May 1, 2024

 
Scenes of a Police State

In scenes more reminiscent of a flailing police state than anything else, several major university campuses across the United States of America have witnessed crackdowns against non-violent pro-Palestine protest encampments. In the northeast, New York’s Columbia and City Universities have both seen police crackdowns against both students and faculty protesting links to Israel. On the West Coast, meanwhile, police stood by to watch as hundreds of pro-Israel thugs attacked student protesters at Los Angeles’ University of California.

Hundreds of campus protesters have been arrested

The crackdowns follow weeks of peaceful, and surprisingly disciplined protests against both the United States’ general support for, and the universities’ specific links to, the Israeli ethnostate that has killed tens of thousands of Palestinians, over half of them children, in a brutal and ongoing campaign for the last seven months.

Dispelling with a long-professed but always wafer-thin pretense of neutrality between Israel and the Palestinians, the American government – led by liberal Democrat Joseph Biden, whose Zionism is rabid even by the standards of American politicians – has thrown its full weight behind Israel. This includes financial support to the tune of billions of dollars, including a package pushed through in mid-April 2024 by the fanatical far-right Congressional speaker Mike Johnson, as well as indispensable military support and diplomatic cover. This happened even as the war sours on an American public that has historically been far more indulgent toward Zionism than the overwhelming majority of the planet.

Attempts to Reframe Opposition to Genocide as Antisemitism

Because Israel is a Jewish ethnostate, one of its defenders’ fondest strategies has been to present any criticism as being an essential hatred of Jews. Thus, antisemitism, and not the generation-long blockade of the Gaza Strip, was widely portrayed as being the cause for the October 2023 hostage raid by Palestinian militants that paved the way for the genocidal Israeli onslaught.

In the United States, Zionist organizations have openly advertised for provocateurs, especially such as can pass as Arabs, to infiltrate and break up the protests. Their aim has been to spread a false narrative, widely parroted in much of the mainstream media, that the protests are about intimidating Jews – even as hundreds of Jewish protesters oppose Israel’s genocidal violence done in their name and the Israeli state loses support among American Jews.

Zionist dissemblers ranging from manchild professor, arms industry profiteer, and widely alleged student-harasser Shai Davidai to serial bellyacher Sahar Tartak have leapt snout-first into the trough, yowling on international platforms about alleged attacks clearly belied by camera evidence and calling in paramilitary crackdowns after fearmongering about something as simple and fundamental as Muslim students in prayer. As with the enormously destructive war on terror that ravaged the Muslim world – a war that was encouraged, and whose patterns are fully embraced, by Israel – Zionist tactics revert at a pinch to the lowest common denominator.

Familiar Authoritarian Tactics

Zionist thugs attack pro-Palestinian protesters at UCLA

These are, of course, tactics widely practiced by Israelis on Palestinians, but the close link between Israeli enforcement and their American counterparts may at least partly explain why they have caught on in the United States. The sight of Zionist thugs storming pro-Palestine protesters in Los Angeles while the police looked fondly on is eerily similar to what is routinely done by ethnonationalist ‘settlers’, fully enabled by Israeli institutions, against Palestinians.

Not that provocateurs are solely to blame. In mid-April 2024, for example, a congressional upbraiding persuaded Columbia president Minouche Shafik, an Alexandrian-born British aristocrat, to call the police on her students. The parallels with Arab autocrats from Anwar Sadat to Mohammad bin Zayed who have repressed their populations in order to indulge Israel is too obvious.

There is also historical precedence in the student occupation of the famed Hamilton Hall in 1968. At the peak of the Vietnam War, students occupied the hall and renamed it after Malcolm Shabazz “X”, the visionary revolutionary. During anti-apartheid protests in 1985, the hall was occupied and named after Nelson Mandela, the then-imprisoned and blacklisted South African opposition leader who would go on to end apartheid five years later.

In the current protest, the protesters that seized the hall chose to name it “Hind’s Hall”, after Hind Rajab, the six-year-old Palestinian child whose family and would-be rescuers were killed and who was pointedly left to die in a particularly callous example of the Israeli army’s brutality.

From Biden to Musk to Amy Schumer

Politicians and most media have also played their part. This reaches as high as Biden; unsatisfied with repeatedly humiliating himself by parroting Israeli lies over Gaza in the autumn, he has stepped up to redefine Arabic words such as intifada, a common phrase often but not exclusively used in the Palestinian context, as hate speech.

The government has recently announced that the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court does not for some reason extend to Israel. In addition, of course, it has repeatedly barred opposition to Israel at international forums and has cheerfully indulged Israel’s vilification of aid workers and mass slaughter of United Nations staff.

In the private sphere, degenerate moguls from Elon Musk to Bill Ackman have rushed to cover for Israel, while celebrities such as Amy Schumer have only been rewarded for dog-whistling bigotry, their base lies reimagined as boldly told truths.

The remarkable variety of Zionist indecency, and the extent to which they are willing to go, are certainly dispiriting for anybody with a brain and conscience. But it is precisely why the fight to cut support for Israel is so necessary, no less within the United States than without.

Related:

Podcast: Gaza’s Strength, Our Weakness | Shaykha Zaynab Ansari

Prophetic Lessons From The Muslim Men In Gaza