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As Peace Protests Are Violently Suppressed, CNN Paints Them as Hate Rallies

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Original article by JULIE HOLLAR republished from FAIR under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

As peace activists occupied common spaces on campuses across the country, some in corporate media very clearly took sides, portraying student protesters as violent, hateful and/or stupid. CNN offered some of the most striking of these characterizations.

CNN‘s Dana Bash (Inside Politics, 5/1/24) blames the peace movement for “destruction, violence and hate on college campuses across the country.” 

Dana Bash (Inside Politics, 5/1/24) stared gravely into the camera and launched into a segment on “destruction, violence and hate on college campuses across the country.” Her voice dripping with hostility toward the protests, she reported:

Many of these protests started peacefully with legitimate questions about the war, but in many cases, they lost the plot. They’re calling for a ceasefire. Well, there was a ceasefire on October 6, the day before Hamas terrorists brutally murdered more than a thousand people inside Israel and took hundreds more as hostages. This hour, I’ll speak to an American Israeli family whose son is still held captive by Hamas since that horrifying day, that brought us to this moment. You don’t hear the pro-Palestinian protesters talking about that. We will.

By Bash’s logic, once a ceasefire is broken, no one can ever call for it to be reinstated—even as the death toll in Gaza nears 35,000. But her claim that there was a ceasefire until Hamas broke it on October 7 is little more than Israeli propaganda: Hundreds of Palestinians were killed by Israeli forces and settlers in the year preceding October 7 (FAIR.org, 7/6/23).

‘Hearkening back to 1930s Europe’

“They didn’t let me get to class using the main entrance!” complains Eli Tsives in one of several videos he posted of confrontations with anti-war demonstrators. “Instead they forced me to walk around. Shame on these people!”

Bash continued:

Now protesting the way the Israeli government, the Israeli prime minister, is prosecuting the retaliatory war against Hamas is one thing. Making Jewish students feel unsafe at their own schools is unacceptable, and it is happening way too much right now.

As evidence of this lack of safety, Bash pointed to UCLA student Eli Tsives, who posted a video of himself confronting motionless antiwar protesters physically standing in his way on campus. “This is our school, and they’re not letting me walk in,” he claims in the clip. Bash ominously described this as “hearkening back to the 1930s in Europe.”

Bash was presumably referring to the rise of the Nazis and their increasing restrictions on Jews prior to World War II. But while Tsives’ clip suggests protesters are keeping him off UCLA campus, they’re in fact blocking him from their encampment—where many Jewish students were present. (Jewish Voice for Peace is one of its lead groups.)

So it’s clearly not Tsives’ Jewishness that the protesters object to. But Tsives was not just any Jewish student; a UCLA drama student and former intern at the pro-Israel group Stand With Us, he had been a visible face of the counter-protests, repeatedly posting videos of himself confronting peaceful antiwar protesters. He has shown up to the encampment wearing a holster of pepper spray.

One earlier video he made showing himself being denied entry to the encampment included text on screen claiming misleadingly that protestors objected to his Jewishness: “They prevented us, Jewish students, from entering public land!” (“You can kiss your jobs goodbye, this is going to go viral on social media,” he tells the protesters.) He also proudly posted his multiple interviews on Fox News, which was as eager as Bash to help him promote his false narrative of antisemitism.

‘Attacking each other’

“Security and [campus police] both retreated as pro-Israel counter-protesters and other groups attacked protesters in the encampment,” UCLA’s student paper (Daily Bruin, 5/1/24) reported.

UCLA protesters had good reason to keep counter-protesters out of their encampment, as those counter-protesters had become increasingly hostile (Forward, 5/1/24; New York Times, 4/30/24). This aggression culminated in a violent attack on the encampment on April 30 (Daily Bruin, 5/1/24).

Late that night, a pro-Israel mob of at least 200 tried to storm the student encampment, punching, kicking, throwing bricks and other objects, spraying pepper spray and mace, trying to tear down plywood barricades and launching fireworks into the crowd. As many as 25 injuries have been reported, including four student journalists for the university newspaper who were assaulted by goons as they attempted to leave the scene (Forward, 5/2/24; Democracy Now!, 5/2/24).

Campus security stood by as the attacks went on; when the university finally called in police support, the officers who arrived waited over an hour to intervene (LA Times, 5/1/24).

(The police were less reticent in clearing out the encampment a day later at UCLA’s request. Reporters on the scene described police in riot gear firing rubber bullets at close range and “several instances of protesters being injured”—LA Times, 5/3/24.)

The mob attacks at UCLA, along with police use of force at that campus and elsewhere, clearly represent the most “destruction, violence and hate” at the encampments, which have been overwhelmingly peaceful. But Bash’s description of the UCLA violence rewrote the narrative to fit her own agenda: “Pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian groups were attacking each other, hurling all kinds of objects, a wood pallet, fireworks, parking cones, even a scooter.”

When CNN correspondent Stephanie Elam reported, later in the same segment, that the UCLA violence came from counter-protesters, Bash’s response was not to correct her own earlier misrepresentation, but to disparage antiwar protesters: Bash commended the Jewish Federation of Los Angeles for saying the violence does not represent the Jewish community, and snidely commented: “Be nice to see that on all sides of this.”

“For me, never again is never again for anyone,” says a Jewish participant in the UCLA encampment (Instagram, 5/2/24).

‘Violence erupted’

Bash wasn’t the only one at CNN framing antiwar protesters as the violent ones, against all evidence. Correspondent Camila Bernal (5/2/24) reported on the UCLA encampment:

The mostly peaceful encampment was set up a week ago, but violence erupted during counter protest on Sunday, and even more tense moments overnight Tuesday, leaving at least 15 injured. Last night, protesters attempted to stand their ground, linking arms, using flashlights on officers’ faces, shouting and even throwing items at officers. But despite what CHP described as a dangerous operation, an almost one-to-one ratio officers to protesters gave authorities the upper hand.

Who was injured? Who was violent? Bernal left that to viewers’ imagination. She did mention that officers used “what appeared to be rubber bullets,” but the only participant given camera time was a police officer accusing antiwar students of throwing things at police.

Earlier CNN reporting (5/1/24) from UCLA referred to “dueling protests between pro-Palestinian demonstrators and those supporting Jewish students.” It’s a false dichotomy, as many of the antiwar protesters are themselves Jewish, and eyewitness reports suggested that many in the mob were not students and not representative of the Jewish community (Times of Israel, 5/2/24).

CNN likewise highlighted the law and order perspective after Columbia’s president called in the NYPD to respond to the student takeover of Hamilton Hall. CNN Newsroom (5/1/24) brought on a retired FBI agent to analyze the police operation. His praise was unsurprising:

It was impressive. It was surprisingly smooth…. The beauty of America is that we can say things, we can protest, we can do this publicly, even when it’s offensive language. But you can’t trespass and keep people from being able to go to class and going to their graduations. We draw a line between that and, you know, civil control.

CNN host Jake Tapper (4/29/24) criticized the Columbia president’s approach to the protests—for being too lenient: “I mean, a college president’s not a diplomat. A college president’s an authoritarian, really.” (More than a week earlier, president Minouche Shafik had had more than a hundred students arrested for camping overnight on a lawn—FAIR.org, 4/19/24.)

‘Taking room from my show’

**** MISSING IMAGE (difficult for WordPress to copy) **** captioned “The majority of news since the war began…has been skewed by a systemic and institutional bias within the network toward Israel,” a CNN staffer told the Guardian (2/4/24).

Tapper did little to hide his utter contempt for the protesters. He complained:

This is taking room from my show that I would normally be spending covering what is going on in Gaza, or what is going on with the International Criminal Court, talking about maybe bringing charges. We were talking about the ceasefire deal. I mean, this—so I don’t know that the protesters, just from a media perspective, are accomplishing what they want to accomplish, because I’m actually covering the issue and the pain of the Palestinians and the pain of the Israelis—not that they’re protesting for that—less because of this.

It’s Tapper and CNN, of course, who decide what stories are most important and deserve coverage—not campus protesters. Some might say that that a break from CNN‘s regular coverage the Israel’s assault on Gaza would not altogether be a bad thing, as CNN staffers have complained of “regurgitation of Israeli propaganda and the censoring of Palestinian perspectives in the network’s coverage of the war in Gaza” (Guardian, 2/4/24)

The next day, Tapper’s framing of the protests made clear whose grievances he thought were the most worthy (4/30/24): “CNN continues to following the breaking news on college campuses where anti-Israel protests have disrupted academic life and learning across the United States.”

Original article by JULIE HOLLAR republished from FAIR under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

Continue ReadingAs Peace Protests Are Violently Suppressed, CNN Paints Them as Hate Rallies

Antisemitism: The Big Lie Smearing Campus Protesters

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Original article by RICHARD ESKOW republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). 

Pro-Palestinian demonstrators and workers gather and take to the streets to protest against Israeli attacks on Gaza during ”May Day Rally” in New York, United States on May 01, 2024.  (Photo by Selcuk Acar/Anadolu via Getty Images)

The people who make, report, and teach history should take note: it has never been kind to those who spread Big Lies. This time will be no different.

Mainstream journalists and politicians have engaged in a campaign of mass slander against U.S. college students protesting the Gaza genocide. Their “antisemitism” Big Lie echoes the racist hate campaigns of the past, inciting hostility toward young people whose only crime is their dedication to justice.

A newly published survey provides some important context for these protests and undermines the smear campaign against the protesters.

Students Are Not Antisemitic

The Chicago Project on Security and Threats (CPOST), a project of the University of Chicago, recently published “Understanding Campus Fears After October 7 and How to Reduce Them,” subtitled “a non-partisan analysis of Antisemitism and Islamophobia among College Students and American Adults.” Robert A. Pape, political scientist and CPOST’s director, writes that its findings “are an opportunity to re-center the national discussion around students and away from politics.” Let’s hope so.

Understandably, Pape and his colleagues focus on the steps that should be taken to make all students feel safe on campus, regardless of religion, ethnicity, or politics. In doing so, their report includes important findings that deserve wider attention.

Their “antisemitism’ Big Lie echoes the racist hate campaigns of the past, inciting hostility toward young people whose only crime is their dedication to justice.

Is there a “climate of antisemitism” on campus? CPOST’s study found that college students are less Islamophobic than the general population, but they are not more antisemitic. The level of student bias against Jews is the same as their bias against Muslims, but no greater.

Why, then, is there a national debate about campus antisemitism and none about the comparable scourge of Islamophobia? What message does that send to the Muslim students whose fears are being ignored?

The Protests Aren’t Antisemitic, Either

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries wants a vote on the “Countering Antisemitism Act,” but neither he nor the president have proposed similar safeguards against Islamophobia. House Speaker Mike Johnson, who said that Columbia protesters have begun “to threaten lives and intimidate and harass people,” has an even more draconian antisemitism bill—also without plans to address Islamophobia.

President Biden, like the others, has condemned what he calls “antisemitic protests.” That slur is challenged by the Chicago study. The authors found that “while college students are not more antisemitic than the general population,” they are “more anti-zionist.” They also found that “prejudicial antisemitism and anti-zionism are largely separate phenomena,” with an “overwhelming” absence of any overlap between antisemitism and a negative view of Israel.

We’ve know for decades that the lie which equates anti-zionism with antisemitism serves a political goal by suppressing speech. We now have evidence to back it up.

“From the River to the Sea”

One protest slogan has been cited over and over as “antisemitic,” with accusers claiming it calls for genocide against Jews: “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.”

Most students do not use it in anything approaching a genocidal way. The CPOST study found that only 14 percent of Muslim students, or roughly one in seven, interpret that slogan “to mean the expulsion or genocide of Israeli Jews.” That figure is too high, as is the 13 percent of students who believe that violence against Muslims is sometimes justified. But it also tells us that most people who use the slogan are not calling for harm against anyone.

Does antisemitism exist among [protesters]? Since it is pervasive in this society, the answer is yes. But amplifying a comment or two from a couple of isolated individuals is a totalitarian smear tactic.

That makes sense, since the phrase can be interpreted nonviolently in at least two ways. One is that a two-state solution should include the territory ceded to Palestine in 1948, which touched both the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. Another is that Israel and Palestine should become a single, democratic, non-racial and non-theocratic state, with rights and safety for all. Under that interpretation, “Palestine will be free” is no more a call to genocide than “South Africa will be free” was a call to kill whites during the anti-apartheid struggle.

The study does note that the slogan makes two-thirds of Jewish students feel unsafe. For that reason, Pape recommends avoiding it.

But we now have confirmation that campus officials, politicians, and the media are misleading the public about that phrase. They’re endangering the protesting students and worsening the fears of pro-Israeli students. They should stop.

Conclusion

The political scientist Bernard Cohen once wrote that, while the press isn’t always successful and telling people what to think, “it is stunningly successful in telling people what to think about.” The student protests are a textbook example. The debate around these protests is focused on the false charge of antisemitism, not on the moral challenge raised by the protesters.

Does antisemitism exist among them? Since it is pervasive in this society, the answer is yes. But amplifying a comment or two from a couple of isolated individuals is a totalitarian smear tactic. Republicans did it with the racist Willie Horton ads in 1988. Trump does it when he highlights crimes allegedly committed by immigrants. And politicians, journalists, and college administrators are doing it today with their charges of protester antisemitism.

CPOST’s moderate recommendations for easing campus fears include, “Clear and immediate communication by college leaders condemning violence and intimidation by students and against students on their campuses.” Instead, those leaders are ordering police violence against protesting students, as they and the political/media elite stoke more fear and hatred against them—even in the wake of the anti-protestor mob violence at UCLA. That isn’t just wrong; it’s a dereliction of duty.

As leaders, these prominent individuals have been entrusted with the care and protection of the nation’s young people. Instead, they’re slandering them and putting them at risk. Why? To distract us from a genocide.

The people who make, report, and teach history should take note: it has never been kind to those who spread Big Lies. It won’t be this time, either.

Original article by RICHARD ESKOW republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). 

Continue ReadingAntisemitism: The Big Lie Smearing Campus Protesters

Students’ Gaza protests spread across Britain

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https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/students-gaza-protests-spread-across-britain

A student adjusts a sign at an encampment on the grounds of Newcastle University, protesting against the war in Gaza, May 2, 2024

Wave of campus occupations launched at six unis

THOUSANDS of pro-Palestine students across Britain are mobilising at their universities to demand an end to “complicity in Israel’s genocide” following violent demonstrations across US campuses.

Students in Leeds, Newcastle, Manchester, Sheffield and Bristol have joined peers in Warwick by pitching tents outside university buildings in protest against the war in Gaza.

Bristol students said they were golding the action “in protest of the university’s complicity in Israel’s genocide of Palestinians,” while Apartheid Off Campus Newcastle said its own action was to “highlight the institution’s investment strategy and its complicity in the Israeli military’s war crimes.”

Student activists elsewhere have also held marches and protests.

…

https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/students-gaza-protests-spread-across-britain

Continue ReadingStudents’ Gaza protests spread across Britain

Students stand with Palestine, Palestine stands with students

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Original article by Natalia Marques republished from peoples dispatch under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 (CC BY-SA) license.

People in Yemen express their support for US students protesting genocide (Photo via @Aldanmarki/X)

Fighting people across the world show support with the student movement in the US facing repression

“We, the students of Gaza, salute the students of Columbia University, Yale University, New York University, Rutgers University, the University of Michigan, and dozens of universities across the United States who are rising up in solidarity with Gaza and to put an end to the Zionist-US genocide against our people in Gaza,” wrote the Student Frameworks Secretariat, composed of a variety of student organizations part of larger resistance groups and left parties—including but not limited to the Islamic Resistance Movement, the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, the Islamic Jihad Movement in Palestine, Fatah, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, and the Palestinian People’s Party. The Gazan students are expressing their support for the dozens of student encampments that have emerged in the United States, in which students occupy public spaces in their universities to demand that their institutions divest from Israel.

“We welcome the examples of solidarity offered by students facing arrest, police violence, suspension, eviction, and expulsion in order to demand that their universities end their complicity in the Zionist-US genocide and renounce their support for the occupation and the war profiteers that arm it,” the students stated, referring to the central demand of divestment that has been leveraged by students in the encampments. 

Palestinians sheltering in the without tears humanitarian camp in Rafah have created banners in support of US students, which they have hung on their tents. The banners read “From Rafah we send you strength,” “the children [of] Gaza are proud of you,” and “thank you students for Columbia uni.”

On April 26, millions gathered on Sana’a Square in Yemen, some holding banners with images from the US student encampments. Their banners showed images from Columbia and other encampments across the country, and featured slogans such as: “To the brave American students, stand your ground! Yemen stands with you! For a free Palestine!” “Dear American Student: They can arrest you, but they can never break your spirit!” and “The Columbia encampment was just the spark! Long live the great student revolution!”

Bisan Owda, a Gazan journalist whose on-the-ground broadcasts of the Israeli genocide have reached millions if not billions across the world, released a video applauding the student protesters. “I’ve lived my whole life in Gaza Strip and I’ve never felt hope like now,” she said. “For the first time in our lives a Palestinians, we hear a voice louder than their voices and the sound of their bombs…It’s children and youth who are leading the movement now for a free Palestine, putting everything they have on the line to demand justice, an end to the genocide, and a new era of the world.”

Students staging peaceful encampments have been met with brutal force by their administrations, who have launched police attacks.

Police deployed snipers near the Gaza Solidarity Encampment at Ohio State University, and beat, tased, and arrested protesters. 

Students were also brutalized while staging an encampment at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. Students at the Emory Gaza Solidarity Encampment had drawn powerful links between the struggle for Palestine and the struggle against Cop City, a multi-million dollar urban warfare training ground for US police. Students demanded not only divestment of the university from Israel, but also to divest from the construction of Cop City. 

Emory students were brutalized by Atlanta police within hours of setting up their encampment. Police fired rubber bullets and teargas at protesters, tased a student, and detained both students and faculty.

On the night of April 24, Emerson College students in Boston, staging an encampment in solidarity with Gaza, were brutally evicted by Boston police. So brutally, in fact, that video from the next day showed city workers hosing off what appeared to be blood from the streets of the former encampment.

Students across the country staging encampments in solidarity with Palestine, in opposition to the genocide and in favor of liberation, have been subject to all manner of state repression. Faculty have watched in horror as their administrations call the police to brutally arrest students, many of whom are undergraduates. 

In response to the University of Texas – Austin calling in state troopers to arrest students staging a Gaza Solidarity Encampment, faculty at the university expressed deep concern “for our students’ well-being and safety.” 

“We have witnessed police punching a female student, knocking over a legal observer, dragging a student over a chain link fence, and violently arresting students simply for standing at the front of the crowd,” the faculty stated. “There can be no business as usual when our campus is occupied by city police and state troopers who are preventing our students from engaging in a peaceful demonstration of their first amendment rights.” The faculty are calling for what is effectively a strike, declaring, “No business as usual tomorrow. No classes. No grading. No work. No assignments.”

Ansar Allah in Yemen, which has been boldly resisting Israeli genocide through its blockage of ships with ties to Isreal in the Red Sea, released a statement condemning the police crackdown on student protesters. “This unjustified repression exposes the falsity of the US government’s claims to defend freedom, protect human rights, and spread democracy,”  the organization declared. “We affirm the right of American citizens to demonstrate peacefully, and we value the moral stance of the demonstrators, which expresses an increased state of societal awareness in the face of the official US policy supporting Israeli crimes in Gaza.”

Original article by Natalia Marques republished from peoples dispatch under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 (CC BY-SA) license.

Continue ReadingStudents stand with Palestine, Palestine stands with students