But then what is the question?
The student uprisings and encampment at colleges and universities across the country over the Israeli destruction of Gaza and the deaths of more than 34,000 Palestinians over the past six months, resonates with the student activism exhibited during the Vietnam War era. It’s surprising that some university leaders and politicians are willing to make the mistake of tamping down on student expression of solidarity with the besieged Palestinian people with calls for the police and national guard to bring “order.” Yes, there has been some vandalism, but nothing like the bombing in Palestine that has destroyed hospitals, universities, libraries, not to mention the untold tens of thousands of civilian lives lost. The protestors aren’t demanding that Israel not defend itself, but to cease fire now, negotiate the return of the hostages and allow relief supplies to be delivered.
The images of the national guard shooting students at Kent State, in Ohio (May 4, 1970), immediately comes to mind as one of those media images one can never forget.
I was at the 1967 police riot at the Century Plaza Hotel. President Lyndon Johnson came to speak in Los Angeles and 10,000 peace demonstrators held a peaceful demonstration before the LAPD attacked them. It wasn’t the protestors that started the melee that ensued, but the police who instigated it.
President Joe Biden, like Johnson and the Vietnam War, didn’t start the war in Gaza. He inherited it and failed to stop it from expanding, with no help from Israel’s right wing prime minister, Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu, leader of the far-right Likud party, and his coalition of Zionist political allies. He falsely claims, “What’s happening in America’s college campuses is horrific. Antisemitic mobs have taken over leading universities. They call for the annihilation of Israel. They attack Jewish students. They attack Jewish faculty.”
This is what some in the media repeat or would like the American public to believe, but not unlike the Black Lives Matter protests of a few years ago, most of these protests are non-violent until authorities or agents provocateurs provoke them.
You will note, that I am in no way defending the political and military organization governing Palestinians, Hamas, for attacking Israel and drawing first blood in this round of conflict. As in most wars, there is no righteous side. After all, 75 years after the founding of the modern state of Israel, a lasting peace treaty with a two-state solution has never been accomplished. Just how long can a people be oppressed before they are allowed to be free? That’s a sentiment every person of the Jewish faith should be able to have empathy for. Instead, with the aid of intellectual disingenuous logic US student uprisings are being labeled “anti-Semitic” in the same way the anti-Vietnam War demonstrators were labeled Commie sympathizers and communists in the 1960s.
What these student uprisings are exposing is not only the hypocrisy of the Zionist faction in Israel, but also the false premise of academic and student free speech on campuses across America. Remember when Richard Bertrand Spencer the American neo-Nazi, anti-Semitic conspiracy theorist, and white supremacist was invited to college campuses. Spencer claimed to have coined the term “alt-right” and was the most prominent advocate of the alt-right movement from its earliest days and was defended on free speech grounds.
The far-right had a field day throwing “free speech” in the face of liberal academics and student progressives. It caused, even me — a proponent of the First Amendment — to step back and question, “What exactly is free speech.” The answer that I came to was that hate speech is like walking into a bar in South Central LA and calling the Black bartender “boy” and thinking you will get out of there without getting thumped. Free speech is not absolute. You can’t yell fire in a crowded theater. But in this case of the student uprisings, it needs to be protected. After all, it is political speech. It should be up to the authorities on just how to keep the peace between the pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian protestors from becoming a Proud Boys confrontation in Huntington Beach. This is where true police reform may yet work here in Los Angeles — they need to be the politically neutral entity and not like the NYPD did when arresting 230 protestors at Columbia University.
What has failed in this context is the reporting by the corporate media which has mostly taken the side of those supporting Israel and the U.S. arms deal that will only increase Palestinian civilian deaths, misery and war in Gaza. For those who only listen to the right-wing media, or are barely cognizant of this war I would direct you to the regular broadcasts of DemocracyNow.com. Five days a week it covers this and other stories from the inside out — from the Palestinians’ point of view, from the vantage point of Jewish scholars who oppose the war or students on-site at Columbia University. If your news diet doesn’t include some alternative voices (there’s a list of them on our website) and you only read what comes up on your news feed, you really don’t know what’s truly going on.
For the student journalists and protestors, this is your generation’s moment to be politicized — and be made aware that the world is not as it has been presented … watch the unmasking of war’s hypocrisy and the powers profiting from it. To quote my Grandpa Charlie, “If they took the profit out of war, there would be none.” Profit, greed, and hate have always created human suffering and conflict. So, if war is not the answer — what then is the question?
The students engaged in these protests are searching for the answer to that question as did the generation before and the generation before that. It is a debate worthy of every college campus in the world until we as one human race of people figure out the question.