Cops on Campus are the Real Outside Agitators

BY JONAH RASKIN

 MAY 9, 2024

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Portland Police on the campus of Portland State University. Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair.

Nothing agitates a campus as dramatically as the arrival of the cops. Indeed, the cops have been the only real outside agitators on campuses across the country this Spring. They have brought upheaval and disorder by breaking up peaceful protests by disciplined students with a cause and ideals. And, of course, the administrators are responsible for calling in the cops. It’s the administrators who up the ante and invite confrontations and clashes. Blaming outsiders for rebellions and revolutions is one of the oldest and nastiest ruses in the world. And one of the newest, too. But it’s not working.

New Yorkers and others aren’t buying the Columbia administration’s story that outside agitators are to blame for the protests that have taken place on the campus. As though Columbia students are too blind or too stupid to see the terrors inflicted on the people of Gaza by the Israeli military with weapons supplied by the USA. At UCLA some masked men with clubs attacked pro-Palestinian demonstrators. The cops aren’t the only culprits now much as they weren’t in ‘68.

Columbia President Shafik must take us for idiots who haven’t learned the lessons of the past and can see what’s happening in front of our own eyes. I mean the abuses of state power in Gaza and to a lesser degree on college campuses from New York to California. I know loads about the cry that outside agitators are to blame for protest movements and rebellions. I’ve heard it before. I have been called one.

I graduated from Columbia College with a B.A. in 1963 and from Columbia University with an M.A. in 1964. By 1967 I was an assistant professor at the State University at Stony Brook. Along with more than 700 or so other protesters, including Abbie Hoffman and Tom Hayden – who coined the slogan “Create two, three, many Columbias” – I was arrested on the Columbia campus in ‘68 and went to jail briefly. I suppose in some respects I could have rightly been called an “outside agitator.” I had graduated from Columbia College five years before students occupied and liberated buildings where classes had been held, though I mostly relinquished the agitating on campus to the Black students who kicked off the 1968 rebellion soon after MLK was shot and killed. Now, that was an incitement to riot.

In ‘68 I didn’t think of myself as an outside agitator. I still reject that label. In the world today insurgents are both insiders and outsiders, localists and internationalists who reject political boundaries and borders. Imperialism respects no national boundaries and neither do anti-imperialists. The line that supposedly divides insiders from outsiders and domestic from imported agitators is far more blurry than it might seem to the casual eye. In ‘68 I felt that I had as much right to sit in as any of the undergraduates. I paid my dues. I had been miseducated and misinformed when I was a student.

I was arrested twice in ’68. The second time I went on trial in a courtroom after I declined to apologize to the Columbia administration when I was asked to do so by a representative of the university. “You are a Columbia graduate and a scholar and gentleman and as such ought to say you’re sorry for your actions,” I was told by Professor Quentin Anderson. In the eyes of the university I would not be an outside agitator if I kissed its academic ass. That I would not do.

I still feel like a member of the extended family of Columbia insurgents. I identify with  the students who protested the invasion and occupation of Gaza this spring and who have been arrested.

As an undergraduate at Columbia in the early 1960s, when I marched against segregation and nuclear testing, my mentors and role models were off-campus radical intellectuals such as Carl Marzini and Paul Sweezy, civil rights activists like MLK and Rosa Parks and further afield Che Guevara, the continental revolutionary who was born in Argentina, joined Fidel Castro in Mexico, fought on the side of the guerrillas in Cuba and later against imperialism in the Congo and Bolivia.

When we referred to the Cuban revolutionaries by their first names as though we were brothers-in-arms, our Cold War profs  – who saw Moscow gold behind all insurrections – were shocked. Like Che, only far more modest than he, American agitators belong to the world and to the legacy of homegrown anti-slavery men and women like Harriet Tubman and John Brown. Slavers didn’t respect boundaries and neither did abolitionists. Nightstick-wielding cops on campuses are “pigs.” I haven’t used that word, which I learned from the Black Panthers, for decades. But it’s as timely now as it was in ’68.

Jonah Raskin is the author of Beat Blues, San Francisco, 1955.

Washington Post’s David Ignatius Remains Clueless About the Middle East

BY MELVIN GOODMAN

 MAY 10, 2024
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Photograph Source: Aude – CC BY-SA 3.0

Wars in the Middle East often end with a fuzzy ambiguity that allows both sides to claim victory.  “Neither victor nor vanquished” is the phrased often used to describe these wars.

– David Ignatius, oped, Washington Post, May 7, 2024.

It’s difficult to imagine an Israeli war in the Middle East that allowed any Arab country to claim victory.  The history of the Middle East over the past 75 years has been a history of war, and the Israelis have been the overwhelming victor in each and every one of them.  Israel’s War of Independence in 1948 marked an overwhelming victory for the Israelis; it created the profound antagonisms that have marked Israeli relations with the Arab states over the past 75 years.  The United States and Israel over the years have indulged in a dialogue about a “peace process,” but Arab refugees have known neither “peace” nor “process.”

The Six-Day War in 1967 was an incredibly brief and violent conflict between Israel and its three neighbors that permanently altered the landscape of the Middle East.  The Soviet Union was partially responsible for the war, falsely telling the Syrians and the Egyptians that Israelis were concentrating troops on their border.  This was dangerous disinformation, and the Soviets never played this game again, but the damage had been done.  The Egyptians believed the report, and mobilized forces in the Sinai Peninsula.  Israel used the mobilization as a pretext to attack, and overwhelmingly defeated the armies of Egypt, Syria, and Jordan in short order.

The October 1973 War marked a major policy and intelligence failure for Israel—Israel’s Pearl Harbor—but the results were similarly one-sided and required U.S. and Soviet diplomatic cooperation and intervention to save the Egyptian forces from virtual annihilation.  Secretary of State Henry Kissinger warned Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Dayan that, if the Israelis continued to break the cease-fire that he had negotiated with Soviet Premier Alexei Kosygin, then the United States would find a way to get food and water to the beleaguered Egyptian III Corps, the most important Corps in the Egyptian Army.  Another one-sided Israeli victory.

The Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982 proved to be a political nightmare for Israel, but there is no question that Lebanon suffered an overwhelming military defeat.  Yasser Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization and Syrian military forces had to flee the country.  It was a dubious Israeli victory because Israeli Defense Forces remained in Lebanon for two decades.  And now Hezbollah, far more threatening than Arafat’s PLO ever was, is the major political force in Lebanon.

The official Israeli name for the operation was “Peace for Galilee,” but several Mossad intelligence analysts told me they called the campaign “Vietnamowitz” because Lebanon proved to be Israel’s “briar patch.”  The Israelis secretly informed U.S. Secretary of State Alexander Haig about the invasion, and he unwisely gave them a “green light,” which cost him his position at the Department of State.

Similar to the Gaza campaign, Defense Minister Ariel Sharon conducted a siege of Beirut that denied the capital city’s residents food, water, and medical supplies.  Like today’s Gazans, the residents of Beirut were trapped.  The air and artillery bombardment of Beirut was ferocious, but unlike Gaza, the Israeli cabinet instructed Sharon that he could no longer use airpower in Beirut without its consent.  Sharon was also responsible for allowing the Lebanese Phalangists to enter two Palestinian refugee camps—Sabra and Shatila—where they brutally massacred unarmed civilians.  UN and even Israeli investigative commissions condemned the actions of the Israeli military; no one should anticipate that the Israelis will do the same in the case of Gaza.

The second Lebanese War in 2006 was similarly one-sided as the Israelis targeted not only Hezbollah, but Lebanese infrastructure and such critical facilities as power plants.  The Israelis should have learned that they couldn’t destroy Hezbollah’s political influence in Lebanon with military force.  Netanyahu’s emphasis on the total destruction of Hamas points to the fact that no lessons were learned from the second war in Lebanon.  President George W. Bush, who learned nothing from his war against Iraq in 2003, was responsible for encouraging Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert to continue the war.  The first Lebanese War destroyed the career of Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin; the second war destroyed Olmert.  Gaza ultimately will cost Netanyahu his stewardship of Israel.

Ironically, the year 2006 was also marked by elections in Gaza that led to the political takeover by Hamas.  Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice convinced Bush that elections should be held in Gaza because they would produce a major victory for Palestinian moderates.  Impartial observers considered the election “free and fair” as Hamas won a majority of the seats in the Palestinian legislature.  American policymakers should be careful about what they wish for.

In the current war with Gaza, Ignatius believes that Prime Minister Netanyahu’s “repeated insistence that he must invade Rafah is partly theatrics, to frighten Hamas into accepting a hostage release deal.”  in view of Israel’s genocidal campaign that has been marked by the total destruction of Gaza’s hospitals, schools, and libraries, it appears to be particularly obtuse to believe that Netanyahu is merely pursuing theatrics; clearly he is trying to ensure that Gaza is not habitable.

Ignatius also claims that “humanitarian assistance in Gaza has increased sharply since Israel withdrew most of its troops last month,” which will come as a shock to the Palestinians suffering from the Israeli-imposed famine in north and south Gaza.  In fact, the latest Israeli incursion in Gaza has disrupted the major entry point for humanitarian assistance in the south.  Palestinian children are already dying from malnutrition; several have arrived in the United States for medical treatment.

Unfortunately, the brokering of peace between Israel and the Arab states has never been a high priority for either side, and only the Carter administration made a real effort, largely successful, to stabilize the region.  No American soldiers were killed in the Middle East during the Carter administration.  In more recent years, American soldiers have been killed only in the Greater Middle East.

Melvin A. Goodman is a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy and a professor of government at Johns Hopkins University.  A former CIA analyst, Goodman is the author of Failure of Intelligence: The Decline and Fall of the CIA and National Insecurity: The Cost of American Militarism. and A Whistleblower at the CIA. His most recent books are “American Carnage: The Wars of Donald Trump” (Opus Publishing, 2019) and “Containing the National Security State” (Opus Publishing, 2021). Goodman is the national security columnist for counterpunch.org.

Civilizational Unity, Not Clash: How Gaza Challenged Samuel Huntington’s Fantasies

BY RAMZY BAROUD

 MAY 10, 2024
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Image by Ömer Yıldız.

Identity is fluid, because concepts such as culture, history and collective self-perceptions are never fixed. They are in a constant state of flux and revision.

For hundreds of years, the map of the Roman Empire seemed more Mediterranean and, ultimately, Middle Eastern than European – per the geographic, or even geopolitical demarcation of today’s Europe.

Hundreds of years of conflicts, wars and invasions redefined the Roman identity, splitting it, by the end of the fourth century, between West and East. But, even then, the political lines constantly changed, maps were repeatedly redrawn and identities fittingly redefined.

This applies to most of human history. True, war and conflict have served as drivers of change of maps – and of our collective relationship with these maps – but culture is also shaped and remodeled by other factors.

The permeation of the English language, for example, as a main tool of communication in the post-Cold War era, resulted in an invasion by US, and to a lesser extent, British entertainment – films, music, sports, etc. – of many parts of the world. This incursion has disrupted the natural cultural development of many societies, widening the generational gap and redefining social conceptions, values and priorities.

Such a sudden change in cultural flow is hardly conducive to the health of a nation, whose sense of self is the outcome of hundreds, if not thousands of years of social conflicts, struggles and, often, growth.

Thus, identity, as a permanent political signifier, cannot be trusted, since this vague concept is in a constant state of motion and because of the unprecedented connectivity among peoples all over the world. While such connectivity can lead to slow ethnocide, which is difficult to detect, let alone avoid, it can also help beleaguered, oppressed nations fight back.

Once upon a time, such self-serving theories as that of an impending ‘clash of civilizations’, was all the rage among many US-western academics.

Samuel Huntington’s division of the world into “major civilizations” whose relationships will be defined by conflict was a convenient addition to a history of such racist tropes, going as far as the early phases of western colonialism.

Such thinking was propelled forward by political expediency, not rational thought, as it was marketed heavily following the collapse of the Soviet order, the first Iraq war and the emboldened western militarism across Asia, the Middle East and the rest of the Global South.

Linking violent endeavors with such lofty words as civilizations – some driven by universal values, while others, supposedly by extremism – was a mere reintroduction of old mantras as Europe’s ‘mission civilisatrice’ and the American ‘manifest destiny’.

All of it failed, anyway, or, more accurately, could not produce the desired outcome of keeping the world hostage to the west’s definition of civilization, identities and human relations, thus the supposedly inevitable ‘clash’.

Currently, there are signs of a new world that is emerging. It is not one that is shaped by civilizational quests or impulses, but by the same old historical paradigm: those who are seeking power that can widen and protect their economic interests, and those fighting back, seeking freedom, justice, equality, rule of law and the like.

Those pursuing power can, and are uniting beyond their supposed civilization inclinations, religious values, racial orientations and geography.

Even prior to the Russia-Ukraine war, a new cold war was already emerging, between a declining empire, the US, and a rising one, China.

Both countries, according to Huntington, would serve as textbook examples of ‘western civilization’ vs. the ‘Sinic civilization’ – lumped with others under the ‘Eastern world’.

Yet, neither the refined approach of Barack Obama nor the populist style of Donald Trump succeeded in deepening this presumed civilizational clash. The rest of the world’s relations with China continue to be governed by economic interests.

Even Washington’s European allies, who rely heavily on Chinese trade and technological advancements, are not entirely persuaded in joining the trade war on Beijing in the name of common western values and other such rhetoric.

As for those fighting back, the war on Gaza was an unexpected rallying cry for unity. Indeed, the war has resulted in a whole new formation of international relations that hardly existed prior to October 7.

Those speaking out for the Palestinians are neither governed by religious, racial, geographic or even cultural boundaries. From Namibia to South Africa, from Brazil and Colombia to Nicaragua, and from China, to Russia to the Middle East, solidarity with Gaza is hardly defined from a narrow ‘civilizational’ perspective.

This includes the mass protests across the world, including throughout Europe and North America, where people from every color, race, age group, gender, religion and more are united in a single chant: ceasefire now.

Of course, there will always be those invested in dividing us, around whatever lines that may serve their political agendas, which are almost always linked to economic interests and military might.

Yet, the global resistance to such delusional academics and chauvinistic politicians is stronger than ever before. Gaza has proven to be the ultimate unifier, as it has drawn a line that bonds all of Huntington’s civilizational groups, not around imminent conflict, but global justice.

Ramzy Baroud is a journalist and the Editor of The Palestine Chronicle. He is the author of five books. His latest is “These Chains Will Be Broken: Palestinian Stories of Struggle and Defiance in Israeli Prisons” (Clarity Press, Atlanta). Dr. Baroud is a Non-resident Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Islam and Global Affairs (CIGA), Istanbul Zaim University (IZU). His website is www.ramzybaroud.net