With the @ifnotnowboston account here, I'm thinking I'd like to lean in to what the fedi is good at, and use it more for community and conversation, than breaking news and broadcast. Like, more discussion prompts I guess. Are there some good examples of accounts doing that successfully?
There was very little discussion of it here, although @AdrianRiskin posted the link to the video and @elsantonegro shared KTVU's article on it.
There's some discussion on Bluesky, almost all of it from white people.
But Xitter's where the action is, with statements from CAIR, NLG, perspectives from multiple lawyer. Muslim women see it differently than tenured white law profs, who could have predicted? Of course there's plenty of Islamophobia and anti-Semitism in the replies on Xitter, also very predictable. But since almost none of the press coverage covered the protestors goals and perspectives in any detail, focusing only on the narrow question of whether the First Amendment protects political speech at a semi-official event at a private residence, without looking on Twitter it's a once-sided debate -- and Xitter's still by far the best option of the three for getting Muslim perspectives on this.
And to @jdp23 's point I only saw a protest at Pomona College where students were getting arrested bc I happened to hop onto on Xwitter. I think @AdrianRiskin later posted a news story.
Yeah the LA Times article is fairly typical of the news coverage -- you have to go pretty deep into it to get to one or two sentences about the protestors' message and goals and they don't have the statement from CAIR (which is relevant in general and also because Malak Afaneh, the law student who organized the protest, interns there). The KQED link I shared at least had a few paragraphs on it:
"Afaneh’s group, Law Students for Justice in Palestine (LSJP), has long demanded that UC Berkeley divest from manufacturing companies that supply weapons to Israel and accuses the school of being complicit in the widespread destruction of Gaza, where more than 33,000 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli attacks since October, according to Gaza officials.
The group called on their peers to boycott the dinners at the couple’s house, accusing Chemerinsky of aligning with Zionist causes and repeatedly trying to silence pro-Palestinian student activism.
“He’s provided no support for Palestinian voices, no support for Muslims, but is very staunchly Zionist,” Afaneh said.
Oh hmm, that's useful conext, I wonder why the LA Times and NY Times didn't publish that? (Just kidding, I know why the LA Times and NY Times didn't publish that.)
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