Denounce Government Targeting of Students and Institutions of Liberal Education Using Claims of Anti-Semitism

– Kathleen Chandler –


Students at Fashion Institute of Technology, New York City, Gaza Encampment, May 7, 2024

Students, professors, staff and people across the U.S. are rejecting government efforts to criminalize the more than 100 student encampments for Palestine as being anti-Semitic and violent. Students and faculty on campus after campus have brought to the fore that opposing genocide is defending humanity and contributing to the well-being of all. Their encampments embrace this spirit and are welcoming and organizing centres for the rights of all.

President Biden has repeatedly promoted the claim that standing for Palestine is anti-Semitic, as have members of the House of Representatives. The House is passing legislation and is interrogating university presidents, claiming they need to do more to "protect Jewish students" and oppose support for Palestinian resistance, which representatives claim are "calls for genocide." They specifically target the slogans Long Live the Intifada and From the River to the Sea, Palestine Will be Free. Both are well-known to speak to self-determination for Palestine, which stands against genocide. These efforts are not only serving to divert from the daily U.S./Israeli genocide but also put university administrators on the defensive to "do more" or be branded anti-Semitic. This is being widely opposed by students and faculty who persist in their just struggles in support of Palestine.

On May 1 the House of Representatives passed a bill titled the Anti-Semitism Awareness Act by a large majority of 320 to 91. It now goes to the Senate. The bill is in keeping with Biden's attacks on the public's broad and growing opposition to genocide and the slaughter of tens of thousands of Palestinians, most of them women and children, as well as the unprecedented deliberate destruction of homes and civilian infrastructure. The bill is an attempt to make legal the violence of Zionists in the U.S. and Palestine and enshrine in law that opposition to Zionism and the Zionist Israeli state is anti-Semitic. This goes against not only the peoples worldwide who are standing with Palestine, but UN resolutions and stands which long ago determined that Zionism is racism. The bill strengthens the stranglehold on the political power in the U.S. of racist, reactionary Zionists, including Biden who repeatedly says he is a Zionist, and all reactionary forces, as well as strengthening their impunity.

On April 30, House Speaker Mike Johnson said the House Committee on Education and the Workforce's investigation into anti-Semitism on college and university campuses will now become a House-wide probe. Johnson, flanked by leaders of several important House committees, vowed to hold university leaders accountable for "their failure to protect Jewish students." University administrators from Yale, UCLA, and the University of Michigan will be forced to testify at a May 23 committee hearing. This is the same McCarthy-style committee that grilled Harvard and University of Pennsylvania presidents in December, claiming they were "soft" on anti-Semitism, with both forced to resign shortly after. Columbia's president was interrogated April 17, the day on which the Columbia encampment was established. She called for the first police raid on the campus the next day and an even more brutal one April 30 and now has police occupying the campus.

These actions by the House are consistent with Biden's claims that the student encampments are endangering the safety of Jewish students. In his latest statement he said students have "the right to walk across campus safely without fear of being attacked," even though the only attacks have been carried out by Zionist provocateurs and the police. Everywhere the encampments have become gathering areas for collective discussion and learning together for students of all religions and backgrounds. It is this unity and firm stand of the students and faculty against genocide and in support of Palestine and their increasing rejection of the existing electoral set-up which blocks the majority from having a say that Biden and Congress fear.

Despite all evidence to the contrary Biden claimed, "We are not an authoritarian nation where we silence people or we squash dissent." Evidence shows that there is a complete lack of safety for those at the encampments subject to the attacks of police brought in to quell dissent. With a green light from Biden, police in city after city have violently raided student encampments, terrorizing students with tear gas, flash bang grenades, pepper spray, rubber bullets and mass arrests. Still, according to Biden, the issue is violence of the students, not police, not the U.S./Israeli genocide including mass killings and destruction in Gaza.

Biden's statements, along with actions by Congresspeople, make clear that the target is both those standing up to support Palestine and oppose U.S./Israeli genocide and impunity and the institutions entrusted with providing a liberal education consistent with the requirements of a civil society said to serve the public good.

The U.S. has long-since stopped being such a society. Nonetheless, what we are witnessing at this time is the desperation of the narrow private interests which have seized the state's decision-making power at all levels of government to destroy all the institutions of a civil society, its infrastructure and legal and constitutional guarantees. Whether it is via the insidious and criminal so-called rules-based methods used by the Biden administration and espoused by the Democratic Party, or the smash-everything methods used by Trump and his adherents, the aim is the same -- which is to smash whatever fetters lie in the way of the narrow private interests seeking to control everything on the world scale.

After destroying the role of the media to impart information which creates public opinion and undermining the job of public schools to impart general knowledge to students which promotes a common world view about the U.S. and what it stands for -- also a component in the creation of public opinion -- and with the failure of the legislatures to debate policy in a manner which helps create public opinion, the Biden administration is set on undermining the institutions of higher learning. These institutions were created to impart liberal education which sustains the conception of liberal democratic institutions, civil society and public good. It is the latest desperate attempt to impose a neo-liberal anti-social offensive which endorses the U.S. striving for global hegemony at a time when the conditions do not exist for any country in the world to accept the U.S. as an "indispensable nation" to which they must submit without question.

It is no accident that the U.S./Israeli genocide has destroyed Gaza's universities and cultural institutions and killed scholars, doctors, writers, poets, journalists, humanitarian personnel and patriots as well as civilians on a massive scale. It is similarly no accident that international rule of law, the convention on refugees and humanitarian law are smashed on the basis of the use of force and positions of power and privilege because all of these are integral to guaranteeing civil societies based on what was called peace, order and good government. This is seen in the latest U.S./Israeli announcement that after smashing the current Rafah crossing with Egypt to smithereens in an effort to wipe out Hamas, a private firm comprised of former U.S. elite mercenary soldiers will be put in charge of the crossing.[1]

Civil society is under attack and the battle for democracy is the order of the day. This is the battle to uphold all democratic norms and institutions, as the student encampments, faculty, staff and community supporters are doing. It is also making way for the battle of democracy. This is the battle of democratic renewal, of replacing with new mass democratic forms all the arrangements that block society's path to progress, something which the oligarchs who have seized power are dead set on not permitting. This makes the resistance battle of the students on all the campuses even more significant and worthy of encouragement.

Governments of police powers such as those which have taken over in the U.S., Israel, Canada, Britain and other countries operate by demanding unfettered impunity. This makes them dangerous and resistance necessary. The crimes they are committing are also their death knell because the violence, impunity and unprecedented open and blatant criminality are bringing to the fore the necessity for both the battle for democracy and the battle of democracy. Both of these developing struggles represent the striving of humanity for peace, freedom and a democracy of their own making -- and they will prevail. 

Evidence of this is the militant stand taken by the American Association of University Professors which pointed out that the state attacks promoted by the Biden administration are a "political attack intended to dismantle higher education in service to the public interest, and make our institutions beholden only to corporate, political and private interests."

Education, like the media, plays a role in forming public opinion and governments of police powers require that public opinion designed to maintain a public order and civil society be eliminated and any thought of government for the public good destroyed. The aim of their disinformation is to destroy the public form of the body politic so that their rule cannot be effectively challenged in any way. The growing student encampments and support from faculty and staff in the U.S., Canada, Britain, Australia and elsewhere are standing against this. The determined support for Palestine worldwide cannot be legislated out of existence and nowhere are people accepting criminalization of those standing up for Palestine. It is an important historic struggle which commands ever broader support.


This article was published in
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Volume 54 Number 32 - May 9, 2024

Article Link:
https://cpcml.ca/Tmlm2024/Articles/MS54322.HTM


    

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