Tin Soldiers and Nixon Coming…

by Daniel McAdams Posted onApril 29, 2024

Student action on university campuses against US involvement in Israel’s slaughter of Gaza has exploded across the country. Suddenly there is the distinct feel in the air of the anti-Vietnam war protests once they finally caught on in 1968 and soon thereafter changed the course of US history.

Both protest movements were fully demonized by the same forces of the mainstream Left/Right regime and what libertarian writer Jacob Hornberger rightly calls the “National Security State.” I would add the mainstream media from Fox to MSNBC. But these days there is relatively more freedom of expression available to Americans via some of the social media outlets. The US government war on one of these outlets – TikTok – may also be fueling protests, as this outlet is particularly popular among younger Americans and has become the platform for them to hear more objective and independent views on what is happening in Gaza. It should not be considered a coincidence that not long after Anti-Defamation League’s Jonathan Greenblat was caught on tape panicking over the shift in opinion away from fealty to Israel among the younger generation, a big PR operation about “Chinese infiltration” of the platform emerged as did calls to ban the popular application.

“We have a major, major, major generational (TikTok) problem,” Greenblat said. This past week both Houses of Congress voted to ban TikTok. Problem solved? Not exactly.

So back to the protests.

Tens of thousands of students from New York’s Columbia University to the University of Southern California have risen up to demand an end to US support for Israel’s 200 day – and counting – total demolition of Gaza in retribution for the October 7th Hamas bloody incursion into Israeli territory.

To date, more than 35,000 Palestinian civilians in Gaza have been killed including an estimated 15,000 children. Hamas, by contrast, is reportedly not significantly degraded and its massive tunnel system remains intact. Former Israeli Defense Forces General Yitzhak Brick told Israeli newspaper Maariv that Israel has already lost the war against Hamas and must admit it.

The wild disproportionality of the Israeli response has animated and ignited the sense of repulsion and demand for justice among the nation’s youth. Most recently the grisly details of Israel’s apparent mass slaughter of hundreds of patients at the Nasser Hospital in Gaza – many discovered with their hands and feet bound – may have been the last straw that led to mass student action across the country.

When the wave of student protests settled in the Lone Star State on Wednesday, Texas Governor Gregg Abbott wasted no time at all calling in the Texas State Troopers to smash the protest at the University of Texas. Heavily-armed Troopers – some on horseback – marched onto campus attempting to force the crowd of protesters to disburse. As might be expected, the situation very quickly got out of hand, with Troopers assaulting and arresting those participating in what began as a peaceful protest.

Shortly after siccing the heavily armed state militia on student protestors, Abbot released this Tweet:

Abbott’s blanket accusation that these protests are prima facie anti-Semitic is belied by the fact that Jews across the country are participating in the mass action, including on university campuses.

There is clearly a major attempt being made to conflate legitimate concern over tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians being slaughtered – and hundreds of thousands facing starvation – with blanket hatred of Jewish people. But the youth are not buying it. So it’s time to send in the militarized police to shut down peaceful protest and the First Amendment.

In the case of Texas, one cheeky conservative Twitter/X user pointed out that, “Abbott sent more troops to shutdown peaceful protests at UT than he did to secure the border.”

Ouch – but revealing.

Other observers have similarly pointed out the hypocrisy of the massive deployment of militarized police to quell a peaceful political protest, commenting on a video montage of police beating and arresting American university students that, “imagine if this video was out of Tehran University in Iran, our politicians & media would have endless calls for regime change.”

Throughout the country, many “influencers” on the professional political Right are acting like the “woke snowflakes” they have derided, demanding that our fundamental liberty to freely assemble and speak our minds be amended in this particular instance due to the subject matter.

Many “professional right-wingers” have done their best to try and convince us that these protesters are identical to the BLM protesters of several years ago. Matt Walsh at the Daily Wire put out a podcast today claiming that, “The ‘Free Palestine’ Movement Is Just BLM Repackaged.”

The problem in his and the rest of their calculus is that the state and local authorities would not lift a finger to stop the BLM riots, yet they are cracking heads robustly among the Palestine protests.

Walsh even seemed to sense the inconsistency in his logic, questioning Governor Abbott’s move against the protesters by Tweeting, “Did Abbott ever arrest BLM protesters for antiwhiteism? Is antisemitism the only hateful ideology not permitted in Texas? Are you legally allowed to hate some groups but not others?”

He added, in a criticism of Abbot’s suggestion that the protesters were being arrested for “antisemitism,” that, “If you’re arresting them for an illegal encampment or for making threats then say that. But arresting people for ‘antisemitism’ is obviously a clear violation of the First Amendment. I can’t stand these protesters but you can’t arrest people simply for having ‘hateful’ views.”

He deserves credit for this observation.

As is often the case, action by state actors against this protest movement will only strengthen the movement. We have not even seen the beginning of what is in store.

Polls clearly show that a considerable majority in America believes Israel has gone way too far in its reaction to October 7th. America for the first time in my lifetime is in the majority opposed to Israel, and that shift is more than anything else a generational shift. Hence Greenblat’s panic.

This movement is picking up steam and threatens to turn Biden’s big Democratic Convention coronation ceremony into the disastrous 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago, where the Lyndon Johnson campaign went to die. Ironically the Democratic Party convention this year is to be held in… Chicago!

May 4th will be the 54th anniversary of Nixon’s National Guard killing four students at Ohio’s Kent state University for protesting our killing squads in Vietnam (My Lai massacre). Will soldiers in the US start cutting protesters down again?

Daniel McAdams is Executive Director of the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity and co-Producer/co-Host, Ron Paul Liberty Report. Daniel served as the foreign affairs, civil liberties, and defense/intel policy advisor to U.S. Congressman Ron Paul, MD (R-Texas) from 2001 until Dr. Paul’s retirement at the end of 2012. From 1993-1999 he worked as a journalist based in Budapest, Hungary, and traveled through the former communist bloc as a human rights monitor and election observer. Reprinted from The Ron Paul Institute for Peace & Prosperity.

Confrontation in Dunn Meadow: the Police Raids at Indiana University

BY DAVID STEWART

APRIL 29, 2024
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Indiana State Police raid peaceful protesters in Dunn Meadow on the Indiana University campus in Blooming. The author is in the green shirt, Linda in the hat. Photo: Jeremy Hogan, the Bloomingtonian.

Thursday afternoon, April 25th, 2024,  I was doing my job making sales calls as a staffperson at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana,.My wife was walking with me on campus and we heard shouts coming from Dunn Meadow.  Earlier we had seen police cars blocking off Indiana Avenue north of Kirkwood, near the Sample Gates.  As we neared Dunn Meadow from the Media School area, we saw the tent city and heard the chants “Free Palestine.”  We joined the gathered people.

After about an hour or so of pleasant interaction with the students who happily welcomed us, a student spoke into a megaphone that there was a heavy police presence in the area. To everyone’s alarm, a line of black-clad police appeared in Dunn Meadow near the Union Building.

Linda started videoing and the Thursday video can be seen at: https://youtu.be/hkNAyLQ0lnY

Within an hour after the police had left, the tents were re-erected and the protest gathering continued.

On Friday, I took the day off work and we spent it in Dunn Meadow.  It was a day of interaction with similar-minded people who are also outraged by the events in Gaza and Palestine; outraged by the fact that we are complicit in genocide. We stayed until midnight and had many wonderful conversations,

The next day,  the State Police returned, this time in full military/riot garb and they were accompanied by dark-green uniformed, rifle-toting personnel.  Linda filmed 2 videos which chronicle Saturday’s events.

The first Saturday video begins by showing the phalanx amassed across the meadow.

The other video from Saturday begins by showing the actions of people complying with the police orders to dismantle the tent structures and continues with the advance of the police in formation, the taking of territory by the police, the destruction of the tent city, and the withdrawal by the power which had successfully executed the military operation in Dunn Meadow.

 

I would like to call attention to the Indiana Daily Student article

In the video of Thursday, a policeman can be heard telling students that if they remain, they will be arrested.

In the video of Saturday, a policeman can be heard telling students that as long as the structures are removed, they can remain.

On Saturday evening around sunset, Linda and I returned to Dunn Meadow.  The tents had been resurrected. Those of us who had not fallen and been arrested, or who had been nabbed in military-style kidnapping like several of the leaders had been, had returned.  Chants of “We will not pause, We will not rest, Disclose, Divest” as well as many other chants were shouted by all.

Today is Sunday. From early morning the massive sound system of the Chabad House on 7th Street has been persistently blaring dull, thumping melodies into Dunn Meadow.  Notifying Dispatch at Indiana University Police Department results in being told to notify the IUPD policemen parked nearby on 7th Street.  Talking with the policemen sitting in the police car has the result of being told to notify Dispatch.

The Bloomington Police have been notified about this weaponization of music and do nothing.

The thumping beats continue.

The Students remain steadfast.

Statement of Four Cornell Students

Suspended for Protesting Israel’s Genocide

in Gaza

BY COUNTERPUNCH NEWS SERVICE

APRIL 29, 2024Facebook

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On 4/26, four students were “temporarily suspended” by Cornell University for exercising their constitutional right to protest. In response, these students issued the following statement:

“In the past months, we have seen an incredible movement form on Cornell’s campus: students, faculty members, and staff have joined together to voice their support for the Palestinian Liberation Movement and to demand an end to the genocide happening in Gaza. Cornell’s administration has failed to fulfill its responsibilities to its community over the last six months. Inconsistent and repressive treatment of vocal community members, lackluster responses to threats of sexual assault, and increasingly hostile surveillance tactics towards Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim students, staff, and faculty members have made it clear that our safety and voices do not matter.

When students, staff, and faculty have raised safety concerns about Islamophobic, anti-Arab, and, more specifically, anti-Palestinian attacks by other students, administrators nod their heads and “thank us for our perspective,” ostensibly placating us with empty gestures and no follow-up. When students, staff, and faculty have raised academic concerns about the complete erasure of anti-Zionist history and thought, we are ignored or pushed to the side. The administration has tried time and time again to suppress the speech of our communities, all the while hiding behind the claim that they have to ensure a safe and “undisrupted” learning environment for all students. Their choice to suspend peaceful protestors clearly shows that they do not care about all students’ safety equally.

Make no mistake—Cornell is taking such drastic action because the encampment is a fundamental threat to the university’s legitimacy. In our Liberated Zone (and at encampments across the country) we have called into question whether students ought to participate in institutions that are complicit in an ongoing genocide. If our action were not meaningful in the fight for divestment—if our encampment were not a genuine threat to the legitimacy of this institution—Cornell would not have cracked down on students so severely within twenty-four hours without ever engaging with our demands.

Now, to maintain the status quo of apathy and thoughtless compliance, they have suspended us. They seek to intimidate other students to keep us from fighting for collective, mutual liberation. But we are not scared. We will not be intimidated. And we will not stop demanding justice and liberation. We are committed to liberating our people and using our voices to push this administration to do the right thing.

Thus, our demands remain the same, and we raise our voices in unison to say: Divest Now.”

Being Jewish In a Time of Mass Hysteria

The “never again” faction loudly worries that Palestinian liberation is incompatible with Israeli survival and sees growing American antisemitism behind every picket sign. But support for Netanyahu and his government contradicts everything valuable in Jewish tradition and divides Jews from their historic allies in this country and worldwide.

By Dan Siegel

April 29, 2024

Source: Scheerpost


“UT Austin, where Texas state troopers are barring students from accessing the other side of the campus.” (@balagonline, Twitter)

Hi, my name is Dan.

My pronouns are he and him.

I went to Hebrew school for a year when I was 10 and was bored out of my mind.

I am REALLY outraged by Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack and want to see the hostages freed.

May I proceed?

***

The student protests happening across the U.S. are the best thing that has happened in America in years. What’s even better is that they are happening at USC, the University of Texas, and Arizona State. Special thanks are due to the university presidents and politicians for their efforts to suppress the protests. Their failure to learn the lessons of the 1960s and ‘70s guarantees that the protests will continue and grow. Maybe Biden, Blinken, et al. will be faster learners than JFK, LBJ, and Nixon and will force Israel to end the genocide in Gaza before the death toll doubles again.

The complaints of antisemitism from my Brethren in the Jewish community and their new friends on the right are growing more hollow by the day. Fewer and fewer people remain confused by the blatant sophistry of those who try to equate antisemitism with opposition to Netanyahu, the Israeli government, or Zionism, either as a political movement or as manifested by the State of Israel. I have heard fewer antisemitic statements in the scores of pro-Palestine events I have attended than during a typical week at my Long Island junior high school.

If anyone wonders whether much of America’s Jewish community has been overcome by a mass psychogenic illness, events at a dinner for graduating Berkeley Law students a few weeks ago week should answer the question definitively. A group of students associated with the school’s chapter of Law Students for Justice in Palestine politely disrupted the celebration as one of them, Malak Afaneh, attempted to speak about their outrage with conducting business as usual while the death toll in Palestine was creeping up to 35,000.

Within seconds, one of the dinner’s hosts, law professor Catherine Fisk, had an arm around Ms. Afaneh’s neck while trying to take her phone, from which she was reading, with her other hand. Dean Erwin Chemerinsky, Fisk’s husband, quickly joined the fray, insisting that Ms. Afaneh leave their home. Professor Fisk pointed out that she paid the mortgage on the property.

Ms. Afaneh and a group of supporters soon departed. The uproar that followed was at once predictable, disappointing, and yet even a little surprising. The chairman of the University’s Board of Regents and Berkeley Chancellor Carol Christ denounced the protest, describing it as an inexcusable disruption of a private event at a private space. Much of the public debate over the incident has focused on the arcana of free speech, specifically whether the dinner, paid for by the university, should be considered a public forum, a limited public forum, or no forum at all. Litigation is likely.

More interesting is what this event says about the Jewish community. Edwin Chemerinsky is not the average law school dean. He is deservedly respected for his scholarship and advocacy for the Constitution, especially on free speech issues. So it was especially disappointing that his response to the dinner disruption quickly devolved into assertions of private property rights.

But Dean Chemerinsky is not alone. Events in Palestine and Israel since Oct. 7 have heightened the longstanding conflicts among American Jews who have otherwise consistently fought for the humanitarian and democratic values at the heart of Jewish tradition. One could easily make the argument that Judaism would not have survived in a hostile world for over 3,000 years if it had not united its followers around the progressive principles that explain why, even today, such a large proportion of those supporting Palestinian rights and condemning Israel are Jewish.

I have never been uncomfortable as a Jew supporting Palestinian rights. My grandfather Max grew up in Belarus in the late 1880s in a Jewish community split over whether Zionism or socialism offered a path to Jewish liberation. Max was sent from his small town to Minsk to study to become a rabbi. Instead, he joined the Jewish Workers Bund and supported the 1905 Revolution before emigrating to New York during the repression that followed.

My father became a cadre in the Communist Party, U.S.A, although he developed a soft spot for Israel late in his life. As a small child growing up in the Bronx in the late 1940s and early 1950s, I have no memory of my parents, who discussed politics constantly, ever talking about Israel. Much later, our family’s Passover seders emphasized Jewish solidarity with the oppressed and exploited people of the world and recognized the similarities between the Hebrews’ struggle to escape slavery in Egypt and modern liberation struggles.

The anger of many in America’s Jewish community towards protesting students and critics of Israel is both understandable and confounding. The Holocaust was the 20th century’s effort to eradicate the Jewish people and the continuation of European efforts since at least the Crusades. The attraction of a Jewish homeland in Palestine is easy to understand for refugees unwelcome elsewhere in the world. Unfortunately, it became easy to ignore the fact that those pesky Palestinians already lived there and unsurprisingly reacted to the arrival of the Jews similarly to the reaction of the indigenous people of the Americas to the arrival of the Europeans 450 years earlier.

Splits in the Jewish community are not new. As far back as the seventh century before the birth of Christ, the Old Testament prophets Jeremiah and Ezekiel condemned the hypocrisy, dishonesty, and materialism of the Jewish establishment and predicted its defeat.

Small wonder at the psychological crisis this history has created for American Jewry. The “never again” faction loudly worries that Palestinian liberation is incompatible with Israeli survival and sees growing American antisemitism behind every picket sign. But support for Netanyahu and his government contradicts everything valuable in Jewish tradition and divides Jews from their historic allies in this country and worldwide. People who have spent decades supporting the civil rights movement and efforts for peace and justice throughout the world are now alienated from their traditional values and beliefs.

Does anyone wonder where Einstein and Freud would stand in this debate?

The Palestinian Resistance Isn’t a Monolith

As Palestinians reckon with the genocide being inflicted on them and their prospects for national liberation, it does them a disservice to flatten their political diversity and complex ongoing debates.

By Bashir Abu-Manneh

April 29, 2024
Source: Jacobin





Since October 7, any critical evaluation of Hamas’s military operation — its method, rationality, and targets, or its role in ending the Israeli occupation — has been hard to voice within the Left. This is so not only because an occupying power is ultimately responsible for the destructive status quo, but also because criticizing the tactics of a group acting in the name of the oppressed is seen as undermining their rightful cause.

This situation is compounded by numerous intellectuals on the Left who have voiced unconditional support — if not celebration — for Hamas’s attack. A recent post on the Verso Books blog places a socially regressive religious movement like Hamas into the universal emancipatory tradition of the Left, stating that “the paragliders who flew into Israel on October 7 continue the revolutionary association of liberation and flight.”

Andreas Malm has suggested that the Al-Aqsa Flood operation achieved more than the First Intifada because Palestinians managed to replace stones with military arms — ignoring that the intifada was the largest self-organized anti-colonial mass movement in Palestinian history, and that it compelled Israel to make unprecedented political concessions. Indeed, to argue that Hamas has managed to achieve more is to totally ignore that its military attack has triggered a huge genocide against the Palestinian people.

As Rashid Khalidi has argued, “Looking back over the past six months — at the cruel slaughter of civilians on an unprecedented scale, the millions of people made homeless, the mass famine and disease induced by Israel — it is clear that this marks a new abyss into which the struggle over Palestine has sunk.” Tom Segev concurs: “For Palestinians, the Gaza war is the worst event they have experienced in 75 years. Never have so many been killed and uprooted since the nakba, the catastrophe that befell them during Israel’s war of independence in 1948, when hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were forced to give up their homes and become refugees.”

In addition to individual voices, uncritical celebration of Hamas has also been witnessed in parts of the otherwise inspiring solidarity mobilizations in recent days. “We say justice, you say how? Burn Tel Aviv to the ground,” some are heard chanting in one video.

Such slogans, no matter how rare, undermine the Palestinian cause. Supporting Palestine is about ending an illegal occupation and holding Israel accountable for violating international law. It is not about supporting the killing of Israeli civilians or the destruction of Israeli cities. Upholding international law means upholding it for everyone.

This sort of rhetoric collapses a whole range of political positions in Palestine into what one militant group says and does. It also assumes that Hamas speaks and acts on behalf of all the Palestinian people all the time — simply because it won an election (with 45 percent of the vote) in the Occupied Palestinian Territories in 2006 (mainly as a protest vote against the Palestinian Authority’s corruption and its surrender at Oslo).

Hamas’s one election win is, therefore, not a blank check for eternity. This is especially true because in governing Gaza, Hamas has forgotten about democracy, employed authoritarianism and corruption, and repressed political organization and dissent. To openly speak your mind or express your political views has proven costly for many Palestinians in Gaza. But their silence is not support for Hamas.

Two recent articles in the mainstream press convey how important it is to listen to Palestinian voices in Gaza as they are undergoing the extreme conditions of genocide, famine, and starvation instituted by the Israeli occupation army.

The Financial Times recently reported on public opinion in Gaza — a sobering read. While Palestinians in Gaza clearly blame Israel for executing a human catastrophe in Gaza, there is growing anger and resentment directed at Hamas for failing to expect the scale of Israel’s retaliation for the October 7 attacks and to protect Palestinians during the war.

One interviewee, Nassim, openly says, that Hamas “should have predicted Israel’s response and thought of what would happen to the 2.3mn Gazans who have nowhere safe to go” and “should have restricted themselves to military targets.”

Another interviewee, Samia, is even more damning. “The role of the resistance is to protect us civilians, not to sacrifice us,” she said. “I don’t want to die and I didn’t want my children to witness what they’ve seen and to live in a tent suffering from hunger, cold and poverty.”

Such criticism tracks with what many Palestinians from Gaza have been posting on social media in recent months. It has also been represented in the critical reporting of veteran anti-occupation journalist Amira Hass.

In a recent article in Haaretz, Hass captures the popular disgruntlement and criticism of Hamas’s operation as well as what is seen as Hamas’s hugely costly mode of armed resistance against a vastly superior Israeli military. Palestinians in Gaza openly complain about their lack of security and protection from Israel’s expected retribution and about Hamas’s lack “of clear strategic political planning.”

What most troubles one interviewee, Basel, is that his criticism of Hamas and its approach to resistance is being tarred as treason. As Hass explains, “He’s angry that the Palestinians outside Gaza and their supporters expect Gazans to shut up and not criticize Hamas, because the criticism ostensibly helps the enemy. He rejects the assumption that doubting the decisions and actions of this armed group — and to do so publicly — is an act of treason.”

These critical voices are consistent with the most recent opinion polls conducted in the Occupied Territories. Though polling in wartime is subject to extreme challenges and fluctuations, especially in Gaza where political fear and silencing are important factors to consider in assessing the accuracy of responses, some consistent trends can be identified.

Polls show that Hamas’s approval rating in Gaza in recent months has indeed declined by 11 points — to one-third. There has also been an overall drop in support for armed struggle. In response to the question, “In your view, what is the best means of achieving Palestinian goals in ending the occupation and building an independent state?” there is a decline in support for armed struggle in both the West Bank and Gaza, from 63 percent in December to 46 percent in March. In Gaza alone, it is down from 56 percent to 39 percent. Hamas itself has also just reiterated its willingness to put down its arms and to accept a long-term cease-fire with Israel in return for a state along the 1967 borders.

In Gaza, too, there has also been a dramatic increase in support for the two-state solution: up from 35 percent in December to 62 percent in March. This remains true even as the majority of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza also acknowledge the practical impediments to such a solution, namely Israel’s expanding settlement project. What this does nevertheless indicate is that Palestinians in Gaza hope that international attention and external political pressure on Israel might yield results.

Support for the one-state solution among occupied Palestinians has declined to 24 percent during the war on Gaza. Most occupied Palestinians want to separate from Israel and to live in their own state, and they want to get rid of the illegal settlements in the West Bank. The colonial project contravenes Palestinian rights under international law, especially the right to self-determination.

In addition, Israelis have dehumanized Palestinian society to the most extreme levels during this war. Following the cues of their aggressive elite and warmongering media (saturated with ex-military and security experts), Israelis have overwhelmingly supported the decimation of Gaza. What troubles Israelis most is the hostages, not the war. The lives of Israeli hostages matter, while Palestinians are, in the words of Israel’s defense minister, “human animals.”

Motivated by vengeance and retribution, Israel is a narcissistic society wallowing in its own injury and using that injury as an excuse for its monumental crimes against the Palestinian people. Palestinians find Israel cruel, callous, and horrifying, and their first thought is “protect me from Israel.” Is this the Israeli society that Palestinians should be expected to live with in dignity and with equal rights?

Whatever the future holds, Palestinians need to be able to work through their devastating predicament collectively, democratically, and without fear. To insist on that is to boost their right of self-determination.