#the rhetoric that all student protestors are antisemitic endangers us all

[visenyaism]

um. you do know that the uni protests are wildly antisemitic right? like. there are people there who are fully advocating for genocide of jewish people and the rest of the protesters are not only not kicking them out but actively cheering them on. not to mention that the actual effect of the protests has been to take attention away from the people actually suffering in gaza. like, to be clear: i actually agree that universities investing in weapons programs should divest - but the protesters are asking them to violate the civil rights amendment. (yeah, refusing to employ or work with someone because of their nationality or ethnicity is illegal, and rightfully so.). and also to be clear, i think that the universities' reaction and deployment of the police is a massive escalation, morally wrong, and a violation of the right to protest. but just because i don't think the protesters deserve to be killed or seriously physically harmed does not mean i think theyre in the right. hard to believe they care about ethnic cleansing when they support the regimes that have ethnically cleansed their jewish populations.

I don’t think it’s fair to talk about every single protest like they are a single unified entity. there are almost a hundred active encampments all over the country. i also do not think it is fair to say that every single protester is antisemetic or supports regimes that ethnically cleanse jews especially when a significant amount of campus organizing has been undertaken by chapters of jewish voices for peace and that at least in NYC jewish students have been a really big part of the protests.

I find myself alarmed by the media messaging that these protests are about jewish students’ safety versus pro-palestinian protestors organizing, because that narrative also characterizes Jewish people as a political monolith when there are non-token amounts of participation on both sides and equates Judaism with the state of Israel. That messaging is also what is doing the most to take attention off Gaza to me. Almost 35,000 Palestinians have been murdered by the IDF since October, and the American media’s handwringing about the tactics used by student protestors is the distractor here especially because a lot of the reporting out is in bad faith and right-wing agitprop.

Some of the encampments need way better message discipline and organization in terms of who is allowed on board because some of the things i have seen individuals saying and cheering for are genuinely repugnant and antisemetic. But the idea that they are all actively welcoming and cheering on genocidal rhetoric is an overgeneralization that has been used to justify these crackdowns and shut down any criticism of the state of Israel as antisemitic.

the police are not brutalizing students and faculty and journalists and protestors to combat antisemitism or allow jewish students to feel safe on campus, they are doing it to repress dissent. Jewish students deserve to feel safe on campuses. Sending in thousands of military police to beat up students and faculty endangers everyone on campus. I worry that using combatting antisemitism as an excuse for cops to unlawfully arrest and brutalize thousands of people in defense of a foreign country that has murdered 14,000 children in seven months is going to make Jewish students less safe, not more.