#college protests

[secular-jew]

LMFAO

[drsonnet]

#US, #ISRAEL : Human Rights in #Gaza. Cartoon by Ahmad Qaddura:

[anarchywoofwoof]

Student protests calling for divestment from Israel on university campuses around the United States are the latest sign of public discontent with the Israel-Palestine conflict. Some notable violent clashes have recently taken place, such as on the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) campus, where demonstrators and counter-demonstrators fought at a student encampment overnight on 30 April. However, between 7 October and 3 May, the overwhelming majority of student demonstrations — 97% — have remained peaceful.

…

Police intervention against conflict-related student demonstrations increased by more than eight times in April compared to March. Since October, police have arrested demonstrators and physically dispersed crowds much more frequently at demonstrations with counter-demonstrators. However, in cases where student demonstrators have gathered unopposed, police have intervened against pro-Palestine demonstrations more than five-and-a-half times as often as pro-Israel demonstrations.

[memys-art-stuff]

It is vital that we keep the efforts of so many students across the United States from going to waste. We need to keep the momentum going and ensure that news of the cruelty happening to the people of Palestine is not ignored or suppressed.

Despite what many news outlets may have you believe, what is happening in our world is not minor in the slightest. It is a genocide that is happening before our eyes, day after day. Do not forget the administrative responses these colleges have given to the act of bringing attention this inhumanity. This is history happening now, and these colleges are on the wrong side of it.

These students are calling to divest college funds from Israel. Do not let the media warp their efforts and paint them as an antisemitic mob. Do not let those opposing these demonstrations hide behind claims of antisemitism to justify their actions. This is about stopping human suffering, and to believe anything different is willful ignorance.

[bonesashesglass]

I needed to share this because this was so incredibly moving. This girl is so incredibly strong❤️❤️❤️🇵🇸🇵🇸

[odinsblog]

“I had a Zionist grandmother who grew up, she grew up in Poland, she was supposed to go to Israel to study. Her father had paid for her for the first year of tuition. And then in 1939, when she was in her last year of high school, Germany and the Soviet Union invaded Poland.

She ended up for a couple of years in the Soviet-occupied part of Poland, which was how she ended up in Moscow. And by the time Germany occupied all of Poland. So then she spent the rest of her life living in Moscow.

And 45 years after the end of the war, dreaming of being able to go to Israel, but not being able to because she was now stuck in the Soviet Union. And so I think I was very infected by, infected in a non-derogatory sense, by my grandmother's dream of Israel. And I had my own dream of Israel growing up as a, as a Jewish kid who was bullied and beaten up and teased.

I just wanted to live in a country that, that was majority Jewish. I could not understand why my parents would want to go to the United States and live in another country where Jews are in the minority. My parents on the other hand just didn't want to be Jewish.

Like their only experience of being Jewish was being systematically discriminated against. They were both born during the Second World War, so they were second generation, utterly non-religious and separated from any Jewish tradition, except the tradition of being a targeted minority. So they just, they just wanted to go somewhere where they wouldn't be Jewish.

And so when I was 15, a year after we moved to the United States, I actually went to Israel planning to stay there and didn't. For a variety of reasons, but one of them was being confronted with, with what I found at the age of 15, a shockingly racist society.

So the first time I went to Israel was when I was 15, it was 1982. And then there was like an 18, 17 or 18 year gap.

And I started traveling to Israel regularly from 1999, 2000. And the first time I went back was to actually complete the research on the book about my grandmother's. So it's been a good 25 years that I've been coming back.

And I think Israel has undergone a lot of changes in that time. But no, I don't think that like the kind of Ashkenazi Sephardic racism that shocked me in 1982 has found subtler expressions. But politics of settlement have only been exacerbated.

And I still find them extremely painful to observe, especially because some of my beloved relatives are settlers.

I did visit them this last time I was in Israel, because I really wanted to see what it looked like for them.

I was compelled to go visit them because of a Facebook post that my cousin made. And just to give you an idea, I really hold these people very, very dear. But for years, I would go to Israel, Palestine and not tell them that I was there, because I kind of couldn't face them.

So it's been a number of years since I last saw them, a number of years since I went to that settlement. But my cousin had posted something on Facebook. It was a picture of her son playing the violin.

And she wrote, in one of the houses where they stayed in Gaza, there was a violin. He played for his soldiers and then put the violin back. And I found that post-heart-rending and eye-opening, the picture of him playing the violin was not from Gaza.

It was from earlier, but he had apparently told her about playing the violin in Gaza. And obviously she was worried about her son serving in Gaza and so she's posting about it. And she wants to assert that he is a good boy.

But also, entirely missing from that post and from her world view is that somebody lived in that house in Gaza. That violin belonged to somebody. Like, it was such an extraordinary example of the blindness that we were talking about a little bit earlier that I wanted to go visit them and kind of engage with that blindness more.

And I got a really good dose of blindness to the point where, and we had this incredible moment when we went walking around the settlement after Shabbat lunch. And we sort of got to this hilltop where there's a swing and there's a little free library.

And we're looking out on a Palestinian village. And I said, what are we looking at, to my cousin? And she was trying to get her bearings.

And she said, where are we looking? And she named another settlement, which was kind of, which was not on our line of sight. It was like this literal example of looking at an actual Palestinian village that she drives past every day.

And before the village was sealed off after October 7th, she used to get gas there. And she knows it exists. But somehow she, also it also doesn't enter her geography.

It is nameless.”

—Masha Gessen, the descendant of Holocaust survivors, discusses the dehumanization of Palestinians (part 2 of 3)

[half-of-the-alphabet]

This black student sings gospel (which originated from slaves) as she's carried away by black policemen, who likely heard the same song in church, but practice the tradition handed down from slave patrols. What a sight to behold.

This student is not showing us a cause for hope and celebration, but rather they unyielding determination and spirit activists have. This struggle nay not cause what we want immediately, but it is still our struggle. It is our destiny, as humans, to struggle. And struggle we will, until change is seen.

[baby-girl-aaron-dessner]

[thetourguidebarbie]

Look you can say that the students with Hezbollah flags quoting hitler are "not part of your movement" all you want but they ARE in fact sitting at the protests long enough for people to take pictures of them and post them on the internet without getting told to leave so ??????

[victusinveritas]

[drsonnet]

Hind Rajab was a 5 year old girl in Gaza who was killed while she hid alone in a car, along with the paramedics who tried to rescue her. Yesterday students at Columbia seized the administration building and renamed it in her honor.

Gadzooks Bazooka Instagram: gadzooks_bazooka

Remembering #HindRajab & children in #Gaza: This is what the mother of the child, Hind Rajab . https://tmblr.co/ZTeZMyfB_GHeeu00

UPDATE FROM

@sunnydice: (and please don't forget Layan Hamadeh , her 15 yr old cousin who was trapped with her or Yusuf Zino and Ahmed Al-Madhoun who bravely volunteered to try to save hind and were murdered by the IOF )

DrSonnet — هذا ما قالته والدة الطفلة هند رجب عندما سمعت بخبر... (tumblr.com)

[singing-not-sleeping-beauty]

Something I think is so important to acknowledge with the Columbia university protests is that these students were the class of 2020

the seniors, passing up on their college graduation, where once high schoolers denied their prom & graduation due to a global pandemic that the American government scoffed at.

They are not children protesting a war they "don't understand", these are students at one of the most prestigious academic institutions in the world, they are well educated young adults looking back at the milestones that have been taken from them and willingly letting go of their second chance, because that is how strongly they believe in this cause

[floralcavern]

“They wrongfully silenced us and took away our free speech on these campuses!”

You literally stabbed someone in the eye!

[odinsblog]

“I'm observing such a huge gap between different social groups that I didn't even realize were different. I, you know, most of my friends are in the media. A lot of my journalist friends are just much better informed.

A lot of them have had experience reporting in Israel, Palestine, and are quite critical of both Israel and the antisemitism narrative. Then, like, my wife is a lawyer, and her circle is a little bit different, right? It's not dominated by media people, like people in the law or in other professions seem to be broadly much more kind of taken by the sense of profound insecurity and shift in the American Jewish experience.

I think we sort of see different things, for example, when we watch the hearings in Congress on antisemitism on campus.

The university presidents, of which there have now been two hearings, one with three presidents, one with the president of Colombia, and there will be many, many more. And what I see is a right-wing campaign against higher education that is weaponizing antisemitism as an idea, right? Not antisemitism as a practice.

And what they see is, with the possible exception of the president of Colombia, is people who represent institutions or lead institutions that they feel an affinity with, often institutions that they graduated from, who are not standing up for them. Which I find that viewing of those hearings somewhat shocking because people seem to be turning off their critical faculties. But people, intelligent, educated, politically astute people don't turn off their critical faculties unless they're scared.

So I think the underlying fear is real. But just because it's real, it doesn't mean it's justified.

I think a factual account of what we're seeing on campuses now is that this generation of Americans is far more critical of Israel than their parents' generation. And this is true of both Jews and non-Jews. I think that they look at information available to them and they see a 57-year brutal illegal occupation.

And they don't understand how it's possible that their parents and the politicians that their parents support and the politicians who come and give commencement addresses and all that other stuff that I can say about politicians, how it is possible that these people support that state? I think that is an entirely understandable view. It also reflects a huge generation gap.

I think some of those young people are assholes, and some of them are antisemites. I think it's a small minority of the protesters, and it is not actually part of the critique. The protesters' demands, the protesters' organizing beliefs are not in any way or shape antisemitic.

And then there are Jewish students who were brought up Zionist, who were brought up to identify strongly with the state of Israel, who are, I think, a little bit like my cousin in the settlements again. They see these protests, and even probably the participation of their fellow Jewish students in these protests, as threatening their core identity, as threatening their ties to their families, as threatening everything that they were taught for the first 18 years of their lives is true. And of course they feel rattled, of course they feel unsettled, of course they feel threatened.

Like, wouldn't you, if you felt that everything you had believed in was being turned on its head, and if you, by apparently reasonable people? And so you have a couple of options. One is to look at what the protestors are saying, to engage with the facts, to engage with the critique of everything you've ever believed.

There was a terrific, George Curran's podcast a couple of weeks ago with three Columbia students, one of whom sort of narrated that kind of trajectory, getting to university and finding this stuff out and having their mind blown. That's a very difficult path, and it's a very difficult path, especially if you are, say, a first year student in 23, 24.

And then there's the easier path of staying integrated in your community, in your beliefs, and saying this is antisemitic.

Because unfortunately the things that the protestors are talking about are so horrible that you can't say, okay, let's agree to disagree, that you can't hold both of these things in your mind at the same time.

You can't continue to hold your family's uncritical, long-standing support of Israel, and an understanding of what is happening in Gaza and the occupation that has preceded the war in Gaza.

So yeah, of course they feel rattled. That doesn't mean that they're being surrounded by antisemitism.”

—Masha Gessen, the descendant of Holocaust survivors, discusses campus protests (part 3 of 3)

[spamitami]

yes, iran IS bad. if you find yourself defending the fucking ISLAMIC REGIME OF IRAN then maybe take a few steps back and see how far into the rabbit hole of propaganda you have fallen, because oh my lord the number of pro-iran government posts that i have seen here is alarming. and i can guarantee you that these are mostly white leftists who live in first world countries saying these things.

people on here are trying to whitewash this regime, to make it fit into their good v bad, oppressor v oppressed narrative. it doesn't work like that, the world doesn't work like that. you are defending a misogynistic homophobic theocratic dictatorship.

women in iran have been EXECUTED for not wearing their hijab PROPERLY (not even taking it off, just wearing it the wrong way). women have been beaten, raped, and forced to live under a theocratic dictatorship, and you sing the regimes praises because 'west bad'.

the regime literally funds terrorist organizations all over the middle east, including hezbollah and hamas. on october 7th, iran technically attacked israel as well as hamas.

a lot of people are talking about how israel bombed an embassy. israel attacked the building next to the embassy, not the embassy itself. It was a consulate and did not have the same international protections. Of the 7 dead from the consulate bombing, 5 were members of terrorist group IRGC. 2 of the dead had coordinated terrorist attacks on leaders and were high ranking officials.

israel bombing the consulate was a response to the way that iran uses their proxies to fight israel. this is a shadow war that they have been fighting for years now, and you really expose your dumb ignorant asses when you pretend that the israeli bombing of the iranian consulate was just a random attack.

when you say 'iran has a right to defend itself', you are not standing up for the civilians of iran, you are standing up for the terrorist government.

[lilithism1848]