MIT’s Orwellian Language Masks Its Stance On Gaza Protests

By Michel DeGraff

May 25, 2024

Source: Le Monde Diplomatique


MIT lecture hall (Photo: Ryan Tyler-Smith)

I write this essay while thinking of my dear friend and colleague Noam Chomsky who deeply understands the importance of truth, courage, language and linguistics for decolonisation, liberation, peace and community-building in Israel and Palestine to Haiti.

In George Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, the fictional language Newspeak is designed to control human minds and hide reality — for example, claiming that ‘war is peace’ and ‘ignorance is strength’ or, in the case of my native Haiti, calling a violent invasion a ‘peacekeeping mission’— so that the ruling classes of the world, aka ‘Big Brother’, can strengthen the power of their totalitarian regimes. In recent months, this dystopian use of language as a political weapon for a variety of nefast objectives (gaslighting, dehumanisation and manufacturing consent) has intensified in the context of the war on Gaza and associated protests and counter-protests, police crackdowns on student encampments against genocide. Most surprisingly, doublespeak has permeated even curriculum-related disputes with my own departmental colleagues at MIT about what’s ‘fit’ to teach as linguistics and what my expertise (or alleged lack thereof) should allow me to teach as such. Is ignorance really strength, even at MIT, even among linguists? If linguistics were taken as an indispensable tool for unveiling Newspeak’s semantic distortions and for advocating for liberation and community-building, it might help usher a better world.

Under the banner of Scientists Against Genocide Encampment (SAGE), MIT students are courageously standing for justice and peace for Palestinians. With their chants of ‘intifada’ (meaning ‘shaking off, uprising, resistance’ in Arabic) and of freedom for Palestinians ‘from the river to the sea’ (a phrase also used in Likud’s original charter, before Hamas, for Zionist expansion), they demand that MIT cut ties with Israel’s ministry of defence in the context of collaboration that represents only 0.03% of MIT’s 2023 allocated sponsorship. In their protests, the SAGE students have highlighted two projects that directly contribute to Israel’s war against Palestinians: one for autonomous robotic swarms of killer drones, the other for biosensors for remote detection.

Some in the MIT community, like post-doctoral student Lior Alon, claim that the SAGE’s students’ pleas to halt the genocide of Palestinians are ‘pro-Hamas’ and advocate the killing of Jews. That’s false. And Alon contradicted himself by mocking his own ‘fear’ after scaling the gates of the encampment and standing on top of a chair among SAGE students minding their business and ignoring him. He sarcastically shouted: ‘Retsef, I feel unsafe. Can you come and help me? Retsef, I am all alone here, and I need help from some other Jewish person.’ Alon, like many other Zionist counter-protesters, participate in well-rehearsed propaganda that erases the anti-Zionist Jewish students and misrepresents them, along with their non-Jewish comrades, as violent and antisemitic. Here it must be stressed that the anti-genocide and pro-Palestinian protesters are not anti-Israel, though they are anti-Zionist to the extent that they want the peaceful co-existence of an Israel-Palestine where both Jews and Palestinians can safely live with fully uninhibited sovereignty, human rights, land rights, justice and dignity as equals.

Yet MIT president Sally Kornbluth, too, is guilty of participating in this narrative as she helps spread the racist trope that Palestinian students and their allies pose a potential threat to the MIT community. In a recent video, she criticises ‘chants [that] are heard by members of our community as calling for the elimination of the state of Israel’. SAGE students are now paying a heavy toll for her duplicity, when so-called ‘interim suspensions’ and other unprecedented penalties levied by MIT’s administration carry permanent consequences for students’ lives and careers, including delay in graduation and loss of employment, loss of post-graduate opportunities etc. Worse yet, these suspensions were decided without any due process. To date, four of them have had to be rescinded due to missing or false evidence in these students’ cases. Yet the administration still defends these measures, even comparing them to the preemptive measures that are needed to protect potential victims of sexual predators. The layers of doublespeak and racism are thick.

MIT professor Retsef Levi, a member of MIT Israel Alliance (MITIA), has added fuel to the fire of these Orwellian allegations about SAGE students’ violence when he mistranslated the Arabic slogans ‘Death to the Zionist project’ as ‘Death to the Zionists’, and ‘Israel is thief’ as ‘Israel destroyed’. These mistranslations are tendentious, as confirmed by colleagues who speak and study Arabic. It’s as if Martin Luther King had called, not for an end to racism, but for death to racists. Such slander endangers SAGE students, especially when mistranslated videos go viral in Zionist anti-Palestinian circles. These distortions come from the same professor who, on 8 May at SAGE, decided unilaterally that his senior MIT faculty colleague (myself) cannot be considered ‘faculty’. During MITIA’s Yom Ha’atzmaut party on 7 May, an event sanctioned by MIT, Zionist Jews were dancing near SAGE to the beat of חרבו דרבו, ‘Harbu Darbu’, a song calling Palestinians ‘whores’, ‘fucking mice coming out of tunnels’ and ‘children of Amalek’, which encourages the Israel army to make a ‘complete mess on [their] head[s]’. Yet it’s the SAGE students who are accused of posing an existential antisemitic threat to the community and to Israel, and who are met with suspensions and evictions.

The antisemitism charge is false. In the Boston Globe, the MIT Israel Alliance characterised SAGE as ‘anti-Jewish’, ‘anti-Israel’, and fear-inducing for Jewish students. There, too, there’s no mention that SAGE includes, among many Jewish students, members of MIT Jews for Ceasefire (MITJ4C) who organised a Passover Seder at the encampment to which MITIA was invited. MITJ4C students, too, have been forceful in their critiques of Israel’s government.

Truth, though, must not get in the way of Orwellian language. Observing a counter-protest on 3 May 2024 at MIT, co-sponsored by Israel’s consulate in Boston, one would think Palestinians didn’t even exist. The ‘Never Again Is Now’ rally focused solely on the evils of the Holocaust, the atrocities on 7 October and antisemitism — not one word about the ongoing genocide in Gaza and the preceding violence against Palestinians since the Nakba.

In her work, Israeli professor Nurit Peled-Elhanan, formerly at Hebrew University, has described a ‘semiotics of othering’ used in Israeli schools to foster indifference toward the suffering of Palestinians and toward the genocidal discourse of Israeli leaders and their allies. In this context, Palestinians are equated with Nazis; now the SAGE and other anti-genocide students are subjected to the same slander — and to ‘Hamasification’. In a related Orwellian twist, an MIT Israel Alliance student called Israel a ‘successful anti-colonial movement’, ignoring the fact that Theodore Herzl, at the end of the 19th century, founded Zionism as an explicitly colonial project. ‘Ignorance is strength’, indeed.

Kornbluth described the Israeli counter-protest as being ‘in support of our Israeli and Jewish students’ (note the pronoun!), again erasing anti-Zionist Jewish students who support justice for Palestinians on a par with Jews. This instance of Newspeak also fails to acknowledge the unusually direct interference of a foreign government in MIT’s affairs, with the Israeli consulate in Boston co-sponsoring a Zionist counter-protest on MIT’s main front steps. This is from the same government whose prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, compared encampment students with Nazi students in German universities in the 1930s. Meanwhile, the pro-Palestinian liberation chants that Jews for Ceasefire students sing keep challenging the false binary of pro-Palestine versus pro-Israel in MIT administration’s discourse about students’ protests — a binary that leads to unfair equations that conflate pro-Palestine with anti-Israel, pro-Hamas and even neo-Nazis. This is yet another manifestation of anti-Palestinian racism that’s veiled by doublespeak.

But there’s more Orwellian Newspeak from Kornbluth. She calls MIT’s collaboration with Israel ‘vibrant’ even though it violates MIT’s own ‘red lights’ principle for halting projects that violate human rights. These ‘red lights’ are based on the same ‘core values’ that led MIT to put a stop to individual MIT faculty accepting gifts from convicted sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein; those faculty who engaged with Epstein were asked by MIT administration to publicly apologise or resign. MIT also stopped collaboration with Russia immediately after the start of the war on Ukraine. Where are the ‘red lights’ to stop MIT complicity in the slaughter of tens of thousands of Palestinians by Israel’s military? In yet another Orwellian twist, Kornbluth appeals to ‘academic freedom’ in order to trump human rights and license MIT’s complicity with genocide.

The personal is political, and nowhere is this more evident than in our academic institutions. On 1 April 2024, I was startled to learn, in a police report, that the MIT Israel Alliance (MITIA), an organisation claiming to be the victim of fear caused by allegedly antisemitic student activists, had, in fact, called for the physical surveillance of those protesting against the war on Gaza. In a disturbing twist of Newspeak, a student who was caught photographing me told MIT Police that the individuals targeted by MITIA were ‘disruptive’ and ‘confrontational’. Yet, the only instances when I felt unsafe at anti-genocide rallies at MIT were when Zionist counter-protesters physically or verbally assaulted the protesters. And on that April day, it was this student’s very actions, surreptitiously photographing me and then fleeing, that disrupted my peace of mind and prompted me to report the incident to MIT Police.

This incident is part of a larger pattern of surveillance and repression. The differential treatment by the MIT administration, hesitating to address such affronts while swiftly suspending and evicting pro-Palestinian student groups, is deeply concerning — especially when the reason given is the need to protect community members who feel ‘unsafe’.

As a Haitian-born linguist, I’ve dedicated my career to using language and linguistics as a tool for decolonisation and liberation. My Fall 2024 seminar, like many of my previous courses such as ‘Black Matters’, ‘Creole languages and Caribbean identities’ and ‘Linguistics & Social Justice: Language, Education & Human Rights’, is an embodiment of MIT’s now familiar, if somewhat hypocritical, slogans — for a #BetterWorld with #MindHandHeart. This seminar, for which I’ve already received MIT MindHandHeart funding for inviting experts in fields adjacent to mine, will explore linguistic dimensions of truth-seeking and nation-building from Haiti to Palestine — from Creole exceptionalism to the Palestine exception. However, my proposal for this seminar has met with resistance from my colleagues at MIT Linguistics — based on ‘concerns’ about whether it would ‘fit our curriculum’ and whether I have the necessary expertise to plan this seminar — though I’ve already invited authors of books who can help us navigate new contents in their respective fields of expertise when needed. My colleagues have even appealed to a clause in MIT’s ‘Report on Free Expression’ that limits ‘academic freedom’ in case a faculty member wanted to teach outside their expertise — for example, ‘Beginning Chinese’ in an advanced calculus class. Yet the very objective of research seminars at MIT Linguistics is to expand knowledge about language by applying already acquired insights to new empirical domains — in the case of my seminar, from Creole exceptionalism in Haiti to Palestine exceptions and Orwellian Newspeak in discourse about the war on Gaza. My MIT Linguistics colleagues have initiated an unprecedented review process for this course proposal, contrasting starkly with the swift approval of previous courses on a variety topics, taught by junior, senior and even visiting professors.

The ongoing scrutiny of my seminar feels less like an issue about ‘curriculum fit’ and ‘expertise’, and more like an attempt to silence analyses that might be perceived as a threat to the status quo. This suspicion is heightened when I recall that even the Linguistic Society of America (LSA), whose mission is ‘the advancement of [linguistic] knowledge and the betterment of society’, rejected my proposal of a statement about linguistic distortions regarding the war on Gaza.

The challenges at hand are not just about Orwellian misrepresentations of Gaza protests and counterprotests at MIT or the censorship one professor’s graduate seminar. These strategies of repression illustrate a critical battle around truth, freedom of speech, academic freedom and even democracy itself, amid political pressures that seek to mold academia, not into a crucible of critical, diverse and ethical thought, but into an echo chamber in service of hegemony. As for the linguistic battlefield, we’ve now glimpsed how the use, interpretation and translation of language are powerful weapons in creating fog around the war on Gaza. The light of truth, though, emerges when language is carefully analysed and its manipulation is exposed. By demystifying Orwellian language, Newspeak and doublespeak as weapons for gaslighting and dehumanisation, we can move closer to a world in which peace and freedom prevail for all — from Gaza to MIT to Haiti.

Michel DeGraff is a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a founding member of the Haitian Creole Academy.

COLD WAR 2.0

Pentagon says Russia launched space weapon in path of US satellite


By AFP
May 22, 2024


Space has been a rare arena where Russia and the United States have maintained a degree of cooperation - Copyright ROSCOSMOS/AFP/File Handout

Russia has launched a likely space weapon and deployed it in the same orbit as a US government satellite, the Pentagon said.

“Russia launched a satellite into low Earth orbit that we assess is likely a counter-space weapon presumably capable of attacking other satellites in low Earth orbit,” Pentagon spokesman Air Force Major General Pat Ryder told a press briefing late Tuesday.

The Russian “counter-space weapon” launched on May 16 was deployed “into the same orbit as a US government satellite,” he said.

Ryder added that Washington would continue to monitor the situation and was ready to protect its interests.

“We have a responsibility to be ready to protect and defend the domain, the space domain, and ensure continuous and uninterrupted support to the Joint and Combined Force,” he said.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov declined to comment when asked about reports that Moscow had launched a space weapon.

“I can’t comment on this in any way. We act absolutely in accordance with international law, do not violate anything, and have repeatedly advocated banning any weapons in space,” he told a regular press briefing in Moscow.

“Unfortunately, these initiatives of ours were rejected, including by the USA.”

Earlier Tuesday, Moscow accused the United States of seeking to weaponize space after Washington vetoed a Russian non-proliferation motion at the United Nations.

“They have once again demonstrated that their true priorities in the area of outer space are aimed not at keeping space free from weapons of any kind, but at placing weapons in space and turning it into an arena for military confrontation,” Russian foreign ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said in a statement.



– Rival UN motions –



The world powers have traded accusations over weaponizing space in recent months.

They have proposed rival non-proliferation motions at the UN as part of the spat.

Russia vetoed the US initiative last month, while Moscow’s proposal was blocked by the United States, Britain and France on Monday.

US envoy Robert Wood said Russia’s proposal, which called on all countries to “take urgent measures to prevent for all time the placement of weapons in outer space”, was a distraction and accused Moscow of “diplomatic gaslighting”.

He said that Russia’s “likely” counter-space weapon was “presumably capable of attacking other satellites in low Earth orbit”.

“Russia deployed this new counter-space weapon into the same orbit as a US government satellite,” he said in remarks ahead of Monday’s vote.

“Russia’s May 16 launch follows prior Russian satellite launches likely of counter-space systems to low Earth orbit in 2019 and 2022.”

In February, the White House said Russia was developing an anti-satellite weapon, the existence of which was confirmed after lawmakers warned of an unspecified but serious threat to national security.

Space has been a rare area where the two countries have maintained a degree of cooperation despite a swathe of Western sanctions and dire relations after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Both countries ferry each other’s crew members to and from the International Space Station (ISS), where their astronauts are jointly stationed.

The space weapon spat between Moscow and Washington resurrects the spectre of space being militarized despite the 1967 Outer Space Treaty which forbids countries from deploying “any objects carrying nuclear weapons or any other kinds of weapons of mass destruction” into orbit or outer space.

burs-mtp/lb

Yuval Noah Harari’s Odyssey into a Parallel Zionist Universe

BY YOAV LITVIN

 MAY 20, 2024
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Image via Wikipedia.

In the vast expanse of the intellectual cosmos, there exists a luminary whose brilliance outshines even the brightest stars.

Professor Yuval Noah Harari, a name whispered with reverence among the learned denizens of the galaxy, is a beacon of knowledge, whose canon traverses the celestial planes of history, philosophy, human psychology and beyond.

Informed by years of contemplative transcendence and prodigious mastery of the written word, his concepts, like cosmic dark matter anomalies rippling through the fabric of reality, challenge our understanding of existence and propel us toward the final frontier of enlightenment.

It is within these boundless realms, with Enterprise captain boldness and sage wisdom, that Harari recently journeyed into his nuanced quagmire imaginary version of Zionism.

In a twist of revisionism as astonishing as his repurposing of “humanism,” Harari embarked on a fantastical odyssey, gazing balefully at those who weaponise “Zionism” as a slur, likening it to a sinister form of tribalism or even racism.

For in the great beyond of Harari’s philosophy, nothing about Zionism suggests any hint of superiority toward native Palestinians. Certainly not Israeli discriminatory laws and inconvenient evidence embedded in Israel’s Basic Law: Knesset, Article 7(a), which erects Zionism as a gatekeeper to participation in the facade of Israeli “democracy.”

The gospel according to Yuval Noah Harari

How mundane to concern oneself with the musings of figures like the obscure Ukrainian Vladimir Jabotinsky, a mere blip on the Zionist radar, albeit Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu’s ideological guru, who said:

“If it is immoral to colonise a country against the will of its native population, the same morality must apply equally to the black man as to the white. Of course, the blackman may not be sufficiently advanced to think of sending delegations to London, but he will soon find some kindhearted white friends, who will instruct him.” 

And:

“There will always be two nations in Palestine – which is good enough for me, provided the Jews become the majority.” 

And:

“We are seeking to colonise a country against the wishes of its population, in other words, by force.” 

Perhaps we can forgive Harari, as he has been preoccupied, hobnobbing with the esteemed German and Austrian Chancellors, engaging in discourse with the luminous French President and exchanging algorithmic pleasantries with his fellow apostle, the social media Meta marvel Mark Zuckerberg, rather than reminiscing on musings of Theodor Herzl, who said:

“We must expropriate gently the private property on the estates assigned to us. We shall try to spirit the penniless population across the border by procuring employment for it in the transit countries, while denying it employment in our own country. The property owners will come over to our side.”

Cogitating in this hallowed sanctum, Harari pays homage to the ancient Zionist rite of denialism, where truth is supplanted by a labyrinthine puzzle wielded deftly for the purpose of gaslighting Palestinians and their allies. Yet, in his orchestration of the numinous, Harari also upholds another sacred tenet of Zionism: the doctrine of white supremacy.

Behold, in his TED Talk of 2018, aptly titled “Why Fascism is so Tempting”, Harari, assuming his digital avatar visage, extols the virtues of nationalism, proclaiming:

“If you look today at the most prosperous and peaceful countries in the world, countries like Sweden and Switzerland and Japan, you will see that they have a very strong sense of nationalism. In contrast, countries that lack a strong sense of nationalism like Congo and Somalia and Afghanistan tend to be violent and poor.” 

In another oration, Harari paints a portrait of “the culture war” as a force cleaving asunder the very fabric of Western civilisation. Fear not, for he proclaims that if we, esteemed burgesses of Europe and the United States, stand as one, all shall be well in our earthly realm. What a marvellously convenient solution to our existential quandaries!

Close your eyes and ears

Hark to the melodious hymns of Harari, bard of the primal Zionist saga!

In each verse, he sings the sacred Hasbara handbook as divine scripture bestowed upon him at the hallowed gates of Ben Gurion airport, flown in with the latest shipment of US/UK weaponry.

From the Partition Plan to the Oslo Accords, to the conflation of Zionism and Judaism, his dulcet tones dance with the rhythm of McCarthyistic anti-communism and Islamophobia, a fascistic symphony of propaganda orchestrated to lull the masses into an hypnotic acquiescence to genocide.

He wields the myth of Israeli “democracy” like a shimmering shield against arrows of truth, casting blame upon Netanyahu, the scapegoat for all of Zion’s woes.

Not a whisper from Harari is there on the UN ESCWA report of March 2017, exposing Israel’s apartheid practices toward Palestinians, spanning every inch of land under its dominion, and the plight of Palestinians scattered in the Shatat (diaspora), left to suffer in the shadow of exclusion.

His neglect extends to Israel’s ongoing and escalating genocide in Gaza, alongside relentless campaigns of settler terror in the West Bank, drowning out the cries of the oppressed.

Settler colonialism, slavery, the plunder of the global south, the annihilation of indigenous peoples — these are topics too gauche for Harari’s highbrow celestial discussions, as he detours around capitalism’s sordid sins.

A playlist of Zionist apologia, Harari’s rhetoric perpetuates the shallow canards of “liberal” Zionism, ensconced in fake notions of human rights, in a facile attempt to salvage a crumbling Western narrative. By conveniently blaming Netanyahu while promoting an ahistorical alternative, he constructs a duplicitous wormhole, leading away from deeper examination of Zionism’s origins as a fascist, white supremacist ideology. Thus, we are left with Harari’s facade masking the true visage of oppression.

This piece first appeared in The New Arab.

Yoav Litvin is a Doctor of Psychology/ Behavioral Neuroscience. For more info, please visit yoavlitvin.com/about/  

Biden’s War On Gaza Is Now A War On Truth And The Right To Protest

The media’s role is to draw attention away from what the students are protesting – complicity in genocide – and engineer a moral panic to leave the genocide undisturbed.

By Jonathan Cook

May 12, 2024

Source: Middle East Eye


Pro-Palestinian demonstrators march back to George Washington University's University Yard on 7 May 2024 in Washington, DC (AFP)

As mass student protests quickly spread to campuses across the United States last week, and others took hold in Britain and elsewhere in Europe, the western media gave centre stage to one man to arbitrate on whether the demonstrations should be allowed to continue: US President Joe Biden.

The establishment media reverentially relayed the president’s message that the protests were violent and dangerous, treating his assessment as if it had been handed down on a tablet of stone.

Biden declared the protesters had no “right to cause chaos”, giving the green light for police to go in with even greater force to clear the encampments.

This week, Biden raised the stakes further by suggesting the protests were evidence of a “ferocious surge” of antisemitism in the US.

According to reports, more than 2,000 protesters have been arrested after some university administrators – under growing pressure from the White House and their own wealthy donors – called in local police.

In approving the crushing of dissent, Biden contradicted himself: “We are not an authoritarian nation where we silence people or squash dissent. But order must prevail.”

One small problem went unmentioned: Biden was not a disinterested party. In fact, his conflict of interest was so gigantic it could, like the damage to Gaza, be seen from outer space.

The students were calling on their universities to pull all investments from companies that are assisting Israel in carrying out what the World Court has called a “plausible” genocide in Gaza. Those weapons are being supplied in huge quantities largely thanks to the decisions of one man.

Yes, Joe Biden.
Law-breaking Biden

The “order” the US president wants to prevail is one in which his decisions to block any ceasefire and arm the slaughter, maiming and orphaning of many tens of thousands of Palestinian children go unchallenged.

Biden has been so indulgent of Israel’s destruction of Gaza that Benjamin Netanyahu’s government crossed the president’s supposed “red line” this week. Israel launched the initial stages of its long-threatened final assault on Rafah in southern Gaza. Some 1.3 million Palestinians have been huddling in makeshift tents there.

Biden could easily have forced Israel to change course at any point over the past seven months, but chose not to, even as he feigned concern about the ever-rising death toll among Palestinian civilians. Only under growing popular pressure, fuelled by the protests, has he finally appeared to pause arms shipments as the attack on Rafah intensifies.

The White House has authorised vast shipments of arms to Israel, including 2,000lb bombs that have levelled whole neighbourhoods, killing men, women and children outright or leaving them trapped under rubble to slowly suffocate or starve to death.

Late last month Biden signed a further $26bn of US taxpayers’ money to Israel, the majority military aid – just as mass graves of Palestinians killed by Israel were coming to light. He has been able to do so only by flagrantly ignoring the requirement in US law that any weapons supplied not be used in ways likely to constitute war crimes.

Human rights groups have warned his administration repeatedly that Israel is routinely breaking international law.

At least 20 of Biden administration’s own lawyers are reported to have signed off on a letter that Israel’s actions violate a host of US statutes, including the Arms Export Control Act and Leahy Laws, as well as the Geneva Conventions.

Meanwhile, the State Department’s investigations show that, even before Israel’s destruction of Gaza began seven months ago, five Israeli military units were committing gross violations of the human rights of Palestinians in the separate enclave of the Occupied West Bank.

There, Israel doesn’t even have the one-size-fits-all excuse that the abuse and killing of Palestinian civilians are unfortunate “collateral damage” in an operation to “eradicate Hamas”. The West Bank is under the control of the Palestinian Authority of Mahmoud Abbas, not Hamas.

Nonetheless, no action has been taken to stop the arms transfers. US laws, it seems, don’t apply to the Biden administration, any more than international law does to Israel.
Protest quicksand

In denying students the right to protest at the US arming of Israel’s plausible genocide, Biden is also denying them the right to protest the most consequential policy of his four-year term – and of at least the last two decades of US foreign policy, since the US invasion of Iraq.

And it is all happening in a presidential election year.

The students’ immediate aim is to stop their universities’ complicity in the slaughter of tens of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza. But there are two obvious wider goals.

The first is to bring attention back to the endless suffering of Palestinians in the tiny, besieged enclave. Until this week’s attack on Rafah, the plight of Gaza had increasingly dropped off front pages, even as Israeli-induced famine and disease tightened their grip over the past month.

When Gaza has made the news, it is invariably through a lens unrelated to the slaughter and starvation. It is details of the interminable negotiations, or political tensions over Israel’s Rafah “invasion”, or plans for the “day after” in Gaza, or the plight of the Israeli hostages, or their families’ agonies, or where to draw the line on free speech in criticising Israel.

The students’ second goal is to make it politically uncomfortable for Biden to continue providing the weapons and diplomatic cover that have permitted Israel’s actions – from slaughter to starvation, and now the imminent destruction of Rafah.

The students have been trying to change the national conversation in ways that will pressure Biden to stop his all-too-visible law-breaking.

But they have run up against the usual problem: the national conversation is largely dictated by the political and media class in their own interests. And they are all for the genocide continuing, it seems, whatever the law says.

Which means the media has carefully refocused attention, dealing exclusively with the nature of the protests – and a supposed threat they pose to “order” – not addressing what the protests are actually about.

Last Sunday, the head of the UN Food Aid Programme, Cindy McCain, warned that northern Gaza was in the grip of “full-blown famine” and that the south was not far behind. Dozens of children were reported to have died of dehydration and malnutrition. “It’s horror,” she said.

The head of Unicef warned last week, a few days before Israel ordered the evacuation of eastern Rafah: “Nearly all of the some 600,000 children now crammed into Rafah are either injured, sick, malnourished, traumatized, or living with disabilities.”

A separate UN report recently revealed it will take 80 years to rebuild Gaza, based on the historic levels of materials allowed in by Israel. On a highly unlikey, best-case scenario, it will take 16 years.

As ever, establishment journalists have been essential to distracting from these horrendous realities.

The students are caught in a protest equivalent of quicksand: the more they struggle to draw attention to the Gaza genocide, the more the Gaza genocide sinks from view. The media have seized on their struggle as a pretext to ignore Gaza and turn the spotlight on to their protests instead.
Feeling ‘unsafe’

The student protest movement has been remarkably peaceful – a fact that is all the more obvious when compared to the Black Lives Matter protests that swept the US in 2020, with Biden’s approval.

Four years ago there were many episodes of property damage, but that has been all but unheard of in the student protests, which are mostly confined to encampments on university campus lawns.

Initially, the idea that student protests were violent depended on a highly improbable claim: that chants calling for the liberation of Palestinians from occupation, or for equality between Israeli Jews and Palestinians, were inherently antisemitic.

The coverage had to studiously ignore the fact that a sizeable chunk of those protesting on campus were Jewish.

The media’s manufactured narrative was then put to further, mischievous purpose. Zionist Jews on campus – those who identify with Israel rather than the global movement to stop a genocide – were reported to be uncomfortable when faced by the protests. Or “unsafe”, as the media preferred to call it.

In all this hysteria, no one seemed to care how “unsafe” anti-Zionist Jewish students felt, or Palestinian and Muslim students, after being publicly labelled antisemitic and a threat to “order” by Congress and their own president.

But this would soon become about a lot more than a clash of feelings. Stoked on by Biden’s condemnations and by political and financial pressures on the universities, administrations took the unusual step of inviting local police forces on to their campuses. Soon police in riot gear were massed against the students.

With the political and media climate mounting against academic freedom and the right to protest on issues of Israel and genocide, university staff turned out in a show of support for their embattled students.

At Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, for example, a Jewish professor, Annelise Orleck, joined colleagues hoping to protect their students by placing themselves between the police and the encampments. It was a pattern repeated across the country.

The police, she told Democracy Now, were clearly determined to break up the encampments using force.

Orleck, a former Jewish studies department head, was one of many grey-haired professors filmed being assaulted by police. In her case, she was videoing the violent arrests of students when a police officer body-slammed her from behind. When she tried to get up, she was thrown to the ground, pinned with a knee in her back and zip-tied.

Jill Stein, another prominent Jew and the Green Party candidate in the presidential elections later this year, was also violently arrested at a demonstration.
Moral panic

The media has worked hard to offer rationalisations for this assault on freedoms once taken for granted.

One moral panic – an entirely fake story about campus protest “violence” against a Jewish student at Yale – illustrates the depths being plumbed.

The Jewish student’s own video of the incident shows her pressing herself up against a campus protest march, presumably as part of her own counter-protest in favour of Israel continuing its genocide. At one point, a small Palestinian flag brushes her face.

Video artist Matt Orfea’s clips of the resulting hysterical coverage would be hilarious were the stakes not so grave. A stream of headlines and TV hosts scream in horrified tones: “Jewish student stabbed in the eye” and “Stabbed for being a Jew.”

The investment by the media in shocked outrage on behalf of one student – who, even in her own assessment, says the worst injury she suffered was a headache – over one unremarkable confrontation at one of the many dozens of campus protests in the US is the real story.

Had the media industry even a tiny conscience, the journalists lavishing concern on a Yale student with a headache might pause to wonder if some of that concern ought to be redirected elsewhere – as the campus protests demand.

Such as towards the tens of thousands of children being killed by US bombs and starved with the help of a US funding blockade on the UN’s main relief agency, Unrwa. Or towards Israel’s destruction of every one of Gaza’s 12 universities.

Similar mendacity was fully on display in the media’s coverage of the protests at UCLA when the police briefly backed down from their stand-off with students. A masked group of pro-Israel activists – seemingly not enrolled at the university – seized the opportunity to invade the campus, throw fireworks into the encampment, tear it down and beat the students.

Police took several hours to show up. None of the “counter-protesters” seems to have been arrested.

Despite the clear, filmed evidence of the attack on the students, the media uniformly painted it as a “clash” between two rival groups of violent protesters. In many cases, the reporting, including by the BBC, insinuated that the students – the victims – had initiated the “clashes”.

It was off the back of this confected “fake news” that Biden was able to characterise the student protests as chaotic, dangerous and a threat to “order”.

Drawing on a well-worn trope used by racists to tar the civil rights movement back in the 1960s, New York’s black mayor joined other politicians in claiming that “outside agitators” were behind the campus protests.

Meanwhile CNN host Dana Bash exploited the manufactured narrative to falsely compare the students to “Nazis”.

When the police returned to the UCLA campus, it was to increase the crackdown, stepping up arrests and firing rubber bullets at the students.
Furious backlash

The UK’s own version of this manufacturing of a moral panic is playing out too. Last weekend the Metropolitan Police arrested four people for displaying what police claimed was a banner “supporting a proscribed organisation”. The four, reportedly including a doctor and parents of students, were protesting outside University College London in solidarity with a protest camp there.

The banner showed a white dove – a symbol of peace – carrying a key flying through a breach in Israel’s apartheid wall around the West Bank.

According to reports, police claimed the four were Hamas supporters based on the fact that the sky behind the dove was “clear blue”, supposedly a reference to the clear skies on the day of Hamas’ attack on 7 October. Police seemed to be unaware that the sky is regularly clear blue in the Middle East.

According to witnesses, police officers had consulted with pro-Israel counter-demonstrators shortly before making the arrests.

The reality the political and media class are working to obscure is that some universities, rather than calling the police, have been allowing the protests on their campuses to play out peacefully.

And – in what seems to be the real fear among the political and media class – the protesters are also slowly having some impact in isolating Israel as well as moving public opinion. Extraordinarily, given the uniformly hostile coverage of the protests, suggesting they are antisemitic, four in ten American voters have still concluded that Israel is committing genocide, according to a survey published this week.

Largely unreported, several universities – in an attempt to end the protests without violence – have quietly made promises to limit their complicity in Israel’s genocide. In most cases, their good faith has yet to be tested.

Under countervaling pressure from 5,000 alumni who signed a letter threatening to withhold donations, the University of California Riversideappears to have agreed to divest from companies with ties to Israel, as well as stopping joint study programmes with Israel.

This week, Ireland’s Trinity College, in Dublin, reached a settlement with protesters that will see it quickly divest from Israeli companies involved with the illegal settlements in the West Bank.

A college statement read: “We are in solidarity with the students in our horror of what is happening in Gaza.”

Goldsmith’s college in London has promised an ethical investment policy that may see it divest from Israel’s decades of occupation of the Palestinian territories. It has also agreed to set up scholarships for Palestinians living under an Israeli occupation that has all but destroyed higher education for them.

And Goldsmith’s is to review its adoption of the new, highly controversial IHRA definition of antisemitism that has been aggressively promoted by the Israel lobby and widely adopted by western public institutions.

Paradoxically, the definition intentionally blurs the distinction between Jews and Israel – a favoured tactic of antisemites – and has been key to helping Israel and its allies smear anti-genocide protests as Jew hatred.

Concessions that ended protests at Rutgers, the state university of New Jersey, have included holding talks with student representatives about investments in arms firms assisting Israel’s slaughter in Gaza, the setting up of a Palestine studies course mirroring an existing Jewish studies programme, and establishing a long-term collaboration with a Palestinian university in the West Bank similar to Rutgers’ relationship with Tel Aviv university in Israel.

Those minimal concessions have already provoked a furious backlash from 700-plus members of the local Jewish community. They accused Rutgers of “capitulating to the extreme demands of the lawless mob”, one that is supposedly inciting “hatred and violence against Jews and the Jewish state”.

The group has threatened to bring the university to its knees by pulling “donations and financial support”. Meanwhile, the four largest Jewish federations in New Jersey are reported to be demanding a state investigation of Rutgers.

Gaza playbook

In reporting on the campus protests, the establishment media have simply rolled out the same well-thumbed playbook they used to cover up Israel’s genocide in Gaza: strip out context, distort chronology, reverse the roles of aggressor and victim, and push the messaging so hard it sticks.

Over the past seven months, the western media have erased the context of decades of Israeli structural violence: its belligerent occupation of the Palestinian territories and ethnic cleansing of Palestinian communities to establish in their place illegal settlements of armed Jewish militias.

Even more specifically, they have disappeared the imprisonment and slow-motion starvation of 2.3 million Palestinians through a 17-year medieval-style siege of Gaza.

Instead, Hamas’ one-day attack on 7 October is presented as coming out of the blue – that clear blue sky. It has served as a rationalisation for genocide by Israel that just keeps on giving.

The student protests are being exploited for a similar purpose. The media have been able to expand their self-serving narrative from foreign fields – where every Palestinian, even a child, can be painted as a potential terrorist – to domestic turf, where anyone clamouring against Israel’s genocide is considered a likely antisemite.

Leaks from the New York Times show that the company has effectively imposed a ban on staff using terms such as “genocide” and “apartheid” in relation to Israel, making it impossible to name the reality faced by Palestinians or the reasons for solidarity among western publics with them.

It is clear that the Times’ policy is shared across the establishment media.

Now, Congress is preparing to bring down the same free speech and free thought shutters on American citizens. Their First Amendment rights are in the process of being shredded to protect a foreign country, Israel, from criticism.

This month the House of Representatives passed by an overwhelming majority an “antisemitism awareness” bill that would once again expand the definition of Jew hatred to criminalise critical speech against Israel. The Republicans who introduced the legislation specifically referenced the bill’s use against the student protests, which call for universities to stop investing in genocide.

The goal is to chill speech in the last places – campuses and social media – where it still exists outside the imposed consensus of the political and media class.

The politicians and media are not disinterested. They are in thrall to Big Money interests, such as the arms, surveillance and oil industries, for whom Israel is a critical element, both in the projection of western power into the Middle East and in the construction of a western narrative of permanent victimhood, even as the West and its allies continue to wreck the region.

From their campuses, the students are calling out as loudly as they can that western institutions are complicit in arming a genocide, that the emperor is every bit as morally exposed as he appears. It is time to stop listening to those gaslighting us. Now is the time to believe our own eyes.

Jonathan Cook
British writer and journalist based in Nazareth, Israel. His books are Blood and Religion: The Unmasking of the Jewish and Democratic State (Pluto, 2006); Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East (Pluto, 2008); and Disappearing Palestine: Israel's Experiments in Human Despair (Zed, 2008).