Department officials unsympathetic to Chiang Kai-Shek or sympathetic to the Soviet Union from 1947 to 1975, today’s version aims at ending what remains of academic freedom in the United States.
The epithet of “communism” from 75 years ago has been updated to “anti-Semitism.” Senator Joe McCarthy of Wisconsin has been replaced by Elise Stefanik, House Republican from upstate New York, and Senator “Scoop” Jackson upgraded to President Joe Biden. Harvard University President Claudine Gay (now forced to resign), former University of Pennsylvania President Elizabeth Magill (also given the boot), and Massachusetts Institute of Technology President Sally Kornbluth were called upon to abase themselves by promising to accuse peace advocates critical of U.S. foreign policy of anti-Semitism.
The most recent victim was Columbia’s president Nemat “Minouche” Shafik, a cosmopolitan opportunist with trilateral citizenship who enforced neoliberal economic policy as a high-ranking official at the IMF (where she was no stranger to the violence of “IMF riots”) and the World Bank, and who brought her lawyers along to help her acquiesce in the Congressional Committee’s demands. She did that and more, all on her own. Despite being told not to by the faculty and student affairs committees, she called in the police to arrest peaceful demonstrators.
This radical trespass of police violence against peaceful demonstrators (the police themselves attested to their peacefulness) triggered sympathetic revolts throughout the United States, met with even more violent police responses at Emory College in Atlanta and California State Polytechnic, where cell phone videos were quickly posted on various media platforms.
Just as intellectual freedom and free speech were attacked by HUAC 75 years ago, academic freedom is now under attack at these universities. The police have trespassed onto school grounds to accuse students themselves of trespassing, with violence reminiscent of the demonstrations that peaked in May 1970 when the Ohio National Guard shot Kent State students singing and speaking out against America’s war in Vietnam.
Today’s demonstrations are in opposition to the Biden-Netanyahu genocide in Gaza and the West Bank. The more underlying crisis can be boiled down to the insistence by Benjamin Netanyahu that to criticize Israel is anti-Semitic. That is the “enabling slur” of today’s assault on academic freedom.
By “Israel,” Biden and Netanyahu mean specifically the right-wing Likud Party and its theocratic supporters aiming to create “a land without a [non-Jewish] people.” They assert that Jews owe their loyalty not to their current nationality (or humanity) but to Israel and its policy of driving the Gaza Strip’s millions of Palestinians into the sea by bombing them out of their homes, hospitals and refugee camps.
The implication is that to support the International Court of Justice’s accusations that Israel is plausibly committing genocide is an anti-Semitic act. Supporting the UN resolutions vetoed by the United States is anti-Semitic.
The claim is that Israel is defending itself and that protesting the genocide of the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank frightens Jewish students. But research by students at Columbia’s School of Journalism found that the complaints cited by the New York Times and other pro-Israeli media were made by non-students trying to spread the story that Israel’s violence was in self-defense.
The student violence has been by Israeli nationals. Columbia has a student-exchange program with Israel for students who finish their compulsory training with the Israeli Defense Forces. It was some of these exchange students who attacked pro-Gaza demonstrators, spraying them with Skunk, a foul-smelling indelible Israeli army chemical weapon that marks demonstrators for subsequent arrest, torture or assassination. The only students endangered were the victims of this attack. Columbia under Shafik did nothing to protect or help the victims.
The hearings to which she submitted speak for themselves. Columbia’s president Shafik was able to avoid the first attack on universities not sufficiently pro-Likud by having meetings outside of the country. Yet she showed herself willing to submit to the same brow-beating that had led her two fellow presidents to be fired, hoping that her lawyers had prompted her to submit in a way that would be acceptable to the committee.
I found the most demagogic attack to be that of Republican Congressman Rick Allen from Georgia, asking Dr. Shafik whether she was familiar with the passage in Genesis 12.3. As he explained” “It was a covenant that God made with Abraham. And that covenant was real clear. … ‘If you bless Israel, I will bless you. If you curse Israel, I will curse you.’ … Do you consider that to be a serious issue? I mean, do you want Columbia University to be cursed by God of the Bible?”
Shafik smiled and was friendly all the way through this bible thumping, and replied meekly, “Definitely not.” She might have warded off this browbeating question by saying, “Your question is bizarre. This is 2024, and America is not a theocracy. And the Israel of the early 1st century BC was not Netanyahu’s Israel of today.” She accepted all the accusations that Allen and his fellow Congressional inquisitors threw at her.
Her main nemesis was Elise Stefanik, Chair of the House Republican Conference, who is on the House Armed Services Committee, and the Committee on Education and the Workforce.
Congresswoman Stefanik: You were asked were there any anti-Jewish protests and you said ‘No’.
President Shafik: So the protest was not labeled as an anti-Jewish protest. It was labeled as an anti-Israeli government. But antisemitic incidents happened or antisemitic things were said. So I just wanted to finish.
Congresswoman Stefanik: And you are aware that in that bill, that got 377 Members out of 435 Members of Congress, condemns ‘from the river to the sea’ as antisemitic?
Dr. Shafik: Yes, I am aware of that.
Congresswoman Stefanik: But you don’t believe ‘from the river to the sea’ is antisemitic?
Dr. Shafik: We have already issued a statement to our community saying that language is hurtful and we would prefer not to hear it on our campus.
What an appropriate response to Stefanik’s browbeating might have been?
Shafik could have said, “The reason why students are protesting is against the Israeli genocide against the Palestinians, as the International Court of Justice has ruled, and most of the United Nations agree. I’m proud of them for taking a moral stand that most of the world supports but is under attack here in this room.”
Instead, Shafik seemed more willing than the leaders of Harvard or Penn to condemn and potentially discipline students and faculty for using the term “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” She could have said that it is absurd to say that this is a call to eliminate Israel’s Jewish population, but is a call to give Palestinians freedom instead of being treated as Untermenschen.
Asked explicitly whether calls for genocide violate Columbia’s code of conduct, Dr. Shafik answered in the affirmative — “Yes, it does.” So did the other Columbia leaders who accompanied her at the hearing. They did not say that this is not at all what the protests are about. Neither Shafik nor any other of the university officials say, “Our university is proud of our students taking an active political and social role in protesting the idea of ethnic cleansing and outright murder of families simply to grab the land that they live on. Standing up for that moral principle is what education is all about, and what civilization’s all about.”
The one highlight that I remember from the McCarthy hearings was the reply by Joseph Welch, the U.S. Army’s Special Council, on June 9, 1954 to Republican Senator Joe McCarthy’s charge that one of Welch’s attorneys had ties to a Communist front organization. “Until this moment, senator,” Welch replied, “I think I never gauged your cruelty or your recklessness. … Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?”
The audience broke into wild applause. Welch’s put-down has echoed for the past 70 years in the minds of those who were watching television then (as I was, at age 15). A similar answer by any of the three other college presidents would have shown Stefanik to be the vulgarian that she is. But none ventured to stand up against the abasement.
The Congressional attack accusing opponents of genocide in Gaza as anti-Semites supporting genocide against the Jews is bipartisan. Already in December, Rep. Suzanne Bonamici (D-Ore.) helped cause Harvard and Penn’s presidents to be fired for their stumbling over her red-baiting. She repeated her question to Shafik on April 17: “Does calling for the genocide of Jews violate Columbia’s code of conduct?” Bonamici asked the four new Columbia witnesses. All responded: “Yes.”
That was the moment when they should have said that the students were not calling for genocide of the Jews, but seeking to mobilize opposition to genocide being committed by the Likud government against the Palestinians with President Biden’s full support.
During a break in the proceedings Rep. Stefanik told the press that “the witnesses were overheard discussing how well they thought their testimony was going for Columbia.” This arrogance is eerily reminiscent to the previous three university presidents who believed when walking out of the hearing that their testimony was acceptable. “Columbia is in for a reckoning of accountability. If it takes a member of Congress to force a university president to fire a pro-terrorist, antisemitic faculty chair, then Columbia University leadership is failing Jewish students and its academic mission,” added Stefanik. “No amount of overlawyered, overprepped, and over-consulted testimony is going to cover up for failure to act.”
Shafik could have pointedly corrected the implications by the House inquisitors that it was Jewish students who needed protection. The reality was just the opposite: The danger was from the Israeli IDF students who attacked the demonstrators with military Skunk, with no punishment by Columbia.
Despite being told not to by the faculty and student groups (which Shafik was officially bound to consult), she called in the police, who arrested 107 students, tied their hands behind their backs and kept them that way for many hours as punishment while charging them for trespassing on Columbia’s property. Shafik then suspended them from classes.
The clash between two kinds of Judaism: Zionist vs. assimilationist
A good number of these protestors being criticized were Jewish. Netanyahu and AIPAC have claimed – correctly, it seems – that the greatest danger to their current genocidal policies comes from the traditionally liberal Jewish middle-class population. Progressive Jewish groups have joined the uprisings at Columbia and other universities. Early Zionism arose in late 19th-century Europe as a response to the violent pogroms killing Jews in Ukrainian cities such as Odessa and other Central European cities that were the center of anti-Semitism. Zionism promised to create a safe refuge. It made sense at a time when Jews were fleeing their countries to save their lives in countries that accepted them. They were the “Gazans” of their day.
After World War II and the horrors of the Holocaust, anti-Semitism became passé. Most Jews in the United States and other countries were being assimilated and becoming prosperous, most successfully in the United States. The past century has seen this success enable them to assimilate, while retaining the moral standard that ethnic and religious discrimination such as that which their forbears had suffered is wrong in principle.
Jewish activists were in the forefront of fighting for civil liberties, most visibly against anti-Black prejudice and violence in the 1960s and ‘70s, and against the Vietnam War. Many of my Jewish school friends in the 1950s bought Israel bonds, but thought of Israel as a socialist country and thought of volunteering to work on a kibbutz in the summer. There was no thought of antagonism, and I heard no mention of the Palestinian population when the phrase “a people without a land in a land without a people” was spoken.
But Zionism’s leaders have remained obsessed with the old antagonisms in the wake of Nazism’s murders of so many Jews. In many ways they have turned Nazism inside out, fearing a renewed attack from non-Jews. Driving the Arabs out of Israel and making it an apartheid state was just the opposite of what assimilationist Jews aimed at.
The moral stance of progressive Jews, and the ideal that Jews, blacks and members of all other religions and races should be treated equally, is the opposite of Israeli Zionism. In the hands of Netanyahu’s Likud Party and the influx of right-wing supporters, Zionism asserts a claim to set Jewish people apart from the rest of their national population, and even from the rest of the world, as we are seeing today.
Claiming to speak for all Jews, living and dead, Netanyahu asserts that to criticize his genocide and the Palestinian holocaust, the nakba, is anti-Semitic. This is the position of Stefanik and her fellow committee members. It is an assertion that Jews owe their first allegiance to Israel, and hence to its ethnic cleansing and mass murder since last October. President Biden also has labeled the student demonstrations “antisemitic protests.”
This claim in the circumstances of Israel’s ongoing genocide is causing more anti-Semitism than anyone since Hitler. If people throughout the world come to adopt Netanyahu’s and his cabinet’s definition of anti-Semitism, how many, being repulsed by Israel’s actions, will say, “If that is the case, then indeed I guess I’m anti-Semitic.”
Netanyahu’s slander against Judaism and what civilization should stand for
Netanyahu characterized the U.S. protests in an extremist speech on April 24 attacking American academic freedom.
What’s happening in America’s college campuses is horrific. Antisemitic mobs have taken over leading universities. They call for the annihilation of Israel, they attack Jewish students, they attack Jewish faculty. This is reminiscent of what happened in German universities in the 1930s. We see this exponential rise of antisemitism throughout America and throughout Western societies as Israel tries to defend itself against genocidal terrorists, genocidal terrorists who hide behind civilians.
It’s unconscionable, it has to be stopped, it has to be condemned and condemned unequivocally. But that’s not what happened. The response of several university presidents was shameful. Now, fortunately, state, local, federal officials, many of them have responded differently but there has to be more. More has to be done.
This is a call to make American universities into arms of a police state, imposing policies dictated by Israel’s settler state. That call is being funded by a circular flow: Congress gives enormous subsidies to Israel, which recycles some of this money back into the election campaigns of politicians willing to serve their donors. It is the same policy that Ukraine uses when it employs U.S. “aid” by setting up well-funded lobbying organizations to back client politicians.
What kind of student and academic protest expressions could oppose the Gaza and West Bank genocide without explicitly threatening Jewish students? How about “Palestinians are human being too!” That is not aggressive. To make it more ecumenical, one could add “And so are the Russians, despite what Ukrainian neo-Nazis say.” I can understand why Israelis feel threatened by Palestinians. They know how many they have killed and brutalized to grab their land, killing just to “free” the land for themselves. They must think “If the Palestinians are like us, they must want to kill us, because of what we have done to them and there can never be a two-state solution and we can never live together, because this land was given to us by God.”
Netanyahu fanned the flames after his April 24 speech by raising today’s conflict to the level of a fight for civilization: “What is important now is for all of us, all of us who are interested and cherish our values and our civilization, to stand up together and to say enough is enough.”
Is what Israel is doing, and what the United Nations, the International Court of Justice and most of the Global Majority oppose, really “our civilization”? Ethnic cleansing, genocide and treating the Palestinian population as conquered and to be expelled as subhumans is an assault on the most basic principles of civilization.
Peaceful students defending that universal concept of civilization are called terrorists and anti-Semites – by the terrorist Israeli Prime Minister. He is following the tactics of Joseph Goebbels: The way to mobilize a population to fight the enemy is to depict yourself as under attack. That was the Nazi public relations strategy, and it is the PR strategy of Israel today – and of many in the American Congress, in AIPAC and many related institutions that proclaim a morally offensive idea of civilization as the ethnic supremacy of a group sanctioned by God.
The real focus of the protests is the U.S. policy that is backing Israel’s ethnic cleansing and genocide supported by last week’s foreign “aid.” It is also a protest against the corruption of Congressional politicians raising money from lobbyists representing foreign interests over those of the United States. Last week’s “aid” bill also backed Ukraine, that other country presently engaged in ethnic cleansing, where House members waved Ukrainian flags, not those of the United States. Shortly before that, one Congressman wore his Israeli army uniform into Congress to advertise his priorities.
Zionism has gone far beyond Judaism. I’ve read that there are nine Christian Zionists for every Jewish Zionist. It is as if both groups are calling for the End Time to arrive, while insisting that support for the United Nations and the International Court of Justice condemning Israel for genocide is anti-Semitic.
What CAN the students at Columbia ask for:
Students at Columbia and other universities have called for universities to disinvest in Israeli stocks, and also those of U.S. arms makers exporting to Israel. Given the fact that universities have become business organizations, I don’t think that this is the most practical demand at present. Most important, it doesn’t go to the heart of the principles at work.
What really is the big public relations issue is the unconditional U.S. backing for Israel come what may, with “anti-Semitism” the current propaganda epithet to characterize those who oppose genocide and brutal land grabbing.
They should insist on a public announcement by Columbia (and also Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania, who were equally obsequious to Rep. Stefanik) that they recognize that it is not anti-Semitic to condemn genocide, support the United Nations and denounce the U.S. veto.
They should insist that Columbia and the other universities making a sacrosanct promise not to call police onto academic grounds over issues of free speech.
They should insist that the president be fired for her one-sided support of Israeli violence against her students. In that demand they are in agreement with Rep. Stefanik’s principle of protecting students, and that Dr. Shafik must go.
But there is one class of major offenders that should be held up for contempt: the donors who try to attack academic freedom by using their money to influence university policy and turn universities away from the role in supporting academic freedom and free speech. The students should insist that university administrators – the unpleasant opportunists standing above the faculty and students – must not only refuse such pressure but should join in publicly expressing shock over such covert political influence.
The problem is that American universities have become like Congress in basing their policy on attracting contributions from their donors. That is the academic equivalent of the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling. Numerous Zionist funders have threatened to withdraw their contributions to Harvard, Columbia and other schools not following Netanyahu’s demands to clamp down on opponents of genocide and defenders of the United Nations. These funders are the enemies of the students at such universities, and both students and faculty should insist on their removal. Just as Dr. Shafik’s International Monetary Fund fell subject to its economists’ protest that there must be “No more Argentinas,” perhaps the Columbia students could chant “No More Shafiks.”
WSWS: Democrats demand police crackdown at Columbia University Gaza encampment
On the morning of April 29, 21 Democratic lawmakers issued a threatening public letter to the Trustees of Columbia University demanding they take “action ... now” to disband the anti-war encampment on campus, which they lyingly claimed was constructed by “anti-Jewish activists.”
If the trustees were not willing, or able, to call in riot police, or perhaps the National Guard, to violently deal with college students and their professors peacefully protesting the university’s, and US government’s, complicity in the genocide in Gaza, the representatives demanded the trustees’ resignation.
The authoritarian letter was signed by several prominent Democrats, including Maryland Rep. Steny Hoyer, the most senior member of the Democratic House, having been in Congress since May 1981. Until January 2023, Hoyer served as the Majority Leader in the House for over two decades, second-in-line to then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
Other prominent Democrats who signed the letter include Senate candidate and current California Representative Adam Schiff, Debbie Wasserman Schultz (Florida), Josh Gottheimer (New Jersey) Dan Goldman (New York) Henry Cuellar (Texas), as well as Haley Stevens (Michigan).
In the letter, the Democrats expressed their “disappointment that, despite promises to do so, Columbia University has not yet disbanded the unauthorized and impermissible encampment.” Echoing fascistic Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, the Democrats repeated the “big lie” that protesting the mass slaughter of over 40,000 Palestinians, a majority women and children, was “antisemitic.”
The Democrats wrote that the encampment “has been the breeding ground for antisemitic attacks on Jewish students.” To back up their bogus claims of “antisemitism” the authors of the letter cited President Joe Biden’s April 21 statement which also repeated the slander.
At the same time the Democrats’ letter was released, Columbia President Minouche Shafik also released a statement claiming the encampment had created an “unwelcoming environment for many of our Jewish students and faculty.” She demanded students “voluntarily disperse.” Shafik’s statement was accompanied by a packet distributed to protesting students at the encampment warning them to disband and leave before 2 p.m. or face suspension/expulsion.
Unfazed by threats from the Democrats or administration officials, it appears none of the students took them up on their offer to voluntarily disband. Instead, prior to the 2 p.m. deadline, dozens of Columbia faculty members joined the encampment and formed a human chain.
The faculty were joined by up to 1,000 other students. As of this writing, the encampment remains, but it appears the university has begun suspending students. In a statement to the New York Times, Ben Chang, a spokesman for the school said, “We have begun suspending students as part of the next phase of our efforts to ensure the safety of our campus.”
Since April 17, students at Columbia University, ranging from a few dozen to several hundreds, have occupied a section of the lawn. Despite the peaceful character of the protests, the university called in the riot police the following day, leading to the arrest of 108 people.
Massive police repression did not prevent the encampment from reconstituting on Columbia grounds, and spreading to other universities in the US and internationally, including in France, Germany, Spain, England and Australia. In addition to student encampments, protests against the ongoing genocide in Gaza have continued throughout the world, including in Tokyo, where students in construction helmets resisted riot police while chanting “No more!” “Free Palestine” and “Workers, unite!”
In the United States, despite the police repression, several new encampments and protests in solidarity with Gaza have emerged on major college campuses. In response, several colleges have called in police to violently disperse them.
At the University of Texas-Austin, which saw mass protests and arrests last week, hundreds of riot police were called in by the administration to disperse a reestablished Gaza Solidarity Encampment on the South Lawn of the campus. Video shows riot cops assaulting students sitting on the grass before zip-tying and arresting them. Local reporters estimate that “dozens” have already been arrested.
To justify the mass arrest of peaceful anti-war protesters, UT-Austin issued a statement before the arrests began claiming they found “rocks ... strategically placed within the encampment” and that the school had received “extensive online threats from a group organizing today’s protest.” The university did not disclose the nature of the alleged “threats.”
Video from Austin posted later in the afternoon showed students backing police down from the campus.
At the University of Georgia in Athens, several students, many with Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), were arrested less than two hours after establishing an encampment. The Atlanta Community Press Collective (ACPC) reported that 16 people were arrested and charged with criminal trespass.
After being arrested in the morning, many of the anti-genocide protesters returned to the campus in the afternoon to participate in a pro-Palestinian protest.
ACPC reported protesters demanded that the university divest from companies involved in the genocide in Gaza and that the university divest from companies supporting the construction of “Cop City” in Atlanta.
In Cleveland, Ohio at Case Western University, police were quickly called to disband an encampment established by students outside the library Monday morning. Local reports indicate roughly 50 people initiated the encampment, which was quickly surrounded by police who removed all of the tents. Roughly 20 people were briefly detained by police while the encampment was cleared.
Major protests and walkouts have occurred on several other campuses. At UCLA in California, hundreds of students and faculty walked out of class on Monday in support of Gaza. After holding a brief rally, students and faculty marched around the campus chanting, “We will not stop, we will not rest, disclose, divest.”
Hundreds of students at Whitman College, a liberal arts school in Walla Walla, Washington, walked out of class in solidarity with Gaza and other students.
At the University of Chicago, students established an encampment on campus. A few hours north, in Madison, Wisconsin, hundreds of students have been protesting for several hours and tents have been set up.
At the University of Indiana-Bloomington, hundreds of students and many senior faculty professors held a rally where they demanded the immediate resignation of IU President Pamela Whitten after she ordered state and local police to clear a peaceful encampment last Thursday.
Gaza Solidarity Encampment organized at Western Michigan University
On Saturday, a joint Gaza Solidarity Encampment of students from Western Michigan University (WMU), Kalamazoo College and Kalamazoo Valley Community College was set up near the Faunce Student Services building on the campus of WMU.
The students have received support from faculty members and members of the community for their action. There demands are: 1.) Full transparency as to where funds from the endowment are invested. 2.) Immediate divestment and distance from all companies and organizations with connections to the state of Israel. 3.) A public statement condemning the war crimes and genocide being carried out by Israel and an endorsement of Palestinian liberation; 4.) Full solidarity, support and protection to Palestinian students and faculty.
On Sunday afternoon, Roland, one of the organizers of the encampment, said there had been no contact with the university administration or campus law enforcement so far.
Roland, one of the organizers of the Gaza Solidarity Encampment, at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo.
However, on Monday, the organizers posted on social media that the university was demanding that the encampment be dismantled. They called on students, faculty and the community to rally to defend the protest. Report: Over 900 anti-genocide protesters arrested on college campuses in the United States
In less than two weeks, police in the United States have arrested at least 900 people for participating in anti-war and pro-Palestinian protests according to a database maintained by the Washington Post. Students on college campuses in the US have organized over 75 protests and encampments on or near their schools, including at major Ivy League universities, beginning with Columbia University on April 17.
While the demonstrations have been led by students, in many cases faculty have joined the protests to register their disgust with their schools’ involvement in military projects, including deriving profits from the manufacture of Israeli weapons.
In response to protesters calling on universities to divest from Israeli companies, many administrators and university presidents, encouraged by politicians in both parties, have called the riot police on students peacefully protesting, leading to mass arrests.
On Saturday, at Washington University in St. Louis, some 100 people, including Green Party US presidential candidate Jill Stein, were arrested for participating in an encampment on campus.
Jason Call, Stein’s campaign manager, told Fox News Digital that he and another deputy campaign manager were also arrested alongside Stein and students.
On Sunday, Socialist Equality Party candidate for president Joseph Kishore posted a statement on X/Twitter denouncing the arrest of Stein and others:
The attack on protests nationwide is being directed by the Biden administration. It is supported by both the Democrats and the Republicans, the twin parties of the capitalist ruling elite.
Amidst the expanding protests in the US and internationally, both parties joined hands to pass a massive bill that Biden signed last weekend to finance the US-NATO war against Russia, the genocide in Gaza, and the developing conflict with China.
The corollary to global imperialist war is the vicious attack on democratic rights. The SEP is fighting to develop a movement in working class, connecting the defense of democratic rights to opposition to imperialist war and the capitalist profit system.
The aggressiveness of the police in response to anti-genocide protesters stands in stark contrast to the “hands-off” approach taken when it comes to neo-Nazis and white supremacists. As police rampaged on college campuses over the weekend, video emerged showing members of the Patriot Front marching through downtown Charleston, West Virginia, free from police interference.
Over 1,000 students and community members march against genocide at Yale University
On Sunday afternoon, over 1,000 Yale students and community members rallied and marched across campus in New Haven, Connecticut against Yale’s complicity in the Gaza genocide and police repression on campuses.
Over 1,000 people protested the genocide in Gaza on April 28, 2024, in New Haven, Connecticut. Many students from Yale spoke about their experiences being arrested at the request of the Yale administration for peacefully protesting on campus last week. UConn students, who recently erected a Gaza Solidarity Encampment on their campus, were also present and spoke. There was also a large contingent of students from Wesleyan University.
A child holds up a sign at the protest that reads, "Not one more child. From Palestine...to New Haven. No more murdered for greed or empire." A Columbia graduate student—who was one of the over 108 students who were arrested in Harlem last week—traveled to New Haven for the protest. She read the October 16, 2023 statement issued by the Palestinian Trade Union Federation calling on workers in the US and internationally to halt all military arms to Israel.
The World Socialist Web Site spoke with students and workers at the New Haven protest.
Ky, a Yale student and organizer involved in the encampment, said, “I think it’s disgusting and shameful and as a student I feel ashamed to be a member of universities that are allowing police to treat peaceful protesters exercising their right to free speech in this way. In the United States of America, it is disheartening and frustrating and deeply shameful for me to witness this.”
About the recent video from Gazans responding to the campus encampment, Ky said, “Honestly, when I saw the video of Gaza children thanking students from Harvard, from Yale, from McGill, from all over the place, it brought me to tears. I was so moved by this. It really is just a testament to how international and long lasting this movement is.”
Two young workers from New Haven, Jeanne and Zasha, attended Sunday’s protest. Jeanne said, “We need to protect the students. To send basically the militia to crack down [with] arrests is absolutely unnecessary and it is a repeat of history of time and time again throughout every type of war…We need to let people know that we’re not tolerating this. We need to stop genocide.”
Zasha told the WSWS, “The struggle of Palestinians is the struggle of all oppressed people. Once we join together and we have that consciousness, we can be undefeated.”
On the Biden administration’s support and funding for the genocide, she said, “I was never affiliated with the Democratic Party.” She said she is looking to support a third-party anti-war socialist candidate and was interested to learn about the Socialist Equality Party’s campaign in the elections.
A New Haven Eighth Grader who attended the protest with her family spoke about the police crackdowns. “I think they’re scared because when we actually start speaking up and we actually start bringing awareness, it takes a toll on our government. And they don’t want us to reveal the truth about what’s happening in the Middle East and in Palestine, because Israel is a big partner for them and source of resources in the Middle East.
Students and community members at the New Haven, Connecticut protest, April 28, 2024. “For universities, all they care about is how they look in the media. They don’t really care about people’s lives and what’s really going on. They just want to protect their image. They don’t want anything else to get in the way of that.”
Asked if she had heard about the $95 billion war spending bill passed by Congress and Biden this week, she replied. “Being American now, it’s really embarrassing that all our tax dollars are going abroad, instead of actually going to help us with free healthcare or stuff that we need fixing here. There’s so many homeless people in America, and what we’re focused on is funding a genocide, and it’s really embarrassing and really sad.”
on April 29, 2024, 8:46 pm