by Ibrahim Moiz for MuslimMatters

May 2, 2024

UCLA Students and Faculty Horrified at Extent of Violence

The campaign against pro-Palestine protests on American campuses took another unsavory shift this week in Los Angeles when an encampment at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) was stormed by armed Zionist thugs, who set about attacking the protesters with practical impunity and with no response from either police or campus security. The assault continued for hours in the night, leaving both students and faculty horrified at the extent of the violence and its indulgence by security who are meant to protect the university community.

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UCLA pro-Palestine encampment

Overwhelmingly nonviolent protests have spread across the United States in recent weeks, as students protest for universities to divest from companies that profit off the internationally illegal, but liberally indulged, occupation of the West Bank and Palestine. Although the United States has long claimed brokerage between Israelis and Palestinians, in actual fact, it has indulged Israel’s occupation under the pretext of security, and much of the American political and business class has engaged with and invested in an internationally illegal occupation.

Cowardly Leaders Fail to Protect Students

Pro-Israeli thugs attack protesters

In a typical diversion, Zionist organizations and their sympathizers in the corridors of power, as high as Joseph Biden himself, have attempted to paint the opposition to Israel’s genocide in Gaza as an episode of antisemitism, notwithstanding the hundreds of Jewish protesters and the mounting disapproval for Israeli policies among even a traditionally sympathetic Jewish-American populace. Thus the White House’s only response to events at New York’s Columbia University, whose British-Arab president Minouche Shafik caved into political pressure and ordered the police on her own students a fortnight ago and where students occupied a historic hall in solidarity with Palestine, was to condemn antisemitism and paint the Arabic term intifada, commonly used in various uprising-related contexts around the world, as an antisemitic slur.

At the other, western end of the United States, leadership has been similarly craven. In an interview with Ian Masters, professor and director of the UCLA Institute on Inequality and Democracy Ananya Roy described the university’s failure in protecting its students, whose “calm, contained, peaceful encampment” was repeatedly menaced by Zionist agitators. This failure, Roy says, led directly to the “unchecked violence”, dumbly watched by passive security forces as students and faculty who tried to protect them were assaulted. The administration, according to Roy, “resolutely refused to recognize the safety and well-being of our very own students who are in that encampment and really have the right to protest at university.”

Campus Administration Negligence

Pro-Zionist thugs attacked protesters

Not only did the university administration fail to have the attackers arrested, but their statements and messaging “downplayed the need for safety and well-being for the students in the encampment”. It was in this context that some two hundred Zionist thugs launched an armed night attack on the encampment, savagely laying about the students and chanting genocidal slogans such as the call for a second “Nakba”, referring to the original expulsion of Palestinians from their land at the foundation of the Israeli ethnostate in the late 1940s.

Though UCLA chancellor Gene Block has since responded to the assault with a condemnation, Roy describes the administration as having been negligent in the days leading up to it. Complaints about the behavior of a Zionist counterprotest over the weekend – a counterprotest funded in part by the wife of comedian Jerry Seinfeld – were ignored.

Belying widespread attempts to portray the protests as antisemitic because of their criticism of Israel, Roy noted that many of the students and, indeed, faculty who opposed Israel’s policy were Jews, who were nonetheless endangered by violence in the name of the “Jewish state”. She described how one Jewish student on whom she checked after the violence replied, “I’m okay – but the university was really trying to kill us last night.”

Many comments on social media expressed shock at the violence and its apparent impunity.
https://twitter.com/ryangrim/status/1785614477561344489

Others grimly noted the parallel with Zionist militia violence in Palestine, where thuggish Israeli settlers regularly brutalize Palestinians with the protection, and frequent participation, by the Israeli state.

https://twitter.com/BenEhrenreich/status/1785606983065739581
https://twitter.com/thaqafatalhind/status/1785642951697154131

Related:

– Callous Campus Crackdowns On Pro-Palestinian Protesters Grip The United States – MuslimMatters.org

We Are Not Numbers x MuslimMatters – Ramadan While Under Attack In Gaza