NYC Mayor Smeared A Grandmother As An “Outside Agitator” To Justify NYPD Assault On Columbia
Nahla Al-Arian lost more than 200 relatives in Israel's attacks on Gaza. Then Eric Adams said she was the reason police raided Columbia.
By Jeremy Scahill
May 4, 2024
Source: The Intercept
Nahla Al-Arian at a protest camp on Columbia University’s campus in NYC, on April 25, 2024. Photo: Laila Al-Arian
Nahla Aa-Arian has been living a nightmare for the past seven months, watching from afar as Israel carries out its scorched-earth war against her ancestral homeland in the Gaza Strip. Like many Palestinian Americans, the 63-year-old retired fourth-grade teacher from Tampa Bay, Florida, has endured seven months of a steady trickle of WhatsApp messages about the deaths of her relatives.
“You see, my father’s family is originally from Gaza, so they are a big family. And they are not only in Gaza City, but also in Deir al Balah and Khan Younis, other parts,” Al-Arian told me. Recently, the trickle of horrors became a flood: “It started with like 27, and then we lost count until I received this message from my relative who said at least 200 had died.”
The catastrophe was the backdrop for Al-Arian’s visit last week to Columbia University in New York City.
Al-Arian has five children, four of whom are journalists or filmmakers. On April 25, two of her daughters, Laila and Lama, both award-winning TV journalists, visited the encampment established by Columbia students to oppose the war in Gaza. Laila, an executive producer at Al Jazeera English with Emmys and a George Polk Award to her name, is a graduate of Columbia’s journalism school. Lama was the recipient of the prestigious 2021 Alfred I. duPont–Columbia Award for her reporting for Vice News on the 2020 explosion at the port of Beirut.
The two sisters traveled to Columbia as journalists to see the campus, and Nahla joined them.
“Of course, I tagged along. You know, why would I sit at the hotel by myself? And I wanted to really see those kids. I felt so down,” she said. “I was crying every day for Gaza, for the children being killed, for the women, the destruction of my father’s city, so I wanted to feel better, you know, to see those kids. I heard a lot about them, how smart they are, how organized, you know? So I said, let’s go along with you. So I went.”
Nahla Al-Arian was on the campus for less than an hour. She sat and listened to part of a teach-in, and shared some hummus with her daughters and some students. Then she left, feeling a glimmer of hope that people — at least these students — actually cared about the suffering and deaths being inflicted on her family in Gaza.
“I didn’t teach them anything. They are the ones who taught me. They are the ones who gave me hope,” she recalled. “I felt much better when I went there because I felt those kids are really very well informed, very well educated. They are the conscience of America. They care about the Palestinian people who they never saw or got to meet.”
Her husband posted a picture of Nahla, sitting on the lawn at the tent city erected by the student protesters, on his Twitter feed. “My wife Nahla in solidarity with the brave and very determined Columbia University students,” he wrote. Nahla left New York, inspired by her visit to Columbia, and returned to Virginia to spend time with her grandchildren.
A few days later, that one tweet by her husband would thrust Nahla Al-Arian into the center of a spurious narrative promoted by the mayor of New York City and major media outlets. She became the exemplar of the dangerous “outside agitator” who was training the students at Columbia. It was Nahla’s presence, according to Mayor Eric Adams, that was the “tipping point” in his decision to authorize the military-style raids on the campus.
USA vs. Al-Arian
On February 20, 2003, Nahla’s husband, Sami Al-Arian, a professor at the University of South Florida, was arrested and indicted on 53 counts of supporting the armed resistance group Palestinian Islamic Jihad. The PIJ had been designated by the U.S. government as a terrorist organization, and the charges against Al-Arian could have put him in prison for multiple life sentences, plus 225 years. It was a centerpiece case of the George W. Bush administration’s domestic “war on terror.” When John Ashcroft, Bush’s notorious attorney general, announced the indictment, he described the Florida-based scholar as “the North American leader of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Sami Al-Arian.”
Among the charges against him was conspiracy to kill or maim persons abroad, specifically in Israel, yet the prosecutors openly admitted Al-Arian had no connection to any violence. He was a well-known and deeply respected figure in the Tampa community, where he and Nahla raised their family. He was also, like many fellow Palestinians, a tenacious critic of U.S. support for Israel and of the burgeoning “global war on terror.” His arrest came just days before the U.S. invaded Iraq, a war Al-Arian was publicly opposed to.
The Al-Arian case was, at its core, a political attack waged by Bush’s Justice Department as part of a wider assault on the rights of Muslims in the U.S. The government launched a campaign, echoed in media outlets, to portray Al-Arian as a terror leader at a time when the Bush administration was ratcheting up its so-called global war on terror abroad, and when Muslims in the U.S. were being subjected to harassment, surveillance, and abuse. The legal case against Al-Arian was flimsy, and prosecutors largely sought to portray his protected First Amendment speech and charitable activities as terrorism.
The trial against Al-Arian, a legal permanent resident in the U.S., did not go well for federal prosecutors. In December 2005, following a six-month trial, a jury acquitted him on eight of the most serious counts and deadlocked 10-2 in favor of acquittal on the other nine. The judge made clear he was not pleased with this outcome, and the prosecutors were intent on relitigating the case. Al-Arian had spent two years in jail already without any conviction and was staring down the prospect of years more.
In the face of this reality and the toll the trial against him had taken on his family, Al-Arian agreed to take a plea deal. In 2006, he pleaded guilty to one count of providing nonviolent support to people the government alleged were affiliated with the PIJ. As part of the deal, Al-Arian would serve a short sentence and, with his residency revoked, get an expedited deportation. At no point during the government’s trial against Al-Arian did the prosecution provide evidence he was connected to any acts of violence.
For the next eight years following his release from prison in 2008, Al-Arian was kept under house arrest and effectively subjected to prosecutorial harassment as the government sought to place him in what his lawyers characterized as a judicial trap by compelling him to testify in a separate case. His defense lawyers alleged the federal prosecutor in the case, who had a penchant for pursuing high-profile, political cases, held an anti-Palestinian bias. Amnesty International raised concerns that Al-Arian had been abused in prison and he faced the prospect of yet another lengthy, costly court battle. The saga would stretch on for several more years before prosecutors ended the case and Al-Arian was deported from the United States.
“This case remains one of the most troubling chapters in this nation’s crackdown after 9-11,” Al-Arian’s lawyer, Jonathan Turley, wrote in 2014 when the case was officially dropped. “Despite the jury verdict and the agreement reached to allow Dr. Al-Arian to leave the country, the Justice Department continued to fight for his incarceration and for a trial in this case. It will remain one of the most disturbing cases of my career in terms of the actions taken by our government.”
That federal prosecutors approved Al-Arian’s plea deal gave a clear indication that the U.S. government knew Al-Arian was not an actual terrorist, terrorist facilitator, or any kind of threat; the Bush administration, after all, was not in the habit of letting suspected terrorists walk. Al-Arian and his family have always maintained his innocence and say that he was being targeted for his political beliefs and activism on behalf of Palestinians. He resisted the deal, Nahla Al-Arian said.
“He didn’t even want to accept it. He wanted to move on with another trial,” Nahla said. “But because of our pressure on him, let’s just get done with it [because] in the end, we’re going leave anyway. So that’s why.”
Sami and Nahla Al-Arian now live in Turkey. Sami is not allowed to visit his children and grandchildren stateside, but Nahla visits often.
NYPD Smear Campaign
The night of the raids on Columbia, police and other city officials began leaking to journalists that the wife of a convicted terrorist was on the campus, cavorting with the student protesters who had seized Hamilton Hall.
A reporter for CBS News tweeted the allegation, citing City Hall sources. During a broadcast on CNN late that night, the network showed Sami Al-Arian’s tweet with Nahla’s picture. “We’re learning tonight that the wife of an indicted terrorist was on the campus,” said host Laura Coates, adding that “a source” had tipped off CNN about Al-Arian’s tweet. (CNN and Coates, a former federal prosecutor, did not respond to requests for comment.)
Nahla was asleep in Virginia when the raids at Columbia unfolded and was unaware that she was becoming a figure in the emerging New York Police Department and media narratives. In the middle of the night, she checked her family’s WhatsApp group where her daughter had posted the since-deleted tweet from the CBS reporter and a clip from the CNN segment showing her photo.
“I woke up at 2 a.m. And, unfortunately, I took my phone and I looked. I was shocked. I couldn’t sleep for two or three hours,” she said. “I stayed awake feeling very depressed and feeling very shocked. I don’t care about myself. I care about those students that I admired. I didn’t want any harm to happen to them because of me or anyone else. And I felt betrayed by the authorities who resort to using these kinds of tricks, illegitimate, illegal tricks, shameful, shameful methods to attack those students. So I felt betrayed and angry. Is that the America that we believe in, the democracy?”
In a blitz of interviews the next two mornings, Adams, the New York mayor, repeatedly mentioned Al-Arian’s presence at Columbia and said it was a crucial part of his decision to authorize the military-style raid on the building. As evidence of “outside agitators” directing the protests, Adam cited Al-Arian as the one specific example to make his case.
“One of the individuals’ husband was arrested for and convicted for terrorism on a federal level,” Adams said on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.” “I knew that there was no way I was going to allow those children to be exploited the way they were being exploited, and many people thought that this was just a natural evolution of a protest. It was not. These were professionals that were here.”
Adams echoed the tone and tenor of his remarks on “CBS Mornings,” but on NPR’s “Morning Edition,” Adams went further, saying Nahla’s presence at Columbia was the impetus for the raid.
“What really was a tipping point for me was when I learned that one of the outside agitator’s, professional’s husband was arrested for federal terrorism charges,” he said. “I knew I could not sit back and state that I’m going to allow this to continue to escalate. That is why I made that determination” — to raid the campus. (The mayor’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)
“The mayor’s inflammatory comments about my mother’s brief visit to Columbia are being used to justify the heavy-handed and repressive police raid of the student protest,” said Laila Al-Arian, Nahla’s daughter. “It’s equally shameful that some journalists are simply regurgitating these sensationalist claims that are intended to smear students protesting Israel’s daily killing and maiming of Palestinians in Gaza.”
In a press conference on May 1, the NYPD acknowledged that Nahla Al-Arian was not on the campus during the raids, but continued to use her visit the previous week as a justification for the police assault on the protests. “Last week there was the wife of somebody who had been convicted for material support to terrorism on campus,” said Rebecca Weiner, the NYPD deputy commissioner of intelligence and counterterrorism. “We have no evidence of any criminal wrongdoing on her part, but that’s not somebody who I would want necessarily influencing my child if I were a parent of somebody at Columbia.”
The smear campaign against Nahla went far and wide online, particularly in the right-wing media and social media ecosystem. The Israeli actor Noa Tishby posted a video featuring the picture of Nahla’s visit to Columbia and falsely said she had been “convicted with connections to terrorism financing.” Nahla has never been convicted or charged with any crimes.
The New York Post ran an article with the headline: “Wife of convicted terrorist Sami Al-Arian was hanging out at Columbia encampment before dramatic raid.”
For Nahla and the Al-Arian family, none of this is shocking. They have endured more than 20 years of surveillance and trials that have displaced and scattered the family, continuing a long history of what happened to them and other Palestinians throughout the past 75 years. The Al-Arians themselves are descendants of Palestinians expelled from their homes during the 1948 Nakba.
Even as they express outrage at how Nahla was smeared, the Al-Arian family is quick to point out that their suffering pales in comparison to the Palestinians of Gaza, including the scores of their own family members who have died in an Israeli war fueled by the U.S. government.
“I just feel angry because I am being used to hurt those students, to find an excuse to invade their place and to arrest those students. And I feel so terrible,” Nahla said. “It’s also a distraction from the genocide that’s happening in Gaza. Just focusing on a stupid thing like this — they just distract people so people will not think about what’s happening in Gaza. The killing that’s still happening every day, every minute, that destruction. I can’t believe it. They focus on my story and they ignore the most depressing story, which is the killing of innocent people. This is shameful.”
Nahla Al-Arian lost more than 200 relatives in Israel's attacks on Gaza. Then Eric Adams said she was the reason police raided Columbia.
By Jeremy Scahill
May 4, 2024
Source: The Intercept
Nahla Al-Arian at a protest camp on Columbia University’s campus in NYC, on April 25, 2024. Photo: Laila Al-Arian
Nahla Aa-Arian has been living a nightmare for the past seven months, watching from afar as Israel carries out its scorched-earth war against her ancestral homeland in the Gaza Strip. Like many Palestinian Americans, the 63-year-old retired fourth-grade teacher from Tampa Bay, Florida, has endured seven months of a steady trickle of WhatsApp messages about the deaths of her relatives.
“You see, my father’s family is originally from Gaza, so they are a big family. And they are not only in Gaza City, but also in Deir al Balah and Khan Younis, other parts,” Al-Arian told me. Recently, the trickle of horrors became a flood: “It started with like 27, and then we lost count until I received this message from my relative who said at least 200 had died.”
The catastrophe was the backdrop for Al-Arian’s visit last week to Columbia University in New York City.
Al-Arian has five children, four of whom are journalists or filmmakers. On April 25, two of her daughters, Laila and Lama, both award-winning TV journalists, visited the encampment established by Columbia students to oppose the war in Gaza. Laila, an executive producer at Al Jazeera English with Emmys and a George Polk Award to her name, is a graduate of Columbia’s journalism school. Lama was the recipient of the prestigious 2021 Alfred I. duPont–Columbia Award for her reporting for Vice News on the 2020 explosion at the port of Beirut.
The two sisters traveled to Columbia as journalists to see the campus, and Nahla joined them.
“Of course, I tagged along. You know, why would I sit at the hotel by myself? And I wanted to really see those kids. I felt so down,” she said. “I was crying every day for Gaza, for the children being killed, for the women, the destruction of my father’s city, so I wanted to feel better, you know, to see those kids. I heard a lot about them, how smart they are, how organized, you know? So I said, let’s go along with you. So I went.”
Nahla Al-Arian was on the campus for less than an hour. She sat and listened to part of a teach-in, and shared some hummus with her daughters and some students. Then she left, feeling a glimmer of hope that people — at least these students — actually cared about the suffering and deaths being inflicted on her family in Gaza.
“I didn’t teach them anything. They are the ones who taught me. They are the ones who gave me hope,” she recalled. “I felt much better when I went there because I felt those kids are really very well informed, very well educated. They are the conscience of America. They care about the Palestinian people who they never saw or got to meet.”
Her husband posted a picture of Nahla, sitting on the lawn at the tent city erected by the student protesters, on his Twitter feed. “My wife Nahla in solidarity with the brave and very determined Columbia University students,” he wrote. Nahla left New York, inspired by her visit to Columbia, and returned to Virginia to spend time with her grandchildren.
A few days later, that one tweet by her husband would thrust Nahla Al-Arian into the center of a spurious narrative promoted by the mayor of New York City and major media outlets. She became the exemplar of the dangerous “outside agitator” who was training the students at Columbia. It was Nahla’s presence, according to Mayor Eric Adams, that was the “tipping point” in his decision to authorize the military-style raids on the campus.
USA vs. Al-Arian
On February 20, 2003, Nahla’s husband, Sami Al-Arian, a professor at the University of South Florida, was arrested and indicted on 53 counts of supporting the armed resistance group Palestinian Islamic Jihad. The PIJ had been designated by the U.S. government as a terrorist organization, and the charges against Al-Arian could have put him in prison for multiple life sentences, plus 225 years. It was a centerpiece case of the George W. Bush administration’s domestic “war on terror.” When John Ashcroft, Bush’s notorious attorney general, announced the indictment, he described the Florida-based scholar as “the North American leader of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Sami Al-Arian.”
Among the charges against him was conspiracy to kill or maim persons abroad, specifically in Israel, yet the prosecutors openly admitted Al-Arian had no connection to any violence. He was a well-known and deeply respected figure in the Tampa community, where he and Nahla raised their family. He was also, like many fellow Palestinians, a tenacious critic of U.S. support for Israel and of the burgeoning “global war on terror.” His arrest came just days before the U.S. invaded Iraq, a war Al-Arian was publicly opposed to.
The Al-Arian case was, at its core, a political attack waged by Bush’s Justice Department as part of a wider assault on the rights of Muslims in the U.S. The government launched a campaign, echoed in media outlets, to portray Al-Arian as a terror leader at a time when the Bush administration was ratcheting up its so-called global war on terror abroad, and when Muslims in the U.S. were being subjected to harassment, surveillance, and abuse. The legal case against Al-Arian was flimsy, and prosecutors largely sought to portray his protected First Amendment speech and charitable activities as terrorism.
The trial against Al-Arian, a legal permanent resident in the U.S., did not go well for federal prosecutors. In December 2005, following a six-month trial, a jury acquitted him on eight of the most serious counts and deadlocked 10-2 in favor of acquittal on the other nine. The judge made clear he was not pleased with this outcome, and the prosecutors were intent on relitigating the case. Al-Arian had spent two years in jail already without any conviction and was staring down the prospect of years more.
In the face of this reality and the toll the trial against him had taken on his family, Al-Arian agreed to take a plea deal. In 2006, he pleaded guilty to one count of providing nonviolent support to people the government alleged were affiliated with the PIJ. As part of the deal, Al-Arian would serve a short sentence and, with his residency revoked, get an expedited deportation. At no point during the government’s trial against Al-Arian did the prosecution provide evidence he was connected to any acts of violence.
For the next eight years following his release from prison in 2008, Al-Arian was kept under house arrest and effectively subjected to prosecutorial harassment as the government sought to place him in what his lawyers characterized as a judicial trap by compelling him to testify in a separate case. His defense lawyers alleged the federal prosecutor in the case, who had a penchant for pursuing high-profile, political cases, held an anti-Palestinian bias. Amnesty International raised concerns that Al-Arian had been abused in prison and he faced the prospect of yet another lengthy, costly court battle. The saga would stretch on for several more years before prosecutors ended the case and Al-Arian was deported from the United States.
“This case remains one of the most troubling chapters in this nation’s crackdown after 9-11,” Al-Arian’s lawyer, Jonathan Turley, wrote in 2014 when the case was officially dropped. “Despite the jury verdict and the agreement reached to allow Dr. Al-Arian to leave the country, the Justice Department continued to fight for his incarceration and for a trial in this case. It will remain one of the most disturbing cases of my career in terms of the actions taken by our government.”
That federal prosecutors approved Al-Arian’s plea deal gave a clear indication that the U.S. government knew Al-Arian was not an actual terrorist, terrorist facilitator, or any kind of threat; the Bush administration, after all, was not in the habit of letting suspected terrorists walk. Al-Arian and his family have always maintained his innocence and say that he was being targeted for his political beliefs and activism on behalf of Palestinians. He resisted the deal, Nahla Al-Arian said.
“He didn’t even want to accept it. He wanted to move on with another trial,” Nahla said. “But because of our pressure on him, let’s just get done with it [because] in the end, we’re going leave anyway. So that’s why.”
Sami and Nahla Al-Arian now live in Turkey. Sami is not allowed to visit his children and grandchildren stateside, but Nahla visits often.
NYPD Smear Campaign
The night of the raids on Columbia, police and other city officials began leaking to journalists that the wife of a convicted terrorist was on the campus, cavorting with the student protesters who had seized Hamilton Hall.
A reporter for CBS News tweeted the allegation, citing City Hall sources. During a broadcast on CNN late that night, the network showed Sami Al-Arian’s tweet with Nahla’s picture. “We’re learning tonight that the wife of an indicted terrorist was on the campus,” said host Laura Coates, adding that “a source” had tipped off CNN about Al-Arian’s tweet. (CNN and Coates, a former federal prosecutor, did not respond to requests for comment.)
Nahla was asleep in Virginia when the raids at Columbia unfolded and was unaware that she was becoming a figure in the emerging New York Police Department and media narratives. In the middle of the night, she checked her family’s WhatsApp group where her daughter had posted the since-deleted tweet from the CBS reporter and a clip from the CNN segment showing her photo.
“I woke up at 2 a.m. And, unfortunately, I took my phone and I looked. I was shocked. I couldn’t sleep for two or three hours,” she said. “I stayed awake feeling very depressed and feeling very shocked. I don’t care about myself. I care about those students that I admired. I didn’t want any harm to happen to them because of me or anyone else. And I felt betrayed by the authorities who resort to using these kinds of tricks, illegitimate, illegal tricks, shameful, shameful methods to attack those students. So I felt betrayed and angry. Is that the America that we believe in, the democracy?”
In a blitz of interviews the next two mornings, Adams, the New York mayor, repeatedly mentioned Al-Arian’s presence at Columbia and said it was a crucial part of his decision to authorize the military-style raid on the building. As evidence of “outside agitators” directing the protests, Adam cited Al-Arian as the one specific example to make his case.
“One of the individuals’ husband was arrested for and convicted for terrorism on a federal level,” Adams said on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.” “I knew that there was no way I was going to allow those children to be exploited the way they were being exploited, and many people thought that this was just a natural evolution of a protest. It was not. These were professionals that were here.”
Adams echoed the tone and tenor of his remarks on “CBS Mornings,” but on NPR’s “Morning Edition,” Adams went further, saying Nahla’s presence at Columbia was the impetus for the raid.
“What really was a tipping point for me was when I learned that one of the outside agitator’s, professional’s husband was arrested for federal terrorism charges,” he said. “I knew I could not sit back and state that I’m going to allow this to continue to escalate. That is why I made that determination” — to raid the campus. (The mayor’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)
“The mayor’s inflammatory comments about my mother’s brief visit to Columbia are being used to justify the heavy-handed and repressive police raid of the student protest,” said Laila Al-Arian, Nahla’s daughter. “It’s equally shameful that some journalists are simply regurgitating these sensationalist claims that are intended to smear students protesting Israel’s daily killing and maiming of Palestinians in Gaza.”
In a press conference on May 1, the NYPD acknowledged that Nahla Al-Arian was not on the campus during the raids, but continued to use her visit the previous week as a justification for the police assault on the protests. “Last week there was the wife of somebody who had been convicted for material support to terrorism on campus,” said Rebecca Weiner, the NYPD deputy commissioner of intelligence and counterterrorism. “We have no evidence of any criminal wrongdoing on her part, but that’s not somebody who I would want necessarily influencing my child if I were a parent of somebody at Columbia.”
The smear campaign against Nahla went far and wide online, particularly in the right-wing media and social media ecosystem. The Israeli actor Noa Tishby posted a video featuring the picture of Nahla’s visit to Columbia and falsely said she had been “convicted with connections to terrorism financing.” Nahla has never been convicted or charged with any crimes.
The New York Post ran an article with the headline: “Wife of convicted terrorist Sami Al-Arian was hanging out at Columbia encampment before dramatic raid.”
For Nahla and the Al-Arian family, none of this is shocking. They have endured more than 20 years of surveillance and trials that have displaced and scattered the family, continuing a long history of what happened to them and other Palestinians throughout the past 75 years. The Al-Arians themselves are descendants of Palestinians expelled from their homes during the 1948 Nakba.
Even as they express outrage at how Nahla was smeared, the Al-Arian family is quick to point out that their suffering pales in comparison to the Palestinians of Gaza, including the scores of their own family members who have died in an Israeli war fueled by the U.S. government.
“I just feel angry because I am being used to hurt those students, to find an excuse to invade their place and to arrest those students. And I feel so terrible,” Nahla said. “It’s also a distraction from the genocide that’s happening in Gaza. Just focusing on a stupid thing like this — they just distract people so people will not think about what’s happening in Gaza. The killing that’s still happening every day, every minute, that destruction. I can’t believe it. They focus on my story and they ignore the most depressing story, which is the killing of innocent people. This is shameful.”
With the “outside agitator” narrative, the media and politicians are puking up the worst of this country’s past.
By Dave Zirin
May 4, 2024
Source: Originally published by Z. Feel free to share widely.
Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair
More than 2,000 people have been arrested on US college campuses for peacefully protesting Israel’s war on the people of Palestine. For the “crime” of forming tent cities, or “encampments” on campus, students have been attacked by mobs, brutalized by police, and even faced gunfire at Columbia University after occupying a building. (I occupied several administration buildings in decades past and never had to face live ammo.)
President Joe Biden gave his tacit approval to release the hounds when he said, “Threatening people, intimidating people, instilling fear in people is not peaceful protest, it is against the law.”
If that’s the case, then police and violent counterprotesters should have been arrested in droves. Biden’s wink and nod is also politically derelict; it will repel the youth voters he desperately needs to defeat Donald Trump. Biden is sacrificing his election chances and perhaps any pretense of democracy for his support for Israel’s war crimes.
An incurious media in a state of bloodlust has egged on the violence. CNN’s Dana Bash’s comparison of campus protests to 1930s Germany is an insult to every victim of the Holocaust and their descendants—and I have met several descendants of Jewish Holocaust victims at the encampments. There is a Jewish presence at every one of the three dozen encampments that I have been able to research. In a sane media world, Bash would be looking for work, perhaps with a sign that reads, “Will lie for food.”
This is what the powerful do when they lose an argument. There is no moral or political justification for what Israel is doing to the people of Gaza, and students, professors, and community members are pointing that out. Being unable to argue with reason, political leaders have turned to deceit, state repression, and encouraging stochastic terrorism.
We have heard the greatest lie: that the encampments are “antisemitic”—an Orwellian falsehood told to justify state violence. But there is another dangerous narrative taking root: that those arrested are “outside agitators.” It has been striking to see the exhuming and resuscitation of that relic of an insult. One would have thought that calling citizens “outside agitators” had died of shame decades ago. It was used to slander Black Lives Matter protesters in Ferguson, Missouri, but in the mouths of politicians like NYC Mayor Eric Adams, the phrase is having a renaissance. The media and politicians are puking up the worst of this country’s past.
“Outside agitator” is a phrase with its origins in the late 1940s during the earliest days of the Black freedom struggle. It was first said by John Birchers and Jim Crow cops to denigrate and slander civil rights activists. Their argument was that Black people in the South were more than content with white supremacy until a bunch of Northern, radical, carpetbagging communists showed up to tell them that there was something wrong in the world.
Incredibly and ironically, one of the best refutations of the phrase came from Jackie Robinson in 1949, at a congressional House Un-American Activities Committee hearing. This was where Robinson—in the great regret of his life—criticized Paul Robeson for his communist sympathies. But that’s not all Robinson had to say. Little note was made of this in media reports that celebrated the Robeson takedown, but the trailblazing baseball player also said that
“…every single Negro who is worth his salt is going to resent slurs and discrimination because of his race, and he’s going to use every bit of intelligence he has to stop it. This has got absolutely nothing to do with what Communists may or may not do. Just because it is a Communist who denounces injustice in the courts, police brutality, and lynching when it happens doesn’t change the truth of the charges. Blacks were stirred up long before there was a CP and will be stirred up after unless Jim Crow has disappeared.”
One could rewrite this for today’s moment. College students are not stirred up because an adult shows up, bullhorn in hand, telling everyone to gather in the quad with tents to risk arrest, future career prospects, and state violence. They are stirred up by mass graves in Gaza; the killings of civilians, journalists, and children; and the use of starvation as a weapon of war. They are repelled that this genocide is being underwritten with our tax dollars. That’s what pushes people into action, not some imaginary outside agitator.
What the media elites and DC warmongers cannot compute is that they believed this generation was apathetic at best. Now seeing them rise up on college campuses across the country is causing them to malfunction. When Biden proclaims, “We are not an authoritarian nation where we silence people or squash dissent” while professors are being thrown to the ground and led away in handcuffs, it doesn’t take an “outside agitator” for students to see that something is rotten in our democracy.
The boomer elites have lost a generation, and instead of listening to the young, they search for excuses. What they cannot comprehend is that maybe they lost this generation—including many of my fellow Jews—because they have been selling a lie about Israel and the United States being forces for good, and the young are tired of pretending that it is anything other than an ugly hoax.
Source: Originally published by Z. Feel free to share widely.
Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair
More than 2,000 people have been arrested on US college campuses for peacefully protesting Israel’s war on the people of Palestine. For the “crime” of forming tent cities, or “encampments” on campus, students have been attacked by mobs, brutalized by police, and even faced gunfire at Columbia University after occupying a building. (I occupied several administration buildings in decades past and never had to face live ammo.)
President Joe Biden gave his tacit approval to release the hounds when he said, “Threatening people, intimidating people, instilling fear in people is not peaceful protest, it is against the law.”
If that’s the case, then police and violent counterprotesters should have been arrested in droves. Biden’s wink and nod is also politically derelict; it will repel the youth voters he desperately needs to defeat Donald Trump. Biden is sacrificing his election chances and perhaps any pretense of democracy for his support for Israel’s war crimes.
An incurious media in a state of bloodlust has egged on the violence. CNN’s Dana Bash’s comparison of campus protests to 1930s Germany is an insult to every victim of the Holocaust and their descendants—and I have met several descendants of Jewish Holocaust victims at the encampments. There is a Jewish presence at every one of the three dozen encampments that I have been able to research. In a sane media world, Bash would be looking for work, perhaps with a sign that reads, “Will lie for food.”
This is what the powerful do when they lose an argument. There is no moral or political justification for what Israel is doing to the people of Gaza, and students, professors, and community members are pointing that out. Being unable to argue with reason, political leaders have turned to deceit, state repression, and encouraging stochastic terrorism.
We have heard the greatest lie: that the encampments are “antisemitic”—an Orwellian falsehood told to justify state violence. But there is another dangerous narrative taking root: that those arrested are “outside agitators.” It has been striking to see the exhuming and resuscitation of that relic of an insult. One would have thought that calling citizens “outside agitators” had died of shame decades ago. It was used to slander Black Lives Matter protesters in Ferguson, Missouri, but in the mouths of politicians like NYC Mayor Eric Adams, the phrase is having a renaissance. The media and politicians are puking up the worst of this country’s past.
“Outside agitator” is a phrase with its origins in the late 1940s during the earliest days of the Black freedom struggle. It was first said by John Birchers and Jim Crow cops to denigrate and slander civil rights activists. Their argument was that Black people in the South were more than content with white supremacy until a bunch of Northern, radical, carpetbagging communists showed up to tell them that there was something wrong in the world.
Incredibly and ironically, one of the best refutations of the phrase came from Jackie Robinson in 1949, at a congressional House Un-American Activities Committee hearing. This was where Robinson—in the great regret of his life—criticized Paul Robeson for his communist sympathies. But that’s not all Robinson had to say. Little note was made of this in media reports that celebrated the Robeson takedown, but the trailblazing baseball player also said that
“…every single Negro who is worth his salt is going to resent slurs and discrimination because of his race, and he’s going to use every bit of intelligence he has to stop it. This has got absolutely nothing to do with what Communists may or may not do. Just because it is a Communist who denounces injustice in the courts, police brutality, and lynching when it happens doesn’t change the truth of the charges. Blacks were stirred up long before there was a CP and will be stirred up after unless Jim Crow has disappeared.”
One could rewrite this for today’s moment. College students are not stirred up because an adult shows up, bullhorn in hand, telling everyone to gather in the quad with tents to risk arrest, future career prospects, and state violence. They are stirred up by mass graves in Gaza; the killings of civilians, journalists, and children; and the use of starvation as a weapon of war. They are repelled that this genocide is being underwritten with our tax dollars. That’s what pushes people into action, not some imaginary outside agitator.
What the media elites and DC warmongers cannot compute is that they believed this generation was apathetic at best. Now seeing them rise up on college campuses across the country is causing them to malfunction. When Biden proclaims, “We are not an authoritarian nation where we silence people or squash dissent” while professors are being thrown to the ground and led away in handcuffs, it doesn’t take an “outside agitator” for students to see that something is rotten in our democracy.
The boomer elites have lost a generation, and instead of listening to the young, they search for excuses. What they cannot comprehend is that maybe they lost this generation—including many of my fellow Jews—because they have been selling a lie about Israel and the United States being forces for good, and the young are tired of pretending that it is anything other than an ugly hoax.
Dave Zirin
Dave Zirin, Press Action's 2005 and 2006 Sportswriter of the Year, has been called "an icon in the world of progressive sports." Robert Lipsyte says he is "the best young sportswriter in the United States." He is both a columnist for SLAM Magazine, a regular contributor to the Nation Magazine, and a semi-regular op-ed writer for the Los Angeles Times.
Zirin's latest book is Welcome to the Terrordome:The Pain, Politics, and Promise of Sports(Haymarket Books). With a foreward by rapper Chuck D, the book is an engaging and provocative look at the world of sports like no other.
Zirin's other books include The Muhammad Ali Handbook, a dynamic, engaging and informative look at one of the most iconic figures of our age and What’s My Name, Fool? Sports & Resistance in the United States (Haymarket Books), a book that is part athletic interview compendium, part history and civil rights primer, and part big-business exposé which surveys the “level” playing fields of sports and brings inequities to the surface to show how these uneven features reflect disturbing trends that define our greater society. He has also authored a children's book called My Name is Erica Montoya de la Cruz (RC Owen).
Zirin is a weekly television commentator [via satellite] for The Score, Canada's number one 24-hour sports network. He has brought his blend of sports and politics to multiple television programs including ESPN's Outside the Lines, ESPN Classic, the BBC's Extratime, CNBC's The Big Idea with Donny Deutsch (debating steroids with Jose Canseco and John Rocker), C-SPAN's BookTV, the WNBC Morning News in New York City; and Democracy Now with Amy Goodman.
He has also been on numerous national radio programs including National Public Radio's Talk of the Nation; Air America and XM Radio's On the Real' with Chuck D and Gia'na Garel; The Laura Flanders Show, Radio Nation with Marc Cooper; ESPN radio; Stars and Stripes Radio; WOL's The Joe Madison Show; Pacifica's Hard Knock Radio, and many others. He is the Thursday morning sports voice on WBAI's award winning "Wake Up Call with Deepa Fernandes."
Zirin is also working on A People's History of Sports, part of Howard Zinn's People's History series for the New Press. In addition he just signed to do a book with Scribner (Simon & Schuster.) He is also working on a sports documentary with Barbara Kopple's Cabin Creek films on sports and social movements in the United States.
Zirin's writing has also appeared in New York Newsday, the Baltimore Sun, CBSNEWS.com, The Pittsburgh Courier, The Source, and numerous other publications.
