Waking up to read the White House is deciding to ignore the statement of the young students protesting the government's need to feed genocide and for media outlets to call them "hate-filled foreign students" is the first loud bell of the covert fascist alignment domestically of the American project.
Biden's already opened claimed to be a Zionist so it shouldn't be too shocking but this is now a soft declaration of anti-dissent sentiment.
In my opinion (and this is mainly tied to looking at past events from the 90s up to 2019), liberals are incapable of seeing any sort of covert or overt violence that their party leader executed as a bad thing. In fact, it's almost deemed as necessary.
NAFTA was good (and has been a huge contributing factor to the weakening of economic independence of the global South, like sending industrial jobs to Mexico, Brazil, and other places with incredibly weak labor laws and governments that will be violent to workers that stand up - while making our cars at a tenth of the pay of what an American worker would make).
Obama was an excellent president (and bombed parts of Africa and installed a paramilitary unit via AFRICOM to defend companies like General Electric and Microsoft from their unregulated and below the radar acts of resource extraction to feed and maintain the luxury lifestyles of the West - in relation to the rest of the world).
The violence that this country does over indexes towards non-white people. It even found a way to profit from it similar to the violence of its past with other forms of labor. And it's managed to indoctrinate so many people in defense with no space for critical thinking nor a venue for accountability.
With all of this said, the neoliberalist ventures of America and its accompanying forces will be turned more aggressively inwards. All of the paperclip allies will move away from the violence or do their best to contort their ideologies to match what the State informs them to parrot.
@jalcine my timeline is giving me a very different read on Columbia - protestors celebrating Hamas and Oct7, throwing fake blood at Jews, yelling that they will repeat Oct7 to all Jews on campus. The Rabbi of the university has called on Jewish students to go home for Passover as their safety cannot be guaranteed on campus. These reports check out and come from legit source - including anti-war activists. Why would anyone - including Palestine protestors - not condemn this?
First, we should all acknowledge two things: 1) the situation is complicated, because the protesters are not a monolith. And 2) some of the protesters are 100% saying super anti-semitic things.
That being said, the media coverage as usual is not great.
For example, one of the rabbis at Columbia said students should stay home. Another rabbi at Columbia, and the head of Hillel, issued a statement the students should not leave. 🙂🙃
The media down plays the number of Jewish students that are organizers and protesters against the war in Gaza. The framing makes it look like it's all non-Jews against Jews, and that's just not accurate.
The news showed muslims praying in the grass, which is supposed to be scary for some reason? It showed other protesters holding up blankets to give them privacy while they prayed. It didn't mention that many of the other students holding blankets up... are Jewish.
Note that the above author and student at Georgetown, specifically called out Columbia University and Jewish voices for peace , even though this article was written back in February.
I'm not an expert on irreconcilable differences between US progressive Jews, and US Zionists.
I do know that I hear much more nuanced conversation here on the fediverse, and from my Jewish and Israeli and Palestinian friends IRL, than I do from US news media.
Things I've heard listening to Jewish folk:
"Jewish people can be antisemitic. JVP is problematic."
"Problematic how? The far-right accuses any Jewish people that oppose the war of being self-hating and antisemitic."
@mekkaokereke@jalcine
I was JVP subscriber until October 7. On that day - while gunmen were still dragging families from their homes to shoot or kidnap, they sent an email. without a word of criticism, let alone concern, sympathy or compassion for the hostages, victims or those hiding in terror in the bushes on a comedown. It just asked me to preemptively demand a ceasefire from Israel.
So I concluded they aren't a voice for peace, they are the communications arm for one side of the conflict.
Again, I don't know enough about JVP's tactics and communications to know if everything they said and did was above board.
I do know that the US media is intentionally erasing their participation in the organizing and staging of pro-Gaza protests at college campuses and other places.
Because it's much easier to pretend that non-muslims students are ganging up on Jewish students.
It's much harder to explain the nuance: that Jewish students are leaders of the protests.
At any of these large Jewish organized protests, antisemites show up too. They say horrific things, that I won't repeat. No, not even one should be tolerated.
In a protest of thousands, it doesn't matter if there's only a dozen raging antisemites. Fox News will find them all, and film them.
@mekkaokereke@jalcine thanks for the clarifications and nuance. Tbf I’ve also heard about lots of peaceful protestors being arrested which also sounds very wrong.
I guess for myself, in decades of protest - against Iraq, with Occupy, previous Gaza invasions, XR, etc. if part of that protest, no matter how tiny, used threats of rape and murder against anyone, let alone a minority group, I feel we’d need to create maximum distance from them before any kind of defensive msg.
Agreed. I'm not going to assume the capacity of those there but in my experience organizing protests, this is where the Safety committee would come in to help redirect and have people exercise them.
I will also say by giving them air, enough air to become nearly synonymous with the actual protesters of the space, does work in the favor of counter-protests (and like you've mentioned with Zuccoti Park). It's not easy work.
@jalcine@nicol@mekkaokereke I think this is the reason masked infiltrators have been surrounding the Columbia campus. In a high-profile situation with a lot of inexperienced young protestors and several populations detested by right-wing extremists (Muslims, Jews, elite college students, professors), sowing discord by introducing hateful slogans is a win/win/win for their interests. I've watched it happen outside the uni gates--someone on a megaphone gets fed a line and it's chanted.
@jalcine@nicol@mekkaokereke A dear Palestinian friend of mine in another country has been in protests for 50 years, and she said she spends most of her time at protests identifying and working to evict Nazi infiltrators. They are absolutely hanging around the Columbia gates. I don't think they are successful with the coalition of students inside the gates, but they're outside, faces wrapped up, screaming about rape and murder and hell.
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