I sense a plot to destroy the Jedi... (uh, the Gaza Protest movement)
The Campus Anti-Genocide movement has crashed and burned, but was that only because of their own mistakes or were they pushed?
Obviously, mistakes were made. Lines were crossed. Tents were pitched. Windows were broken. Graffiti was scrawled. Some people went too far.
Now it seems the effort to push for divestment in Isreal and to implement a ceasefire in Gaza appears to have crashed on the rocks and may have done permanent damage to Biden and the Democratic Party.
At least, that’s how some media pundits are seeing things. Case in point: Joe Scarborough.
MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough cautioned viewers that the pro-Palestinian protests happening across college campuses could be helping former President Donald Trump’s 2024 election chances. He added that viewers who are too “stupid” to understand that could change the channel.
Scarborough, a frequent critic of the former president, compared the multitude of university protests to the demonstrations against the Vietnam War that took place in the 1960s, which turned his parents from lifelong Democrats to Republicans. He added that his parents, who grew up in the Great Depression, found it hard to believe how “rich kids on campus” had taken over college campuses.
“If you’re offended by this, please, I’m trying to help you,” Scarborough said. ”I don’t want Donald Trump to get elected, all right? I’m trying to help you. If you’re too stupid to figure that out, you can change to another channel. Because we’re sorting through this as a country, and this is not helping. This is not helping the people of Gaza, and this is not helping those of us who want to fight fascism in America.”
This sentiment was echoed by his fellow MSNBC host - and protest expert - Al Sharpton.
Civil rights activist Al Sharpton compared the ongoing pro-Palestine student protests across the United States to the Jan. 6, 2021 Capitol riot on Thursday and argued Democrats had lost the moral high ground.
During an appearance on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, Sharpton argued, “Anytime what you are protesting for becomes secondary to what you are doing, then you’re really not protesting for it, and you, in many ways, dramatize.”
What I did in other situations was to bring attention to a cause, not become the cause, and what is troubling me about lot of this is they’ve become the cause. It’s about them. It is not about pushing the cause. They need to ask themselves, if they were sincere, are you really focusing on what’s going on in Gaza, about the children, about the women, about the innocent people? And in Israel, are you focusing on whether or not you are violent or whether or not you can say the most incendiary statement? How are you guiding this? It’s about them and I think they’ve lost the message, and I think that’s because they’ve been infiltrated by people that are not them.
Later on in the show, Sharpton said, “How do the Democrats, how do all of us on that side say January 6 was wrong if you can have the same pictures going on on college campuses? You lose the moral high ground.”
The “same pictures as J6?”
On January 6 the crowd attacked police - on these campuses, they were attacked by police.
On January 6 the crowd broke and entered the Capitol while it was full of lawmakers in order to stop them from doing their Constitutional duty by threatening their lives- the campus protestors entered empty buildings that were not in use.
On January 6 the crowd was screaming “Hang Mike Pence” - the campus protestors were screaming “Stop the Genocide.” One group was calling for death, another group was calling for life.
After January 6, the attackers uniformly denied responsibility and claimed that “outside agitators” from BLM and ANTIFA were the “real criminals” - the campus protestors were quietly arrested and voluntarily accepted that consequence, but perhaps they do have some legitimate reason to criticize “outside agitators”.
Let’s be real. No protest movement is ever “perfect.” While the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was marching - there were riots. There was violence. Rosa Parks refusing to leave her seat on the bus was breaking the law. Black students sitting down at the counter at Woolworths were breaking the law. Dr. King himself was arrested multiple times. He himself said that “A riot is the voice of the unheard.”
A nice, polite, quiet protest - would have gone nowhere. To be effective, sometimes, a protest has to get into people’s faces, it has to make them feel uncomfortable. It has to challenge them.
So, I’m skeptical that these recent arrests on various campuses are the end of anything. I think things are just getting started.
Then again, some people don’t respond well to challenge. They push back, and they try to shift the moral argument into their own favor. And they paint events the way they want them to be seen.
If you look at slightly more independent media on the issue of the Campus protests you get a much different picture. For example TYT points out how CNN’s Dana Bash literally called the Anti-Genocide protestors “NAZIS.”
That’s pretty harsh rhetoric to use against people who you are criticizing for using.. harsh rhetoric.
Bash: Making Jewish students feel unsafe at their own school is unacceptable. And it’s happening way too much, right now.
[Shows clip of Jewish student not being allowed into a building]
Again, what you just saw was 2024 in Los Angeles, harkening back to the 1930s in Europe, and I do not say that lightly.
Protestors were occupying a building and they were not letting non-protestors in. I think you can criticize that, you can say “that’s wrong” although it could be also argued they may have been doing it for their own security and safety - but to equate it with Kristalnatch? To equate it with the smashing of Jewish businesses and taking of Jewish citizens to the trains, which took them to the camps — is ridiculous.
It’s a good example of the extreme pearl-clutching and hyperventilation that happened during the entirety of the protests.
As Cenk explains.
Cenk: It’s almost a brazen lie by Dana Bash and she should correct that if she’s a real journalist. [She didn’t] They weren’t letting anyone through, it wasn’t just targeting Jewish students. If they were targeting Jewish students it would be a very, very different situation. They blocked everyone from going into that particular entrance, and you could still be mad, but they’re not targeting Jews because they’re Nazis.
I would argue this wasn’t the only example of the facts being distorted.
First off, there’s the fact the issue of Jewish students “feeling threatened.” I’m not going to doubt anyone’s legitimate feelings, but I do have to question what exactly made them “feel this way?” Was it the criticism of Israel? Was it calling for the end of the attacks on Gaza, and the implementation of Humanitarian Aid?
I’ve heard some were incensed by the use of the term “From the River to the Sea” a term which is new to me. I’ve heard that it is a call for the end of Israel, but as this issue bubbled up I also heard from a Jewish Professor, Bruce Robbins at Columbia, who had been part of the protests who told Fareed Zakaria that it meant - to them - something entirely different.
Robbins: As I understand.. “From the River to the Sea” means equal rights for all the people living between the river and the sea. Now, that’s an American value. We believe in Democracy. We believe in equal rights for everybody.
Since we’re talking about double-standards. For me the double-standard is, Israel is going to be a Jewish State. It can’t be a Jewish State and a Democratic State. A Democratic State means equal rights for everybody. And the people who are chanting “From the River to the Sea” are saying: “For everybody - from the river to the sea - equal rights.” Which is, you could say, the One-State solution. I realize not everybody likes the One-State solution. One man, one vote.
Now, this is one of the professors from Columbia who very well may have taught the students at Columbia who are part of the encampment exactly this definition of the term.
This is what they mean.
Now, in my previous Dkos post about this issue I had a fairly robust debate over whether the speaker’s intent is more important than the listener’s interpretation, and whether it’s appropriate to use a phrase that other people view differently and find offensive. (But would you consider it offensive if you’re not using it the way they’re hearing it?)
So we have Jewish students who feel “intimidated and offended” by a statement that isn’t being used the way they think. And then another poster who added this context:
I would just add that the phrase in question was first coined by the Revisionist Zionist Russian thinker, Zeev Jabotinsky, in his 1923 essay, “The Iron Wall” to describe his desire to create the nation of Israel that would stretch from both sides of the Jordan River without the “problematic presence of the indigenous Palestinians.” Jabotinsky is the ideological precursor to Netanyahu’s Likud Party and advocated for the forceful removal of Palestinians who would never agree to be subjugated under Israeli hegemony. For Jabotinsky, the Iron Wall was needed to corral the restive Palestinians by keeping them engaged in a state of perpetual conflict until they could no longer bear it and simply left the land. As Prof. Mark LeVine of UC Irvine writes, “Exactly a century ago, in his {Jabotinsky’s} 1923 manifesto, The Iron Wall, he advocated overwhelming Jewish power to turn Palestine from the river to the sea into a Jewish ethno-state precisely because of the inevitability of Palestinian resistance.”
The phrase and its author were despised by the more left-leaning father of the nation, David Ben Gurion who found the Iron Wall doctrine racist and inhumane. He despised the creator of the “from the river to the sea” phrase so greatly that he refused to allow Jabotinsky’s remains buried in the new state of Israel.
This means that the term was originally coined to suggest the destruction of Palestine for the benefit of the Jewish people, which was eventually achieved in 1948. It’s rather ironic that Hamas has chosen to use the phrase to suggest the “destruction of Israel and the restoration of Palestine.”
And even using Prof. Robbin’s definition - that would mean a massive change in the State of Israel, taking it from being a theocratic Apartheid state to a full democracy. The Israel we have today would be gone, but perhaps, something far better would stand in it’s place.
This is all reasonable fodder for debate. Two-State Solution vs One-State Solution. Genocide and Apatheid for Palestine vs Freedom for Palestine. And what of Hamas? What of the Hostages? What of the people of Gaza who are currently starving on the edge of famine?
But we really didn’t get to have that conversation because of all the outrage over “Anti-Semitism.”
A lot of this concern for Jewish “victims” has allowed many Jewish bullies to act with Impunity as we saw at UCLA.
This man, with the Star of David on his back, used racial slurs, threats and spit on protestors. But do we hear about this person “intimidating” protestors? Do we hear about his Islamophobia? Not, so much.
These people have been emboldened. Empowered. Unleashed. They are perpetrating Stochastic Terrorism.
Hours before Police moved in on the UCLA encampment to dismantle it Pro-Isreal counter-protestors attacked them for hours trying to dismantle their barricades and physically assaulting them.
So do we hear Scarborough and Sharpton tut-tutting about the “poor behavior” of these Pro-Genocidal attackers? It is very clear who the aggressors are here.
Is this justified because someone was prevented access to a door? Is this justified because someone said “From the River to the Sea?”
Police did not step in to protect protestors from the assault, they arrived later and also attacked the protestors - arresting them.
I think it’s fine to criticize “Anti-Semitism” and to call it out where it has legitimately occurred. I suspect, as shown, that issue may have been ginned up and over-hyped - but ok, yes, it should. be called out. But it should also be fine to criticize these actual attacks that occurred against the Anti-Genocide protestors by Pro-Israel supporters.
The attack on the encampment injured 14 people - some of whom were Jewish, because many of the Anti-Genocide protestors in the encampment are Jews - and according the student reporters - some of whom were themselves attacked by the Pro-Israel protestors — “Someone could have died.”
To be fair, CNN is reporting on this from their offices in New York and Atlanta, the Daily Bruin reporters were there. They were attacked. The reporter from Real News Network was there. Perhaps, they have a clearer perspective on things. They report that the Pro-Zionist mobs came to attack the encampment on several nights.
Mel Buer Real News Network: I’ve been to the UCLA encampment on the first day when they were setting up, and from the jump there have been individuals who tried to agitate these demonstrators, they’ve tried to get a rise out of them, they’ve tried to provoke some sort of violent reaction. And to their serious credit these students have spent a lot of time and energy and effort not responding to that. Trying to deescalate a situation. Trying to keep each other safe. Trying to keep the integrity of the encampment safe.
Because the point is not to get into an argument with counter-protestors, right? The point is to continue to pressure UCLA to divest from the various relationships they have with Israel and to boycott these programs that are funding an occupation and a genocide.
So, to see what happened the other night was essentially counter-protestors, many of them riled up, and angry and throwing slurs over the fences, getting a chance to rip their way into the encampment.
Tensions had been growing for multiple days. It’s not the first instance of violenc where Pro-Isreali counter-protestors were knocking over students, were trying to provoke fights. Some fights broke out even two nights before.
From my assessment, as I was there, these groups - this giant group - probably 150 or so counter-protestors, some of them were University age, some of them were much older, and did not appear to be UCLA students, launching assaults on this barricade. This was consistent for many hours. The bear-mace was in the air. I witnessed a lot of folks getting bludgeoned, parts of the barricades with wooden sticks whatever they could bring. And that was a constant for the 4.5 - 5 hours I was there.
Frankly, I do think these counter-attacks were far worse than anything the encampment protestors were accused of. [Just as January 6 was far worse] This violence was excused by weeks of complaints about Anti-Semitism which may have been mostly hype.
Looks like this time, Bull Connor won.
The attacks on school journalists were also reported by the AP.
Ordered by police to leave the scene of a UCLA campus protest after violence broke out, Catherine Hamilton and three colleagues from the Daily Bruin suddenly found themselves surrounded by demonstrators who beat, kicked and sprayed them with a noxious chemical.
On American campuses awash in anger this spring, student journalists are in the center of it all, sometimes uncomfortably so. They're immersed in the story in ways journalists for major media organizations often can't be. And they face dual challenges — as members of the media and students at the institutions they are covering.
Across the country from University of California, Los Angeles late Tuesday, a student-run radio station broadcast live as police cleared a building taken by protesters on the Columbia University campus, while other student journalists were confined to dorms and threatened with arrests.
Hamilton's attackers wore masks. But she recognized the voice of one as a counter-demonstrator sympathetic to Israel's cause because of prior reporting when some of them filmed her working and harassed her by name. She checked out of a hospital Wednesday after learning that injuries to her arms and chest were bruises.
“While it was terrifying and, honestly, will take a lot of mental processing, the experience confirmed for me the importance of student journalists because we know our campus better than any outside reporter would," said Hamilton, 21. "It has not deterred me from wanting to continue this coverage.”
We’ve seen this before.
The legitimacy of the Floyd protest were constantly undermined by complaints about “Violence and Vandalism.” They said that the movement was “tainted” and “compromised.” What they didn’t pay attention to was the fact that a lot of that violence wasn’t perpetrated by BLM, much of it was done by Boogaloo Bois whose agenda wasn’t “Justice for George Floyd” their agenda is creating chaos and trying to spark a 2nd American Civil War.
From the beginning, from the first attack and fire at a Minneapolis Police station as the protests began - there were
A member of the far-right Boogaloo Boys had admitted he traveled from Texas to Minneapolis in the wake of George Floyd’s death and purported to be a Black Lives Matter supporter while wreaking havoc on the city. Ivan Harrison Hunter, 24, pleaded guilty Thursday to a single count of rioting. He admitted to firing 13 rounds from an AK-47-style rifle into the 3rd Precinct police station as rioters set the building alight in May 2020. He was then filmed yelling “Justice for Floyd!” Hunter wore a distinctive skull mask during the riot that investigators later matched to a video on his Facebook page.
The Boogaloo movement is an extremist, anti-government, often racist movement that aims to start a second American civil war. Court filings allege Hunter came to Minneapolis with two other Boogaloos and also communicated with Steven Carrillo, a Boogaloo accused of fatally ambushing officers in California.
Hunter admitted that he fired 13 rounds from an AK-47-style rifle into the 3rd precinct police station on May 28, 2020, as other rioters looted and set fire to the building after police evacuated. No one was struck by the gunfire.
An outside agent provocateur. Just like the J6 terrorist claim happened to them. Except it didn’t in their case. This violence was used to undermine the entire Floyd movement. Just as it’s being used to undermine the Anti-Genocide movement.
I don’t think that’s a coincidence. I don’t think it’s an accident.
Pro-Isreali counter-protestors attacked the encampment for hours prompting UCLA to bring in police, and instead of arresting the attackers - they arrested those in the encampment. How’s that for irony? How’s that for redirecting and undermining the narrative?
Those kids “got what they deserved.” Now they’ve ruined everything.
Have they?
Now, we’ve had Congress just vote to add “Any Criticism Of Israel” into Civil Rights protections. If this passes the Senate, you can be civil and criminally prosecuted for negative comments about Israel or about Jews.
I thought these people were against “Cancel Culture” - I thought they believed in “Absolute Free Speech?” I thought they believed “Fuck your feelings!”
Apparently, not.
Jews and Israel could soon have special protection that isn’t afforded to any other marginalized group. Saying “From the River to the sea” - no matter what context you intend — could soon be considered a Hate Crime.
They would make it illegal to:
Accuse Jews of being people responsible for real or imagined wrong-doing, by a single Jewish person or group, or committed by non-Jews.
Deny the fact, scope, mechanisms, or intentionality of the genocide of the Jewish people at the hands of the Nazis.
Accuse Jewish citizens of being more loyal to Israel, or to the alleged priorities of Jews worldwide.
It’s one thing to have a difference of opinion, it’s another thing to make it criminal.
You could be sued for saying it. You could be prosecuted. They could use this to Prosecute Columbia or UCLA for so-called “Anti-Semitism” on campus. They could prosecute news anchors who support the Anti-Genocide protests. They could prosecute Trump for saying “Jews aren’t loyal”, they could prosecute Elon Musk for supporting the “Great Replacement Theory.”
[And I wonder how Trump’s buddies Nicholas Fuentes and Kanye West are gonna feel about this?]
Let me end with these words from Prof Gates-Johnson from the Democracy Now interview about the UCLA protest:
Prof Gates Lisa-Johnson: This is something that so many of us feel disgusted by. We are… many of the faculty that I spoke to as late as just 45 minutes ago, were feeling shocked. They’re feeling so disillusioned by the response of the University.
This is a University Administration that has for weeks, for months, equivocated the experience of people who are proclaimed Zionists to those Muslim students who have been doxed and harassed every day. And faculty as well.
And so this is a situation where students have been subjected by the University to complete negation of their experience.
It’s not only here at UCLA but across the world. The idea that — as Amy said earlier — clashes between protestors or there are fights breaking out between two people, were talking about a non-violent protest, were talking about students who have been organizing for months, who are trained, who have taken it upon themselves to educate themselves on tactics of non-violence, and the incredible and brave way that they defended themselves all of these nights.
Of course in the culminating violence of the night before last, and the violence of this night as well as they’ve been gassed, there have been flashbangs that were set off by the LAPD, its just been incredible the way they have responded in the face of the gaslighting that the University has done against them. They have done such an.incredible and brave job than any of us.
And many of us, while we are shocked, we are also understanding as Faculty that thousands and thousands of students across the nation, across the world, have been politicized today. And that there is no way, just because the LAPD and UCLA have mandated the dispersal of students, that this is the end. It is only the beginning because there are so many people now who understsand that this is a movement. It can not be unseen, it can not be put back in the box.
The Faculty and the Students who were not arrested — and even those who were — will continue fighting. They have been radicalized now, radicalized for peace.
You can see that is true here with this interview with UCLA Faculty who vigorously defend their students against the claims of Anti-Semitism (some of the protestors were Jewish and they had a Satyr in the Encampment) and they viciously call out the violent Pro-Genocide agitators who spent hours attacking the encampment. They complain that while the encampment was in place, Genocidal agitators had placed a Jumbo-Tron 20 ft away showing constantly horrific images from Oct 7th (and it’s still there in the background of this video). How’s that for “balance”?
They may use different tactics, but they will still fight.
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I come to this site because of a remark in a related piece of yours in Daily Kos '...... I’m frankly concerned that freely addressing this subject, even here, is not safe.' I assume the risk was of being banned by Daily Kos and I write because I have been banned indefinitely by Daily Kos for a piece on Palestine which panned the British/Western betrayal of Palestine and advocated a one state solution.
I haven't had any substantive reason for the ban beyond that it's caused by 2 'flags'. It appears to be due to:
(i) a 'flagging and panning' I had from one contributor because I had said that Democratic losses in the US 1946 elections had been due to loss of Jewish voters' support. Even if I had been wrong this could not be considered a slur on Jews, it's just a statement about how Jews had voted. In fact it appears to be true. Later in the thread I quoted Wikipedia to that effect and no one challenged it.
(ii) another contributor concurred in the flag but for a different reason. He had asked me to 'clarify' my view re the destruction of Israel and I had at that point not done so - I can't sit reading Daily Kos all day. Later I did respond to him and received no further challenge.
The reasons for the flagging are clearly flabby. Neither of them was challenging my argument as a whole nor its conclusion. I conclude that they were unable to and chose bad tempered nit-picking as an easier alternative.
This brings me to Daily Kos's attitude. It seems clear that discussion of Palestine/Israel on that site is subject to nearly invisible constraints, that at bottom it has a Zionist bias.
Medhi Hasan vs Pier Morgan on the definition of "Intifada."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y4rYh7mBPd4