American students have a long history of forcing change in their otherwise rigid and brainwashed "consumer" society.
They first broke through the taboo of the Vietnam War and ultimately scored a victory when the US army was defeated and forced to withdraw in shame in 1975, with 55,000 US soldiers killed.
Then American university students broke through the much bigger taboo of colonial apartheid white South Africa - which shares in many ways the American mythology of the white "civilizing" pioneer who invades and dominates (when it doesn't decimate) the indigenous colonized population. The students protested and ultimately scored a victory against their appalingly conservative government's insistence of keep propping up the supremacist white apartheid regime: The Boycott-Divest-Sanction movement forced the downfall of the apartheid regime and the liberation of Nelson Mandela.
Similarly, American college and university students have come to realize that there is something highly immoral in the US government's propping up the savage colonial apartheid Zionist regime in Israel which not only invaded and raped most of historic Palestine to establish a racist Jewish supremacist state, but continues in its slow simmering ethnic cleansing and genocide of what remains of indigenous Palestine. By the way, Apartheid South Africa and Zionist Israel were best Fascist friends and allies before the defeat of apartheid rule. All three - the US, South Africa and Israel - were born of the same womb of colonial white European violence against native indigenous populations in the Americas (US), in Africa (South Africa) and Asia (Israel).
Student protests have spread like wildfire across all US university campuses in support of a free Palestine, with the students demanding that their universities stop investing and supporting the abject and criminal regime in Tel Aviv. We can see the end of the dark and deadly tunnel: The conscience of millions of young educated Americans is in rebellion against what the foreign zionist settlers have done, and are doing, to the native indigenous Palestinian population. If history is any guide, this augurs a significant shift in the US blind and submissive policies vis-a-vis Israel, ushers the end of the occupation of Palestine, and the rise of a free Palestinian state.
What will the Columbia school administration do now that it has given the students until Friday to dismantle their protest tents from the campus? Send the national guard and the police? Remember how Kent State University students were massacred by the Ohio National Guard in 1970 for their anti-Vietnam war protests? Is this what criminal minds are plotting right now? To move in and kill a dozen students to deter others from speaking out against Zionist racism, supremacy, and colonialism, and for a free Palestine?
The tide has changed. The dark forces of evil have long insidiously betrayed the American faith in human liberty, and our many troubles, past and present, show us the way ahead and teach us to remain faithful to our principles. Every human being deserves full dignity and liberty. We refuse the attempts by Zionists and their ignorant primitive conservative American allies to relativize the condition of certain human populations: Palestinians are like everyone else. They are not "human animals" as the Zionists call them. They are the victims of the Zionist enterprise that continues to expel them from their lands, steal these lands, and establish a supremacist Jewish-only state.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Dozens arrested on California campus after students in Texas detained as Gaza war protests persist
AUSTIN, Texas (AP) — Police peacefully arrested student protesters at the University of Southern California on Wednesday, hours after police at a Texas university aggressively detained dozens in the latest clashes between law enforcement and those protesting the Israel-Hamas war on campuses nationwide.
While tensions rose between police and protesters at USC earlier in the day, in the evening a few dozen demonstrators standing in a circle with locked arms were detained one by one without incident.
Police officers encircled the dwindling group, which sat in defiance of an earlier warning to disperse or be arrested. Beyond the police line, hundreds of onlookers watched as helicopters buzzed overhead. The school closed the campus.
While universities struggling to defuse unrest have quickly turned to law enforcement, the arrests in California were in sharp contrast to the chaos that ensued just hours earlier at the University of Texas at Austin.
Hundreds of local and state police — including some on horseback and holding batons — pushed into protesters, at one point sending some tumbling into the street. Officers made 34 arrests at the behest of the university and Texas Gov. Gregg Abbott, according to the state Department of Public Safety.
A photographer covering the demonstration for Fox 7 Austin was in the push-and-pull when an officer yanked him backward to the ground, video shows. The station confirmed that the photographer was arrested. A longtime Texas journalist was knocked down in the mayhem and could be seen bleeding before police helped him to emergency medical staff.
Dane Urquhart, a third-year Texas student, called the police presence and arrests an “overreaction," adding that the protest “would have stayed peaceful” if the officers had not turned out in force.
“Because of all the arrests, I think a lot more (demonstrations) are going to happen,” Urquhart said.
Police left after hours of efforts to control the crowd, and about 300 demonstrators moved back in to sit on the grass and chant under the school's iconic clock tower.
In a statement Wednesday night, the university's president, Jay Hartzell, said: “Our rules matter, and they will be enforced. Our University will not be occupied."
North of USC, students at California State Polytechnic University, Humboldt, were barricaded inside a building for a third day, and the school shut down campus through the weekend and made classes virtual.
Harvard University in Massachusetts had sought to stay ahead of protests this week by limiting access to Harvard Yard and requiring permission for tents and tables. That didn't stop protesters from setting up a camp with 14 tents Wednesday following a rally against the university’s suspension of the Harvard Undergraduate Palestine Solidarity Committee.
Students protesting the Israel-Hamas war are demanding schools cut financial ties to Israel and divest from companies enabling its monthslong conflict. Some Jewish students say the protests have veered into antisemitism and made them afraid to set foot on campus, partly prompting a heavier hand from universities.
At New York University this week, police said 133 protesters were taken into custody, while over 40 protesters were arrested Monday at an encampment at Yale University.
Columbia University averted another confrontation between students and police earlier Wednesday. University President Minouche Shafik had set on Tuesday a midnight deadline to reach an agreement on clearing an encampment, but the school extended negotiations, saying it would continue talks with protesters for another 48 hours.
On a visit to campus Wednesday, U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson, a Republican, called on Shafik to resign “if she cannot bring order to this chaos.”
“If this is not contained quickly and if these threats and intimidation are not stopped, there is an appropriate time for the National Guard,” he said.
On Wednesday evening, a Columbia spokesperson said rumors that the university had threatened to bring in the National Guard were unfounded. “Our focus is to restore order, and if we can get there through dialogue, we will,” said Ben Chang, Columbia’s vice president for communications.
[...]Harvard law student Tala Alfoqaha, who is Palestinian, said she and other protesters want more transparency from the university.
“My hope is that the Harvard administration listens to what its students have been asking for all year, which is divestment, disclosure and dropping any sort of charges against students," she said.
Police first tried to clear the encampment at Columbia last week, when they arrested more than 100 protesters. The move backfired, acting as an inspiration for other students across the country to set up similar encampments and motivating protesters at Columbia to regroup.
On Wednesday about 60 tents remained at the Columbia encampment, which appeared calm. Security remained tight around campus, with identification required and police setting up metal barricades.
Columbia said it had agreed with protest representatives that only students would remain at the encampment and they would make it welcoming, banning discriminatory or harassing language.
On the University of Minnesota campus, a few dozen students rallied a day after nine protesters were arrested when police took down an encampment in front of the library. U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar, whose daughter was among the demonstrators arrested at Columbia last week, attended a protest later in the day.
A group of more than 80 professors and assistant professors signed a letter Wednesday calling on the university's president and other administrators to drop any charges and to allow future encampments without what they described as police retaliation.
They wrote that they were “horrified that the administration would permit such a clear violation of our students’ rights to freely speak out against genocide and ongoing occupation of Palestine.”
Perry reported from Meredith, New Hampshire. Contributing to this report were Associated Press journalists in various locations including Joey Cappelletti, Will Weissert, Larry Lage, Steve LeBlanc, Dave Collins, Jim Salter, Haven Daley, Jesse Bedayn, John Antczak, Julie Walker and Joseph Krauss.
Meanwhile, another ex-State Department official confirms how the Israeli military gets 'special treatment' on its record of abuses and violations of every law and norm of basic humanity. He recently helped oversee human-rights compliance by foreign militaries receiving American military assistance, and revelaed on Wednesday that he repeatedly observed Israel receiving “special treatment” from U.S. officials when it came to scrutiny of allegations of Israeli military abuses of Palestinian civilians.
Before stepping down in August, Charles O. Blaha was a director of a State Department security and human rights office closely involved in helping ensure that foreign militaries receiving American military aid follow U.S. and international humanitarian and human rights laws. He is the second senior State official involved in that relationship to assert that when it comes to Israel, the U.S. is reluctant to enforce laws required of foreign militaries receiving American aid. “In my experience, Israel gets special treatment that no other country gets,” Blaha said. “And there is undue deference, in many cases, given to Israeli officials’ side of things when the U.S. asks questions about allegations of Israeli wrongdoing against Palestinians, he added.
Blaha and other members of an unofficial, self-formed panel of former senior U.S. civilian and military officials released a report pointing to civilian deaths in specific airstrikes in Gaza. They said there was “compelling and credible” evidence that Israeli forces had acted illegally. Blaha's comments echoed those of another State Department official and panel member, Josh Paul. Paul resigned as a director overseeing arms transfers to other countries' militaries in October in protest of the U.S. rushing arms to Israel amid its war in Gaza.
Asked about the allegations from the two, a State Department spokesman, Vedant Patel, said “there is no double standard, and there is no special treatment.”
Israel historically is the United States' biggest recipient of military aid, and Biden on Wednesday signed legislation for an additional $26 billion in wartime assistance. But Biden has come under growing pressure over that support as Palestinian deaths mount. In coming days, the administration says it will announce its official findings from reviews it did into allegations of especially serious human rights abuses by specific Israeli military units. Those units would be barred from receiving U.S. military aid if the U.S. review confirms those allegations.
Wednesday's unofficial report points to 17 specific strikes on apartments, refugee camps, private homes, journalists and aid workers for which these former U.S. experts find no evidence of the kind of military target present to justify the high civilian death tolls.
They include an Oct. 31 airstrike on a Gaza apartment building that killed 106 civilians, including 54 children. Israeli officials offered no reason for the strike, and a Human Rights Watch probe found no evidence of a military target there, the officials said. Israel has said in many of the instances that it is investigating.
The double standard from which genocidal Israel has benefited for so long is evidence of a long-standing collusion by the United States with the criminal colonial state of Israel. How then does anyone with a brain believe that the US can be an honest broker in the Palestine conflict? The US is not an honest broker: It has been fooling the Arabs with promises that never materialized. For decades, it has scared the numskull Arab regimes, most of which are dictatorships and absolute monarchies, with the Iranian boogeyman in order to force them to comply and accept the growing Israeli cancer colony in their midst.
No comments:
Post a Comment