XPost: uk.legal, soc.culture.jewish, comp.misc   
   XPost: alt.politics.democrats, alt.atheism   
   From: void@invalid.noy   
      
   BY DANIEL FALCONE   
      
   College campuses and universities across the country have organized   
   some of the largest peace activities and anti-war protests since 1969.   
   As the social movement points in specific directions in calling for   
   Palestinian liberation, over 100 schools scattered across the United   
   States from American to Yale University have participated and issued   
   their own sets of “Five Demands.”   
      
   College students especially are utilizing and expanding their   
   educational experiences and cutting their activist teeth on campus in   
   the form of teach-ins, demonstrations, lectures, speeches, and   
   creative art, largely on their own but also with facilitation and   
   professors in solidarity. Further, it’s not lost on young people   
   elsewhere, as news of the movement reached the Gazan children along   
   with families expressing their gratitude.   
      
   A common reaction to the widespread nature and success stories on the   
   part of the student activists has been for naysayers to label and   
   paint the demonstrators and demonstrations as antisemites engaging in   
   antisemitic activity. Perhaps a tool and offshoot from the modern   
   hasbara playbook. Its purpose is to draw suspicion over a real and   
   authentic concern of historical and current antisemitism.   
      
   There are several ways critics and campus protest skeptics have   
   constructed their own reality to undermine student resistance. The   
   methods include counter-protesting, the calling of police, message   
   distortion, flimsy polling data, and the utilization of the mainstream   
   press.   
      
   From the look of the counter-protesting, the goals look fairly   
   obvious. First, counter-protesting presupposes that the Mideast world   
   was a tidy and peaceful place on October 6th and that Iranian and   
   Lebanese proxies simply created a need for power and dominance to   
   defend “good states” (US, Israel, Saudi Arabia) from “bad states”   
   (Yemen, Iran, Syria) on October 7th.  As reported by journalist Joshua   
   Frank, one Columbia professor’s motivation to counter-protest wasn’t   
   based on any intellectual argument at all but rather significant   
   familial ties to arms manufacturing.   
      
   Secondly, counter-protesting invites people to think that Israeli   
   force and Palestinian resistance present a “both sides” argument (bad)   
   and this ranges to counter-protesting that characterizes Netanyahu   
   policy as self-defense (worse). Another motivation of   
   counter-protesting is to draw ire and/or elicit a slip up in words or   
   actions from budding activists in a further effort to categorize them   
   as antisemitic. Hecklers of the encampments have tried to test random   
   students with gotcha questions regarding geography (re: from the   
   Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea), to sending in staged   
   distractions to enhance the possibility of media spectacle. These   
   techniques haven’t amounted to much but the proposition alone that   
   they are feasible is enough to warrant a concern regarding perhaps the   
   ultimate goal of counter-protesting – to necessitate a presence for   
   law enforcement.   
      
   The idea and symbolic presence of law enforcement in the face of the   
   encampment promotes the idea that the cops are there to catch bad   
   people and to ensure that good kids can safely get to class (they   
   always could) when in fact the role of the police hasn’t changed since   
   the days of ancient societies. That is, the main roles of the police   
   are to protect private property and concentrations of wealth and power   
   from well-organized outside forces of resistance. Often, it is the   
   police force’s duty to make sure that mass movements and mobilization   
   techniques are struck down while maintaining a highly stratified   
   society based on law and order. Universities are complicit businesses   
   that must carry on undisturbed just as free enterprise must remain   
   steady.   
      
   It does not help the students either that almost all of New York   
   City’s political class, as an example, is tied to the established   
   order and Biden’s bipartisan consensus when it comes to the   
   Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Although they differ from Republicans,   
   Eric Adams and Kathy Hochul are poised to undermine the student’s   
   resistance just as they are to cut public resources whenever their   
   respective donor classes apply economic or political pressure. When a   
   mayor or governor cannot deviate very far from the established order,   
   the police become willing combatants against the students and   
   professors. The misinformation on the part of the police was best   
   illustrated when the NYPD Commissioner held up a copy of Oxford’s Very   
   Short Introduction Series (Terrorism) believing it was a student’s   
   “how to” book. It served as a microcosm for how the entirety of the   
   encampments have been misunderstood by people with authority.   
      
   One of the more bizarre aspects of the politics of encampment are how   
   the detractors purposefully change the meaning of protest rhetoric as   
   a scare tactic. In response, it reached a level of such carelessness   
   that a Peace Action Group in New York went out of its way to prohibit   
   signs, slogans, and chants at one of their pro-Palestine rallies. They   
   feared that saying such words as “decolonize,” “intifada,” and   
   “revolution,” (even when Jewish activists wanted to use these words)   
   all constituted terms beyond their control. This form of liberal   
   respectability unfortunately played into the hands of the forces   
   attempting to “other” the campus protests. This wasn’t liberal   
   rationality to eliminate infantile leftism as a knee jerk reaction,   
   but servility to power and privilege to protect their organization.   
      
   It gets worse. In a recent Hillel Poll, it found that 61% of college   
   students surveyed cited antisemitism on campus in the wave of protests   
   and encampments. If that wasn’t bad enough, they also concluded that   
   intimidation and assault were increasing because of the protests,   
   while disrupting the ability to attend class (as if student engagement   
   is not a part of higher educations’ purpose). Sociologist Eman   
   Abdelhadi has documented the dialogue and mutual respect found in the   
   encampments that counters Hillel’s forms of cooked data that frames   
   hand selected polls to intentionally distort specific points of view.   
      
   Although Hillel’s polling might be more of a political reaction to the   
   reality that many campus demonstrators are in fact Jewish, and not   
   antisemites, it nonetheless sounds convincing, especially when you do   
   not wish to deny a student’s experience or feelings on the matter.   
      
   International relations scholar Richard Falk indicated to me that   
   Hillel polls are suspect for a variety of reasons. First, the polls   
   serve as ways to discourage activism that a strong majority of Hillel   
      
   [continued in next message]   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)