by Harley Schlanger, LaRouche Organization:
June 1 — The explosion of campus protests against U.S. support for Israel’s scorched earth policies against Palestinians continued last week, with demonstrations at graduation ceremonies at many universities. While the mainstream media has attempted to minimize the actions as “disruptions” of the annual spring festivities, U.S. elected officials have continued with angry denunciations of protesters as “pro-Hamas, pro-terrorist anti-Semites” engaging in “violent” actions, demanding that university officials crackdown on them, with arrests, expulsions, and deportation of any foreign students involved. The U.S. House of Representatives went to the extreme of redefining anti-Semitism as opposition to the policies of Israel, threatening universities with the loss of federal funds unless there is vigorous monitoring, i.e., spying, to “combat anti-Semitism” on campuses.
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Comments made by House Speaker Mike Johnson on the Columbia University campus typify Congressional reaction. In calling for a crackdown against protestors, Johnson said, “We just can’t allow this kind of hatred and anti-semitism to flourish on our campuses.” President Biden and his opponent in November, Donald Trump, joined the chorus in denouncing the protests, while expressing support for Israel’s killing of Palestinians and destruction of Gaza.
In reality, the “violence” on campuses has resulted primarily from campus officials calling in police to remove demonstrators and tear down their encampments. There have been more than 3,000 arrests so far, and measures are being put in place to limit the freedom of speech of students. There is fear that the protests will move off campus, as polls show a growing number of Americans reacting against the support for Israel’s brutal actions in Gaza and the West Bank by the Biden administration and a bipartisan majority in Congress.
Most disturbing for university administrators and Board of Trustee members is the persistence of the demand that the colleges reveal where their large endowments are invested, and divest from firms of the Military-Industrial Complex and businesses with ties to the Israeli military and corporations. The threat of exposure of the profitable relationship between colleges and the war machine was used to provoke officials to move aggressively against the protests, to silence opposition to their complicity in war crimes.
PROTESTS AGAINST GENOCIDE, NOT AGAINST JEWS
The decisions in the last week targeting Israel’s leaders for war crimes, including “plausible” charges of genocide against Palestinians, announced by the International Criminal Court and International Court of Justice, were undoubtedly on the minds of students who protested at graduation ceremonies from coast-to-coast. More than 1,000 students walked out of Harvard’s ceremony to protest the school’s refusal to hand out diplomas to 13 student-protestors, while UCLA grads cheered the speaker who was denied the right to address her graduating classmates, due to the allegation that her support for justice for Palestinians was “anti-Semitic.”
The student actions at Harvard were especially troubling for those committed to suppressing dissent. One large banner carried by students said “Harvard out of occupied Palestine.” Another said simply “Stop the genocide.” Sruthi Kumar, in her commencement address, stated she was “deeply disappointed by the intolerance for freedom of speech and their right to civil disobedience on campus.” The main speaker at Harvard, Maria Ressa, a journalist and Nobel Peace Prize laureate, called out university officials, saying “Harvard, you are being tested….[protests] are testing everyone. Protests give voice, they shouldn’t be silenced.”
Protests are continuing at some campuses after graduation. Unionized academic workers at the University of California system are conducting rolling strikes, with members walking off the job at UCLA and University of California-Davis on May 28. They are protesting violence deployed against peaceful protesters, and their demands include divestment from Israel and ending efforts to limit student’s freedom of speech and right to protest.
The narrative of violent anti-Semitic protesters was exposed by an article in {Politico} on May 3, “What’s Really Happening on College Campuses”, in which student journalists from 13 campuses were interviewed. They were asked “how support for Palestine has surged over the last seven months, how their peers define antisemitism and what the political consequences of these protests might be.” The article reports that “collectively, the group [of student journalists] painted a picture of students fighting to be heard by leadership — both on campus and nationally,” and that violence on their campuses came from what one called “excessive use of force by police.”
They also confirmed that in addition to demands for a ceasefire in Gaza, an end to U.S. military/financial aid for Israel, and recognition of a Palestinian state as part of a two-state solution, the demand for “complete divestment” from Israel had become the leading issue.
DIVEST FROM THE WAR MACHINE
Student protests have brought to public attention that universities, through investment of their endowment funds, and grants they receive from the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD), are fully integrated into what was once known as the “Military-Industrial Complex (MIC).” There are 135 universities with endowments of at least $1 billion, which invest in military contractors and the tech sector corporations incorporated in the MIC. The DOD, for its part, is providing $23.98 billion in contracts to universities for fiscal year 2024.
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