University students across the country, facing mass arrests, suspensions, evictions and expulsions are our last, best hope to halt the genocide in Gaza.
Where have all the flowers gone? – Mr. Fish
By Chris Hedges
in Princeton, N.J.
Scheer Post
Achinthya Sivalingam, a graduate student in Public Affairs at Princeton University did not know when she woke up this morning that shortly after 7 a.m. she would join hundreds of students across the country who have been arrested, evicted and banned from campus for protesting the genocide in Gaza.
She wears a blue sweatshirt, sometimes fighting back tears, when I speak to her. We are seated at a small table in the Small World Coffee shop on Witherspoon Street, half a block away from the university she can no longer enter, from the apartment she can no longer live in and from the campus where in a few weeks she was scheduled to graduate.
She wonders where she will spend the night.
The police gave her five minutes to collect items from her apartment.
“I grabbed really random things,” she says. “I grabbed oatmeal for whatever reason. I was really confused.”
Student protesters across the country exhibit a moral and physical courage — many are facing suspension and expulsion — that shames every major institution in the country. They are dangerous not because they disrupt campus life or engage in attacks on Jewish students — many of those protesting are Jewish — but because they expose the abject failure by the ruling elites and their institutions to halt genocide, the crime of crimes.
These students watch, like most of us, Israel’s live-streamed slaughter of the Palestinian people. But unlike most of us, they act. Their voices and protests are a potent counterpoint to the moral bankruptcy that surrounds them.
Emory's Caroline Fohlin is knocked down by the police while shouting: “I’m a professor!!” Hear the disbelief in her voice. She never expected to be treated like this by her own university for protesting Israel's slaughter.
But remember, democracy is on the ballot in Nov… pic.twitter.com/rDiWDlCH9e
— Trita Parsi (@tparsi) April 26, 2024
Not one university president has denounced Israel’s destruction of every university in Gaza. Not one university president has called for an immediate and unconditional ceasefire. Not one university president has used the words “apartheid” or “genocide.” Not one university president has called for sanctions and divestment from Israel.
Instead, heads of these academic institutions grovel supinely before wealthy donors, corporations — including weapons manufacturers — and rabid right-wing politicians. They reframe the debate around harm to Jews rather than the daily slaughter of Palestinians, including thousands of children.
They have allowed the abusers — the Zionist state and its supporters — to paint themselves as victims. This false narrative, which focuses on anti-Semitism, allows the centers of power, including the media, to block out the real issue — genocide. It contaminates the debate. It is a classic case of “reactive abuse.” Raise your voice to decry injustice, react to prolonged abuse, attempt to resist, and the abuser suddenly transforms themself into the aggrieved.
Princeton University, like other universities across the country, is determined to halt encampments calling for an end to the genocide. This, it appears, is a coordinated effort by universities across the country.
The encampment at George Washington University in Washington D.C. (Joe Lauria)
The university knew about the proposed encampment in advance. When the students reached the five staging sites this morning, they were met by large numbers from the university’s Department of Public Safety and the Princeton Police Department.
The site of the proposed encampment in front of Firestone Library was filled with police. This is despite the fact that students kept their plans off of university emails and confined to what they thought were secure apps. Standing among the police this morning was Rabbi Eitan Webb, who founded and heads Princeton’s Chabad House. He has attended university events to vocally attack those who call for an end to the genocide as anti-semites, according to student activists.
As the some 100 protesters listened to speakers, a helicopter circled noisily overhead. A banner, hanging from a tree, read: “From the River to the Sea, Palestine Will be Free.”
The students said they would continue their protest until Princeton divests from firms that “profit from or engage in the State of Israel’s ongoing military campaign” in Gaza, ends university research “on weapons of war” funded by the Department of Defense, enacts an academic and cultural boycott of Israeli institutions, supports Palestinian academic and cultural institutions and advocates for an immediate and unconditional ceasefire.
But if the students again attempt to erect tents – they took down 14 tents once the two arrests were made this morning – it seems certain they will all be arrested.
“It is far beyond what I expected to happen,” says Aditi Rao, a doctoral student in classics. “They started arresting people seven minutes into the encampment.”
Statue of George Washington draped in Palestinian flag at protest on Thursday at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. (Joe Lauria)
These students, she added, could be suspended or expelled.
Biden has sparked a wildfire. pic.twitter.com/YXbHCKONcm
— Edward Snowden (@Snowden) April 25, 2024
Sivalingam ran into one of her professors and pleaded with him for faculty support for the protest. He informed her he was coming up for tenure and could not participate. The course he teaches is called “Ecological Marxism.”
“It was a bizarre moment,” she says. “I spent last semester thinking about ideas and evolution and civil change, like social change. It was a crazy moment.”
She starts to cry.
A few minutes after 7 a.m, police distributed a leaflet to the students erecting tents with the headline “Princeton University Warning and No Trespass Notice.” The leaflet stated that the students were
“engaged in conduct on Princeton University property that violates University rules and regulations, poses a threat to the safety and property of others, and disrupts the regular operations of the University: such conduct includes participating in an encampment and/or disrupting a University event.”
The leaflet said those who engaged in the “prohibited conduct” would be considered a “Defiant Trespasser under New Jersey criminal law (N.J.S.A. 2C:18-3) and subject to immediate arrest.”
A few seconds later Sivalingam heard a police officer say, “Get those two.”
Hassan Sayed, a doctoral student in economics who is of Pakistani descent, was working with Sivalingam to erect one of the tents. He was handcuffed. Sivalingam was zip tied so tightly it cut off circulation to her hands. There are dark bruises circling her wrists.
“There was an initial warning from cops about ‘You are trespassing’ or something like that, ‘This is your first warning,’” Sayed says.
“It was kind of loud. I didn’t hear too much. Suddenly, hands were thrust behind my back. As this happened, my right arm tensed a bit and they said ‘You are resisting arrest if you do that.’ They put the handcuffs on.”
He was asked by one of the arresting officers if he was a student. When he said he was, they immediately informed him that he was banned from campus.
“No mention of what charges are as far as I could hear,” he says. “I get taken to one car. They pat me down a bit. They ask for my student ID.”
BREAKING: IVY LEAGUE PRINCETON UNIVERSITY START AN ENCAMPMENT FOR GAZA
The police quickly stormed the scene and arrested dozens of students.
The oppression of the establishment continues. Israel controlled. pic.twitter.com/OgYxapif8Y
— Sulaiman Ahmed (@ShaykhSulaiman) April 25, 2024
Sayed was placed in the back of a campus police car with Sivalingam, who was in agony from the zip ties. He asked the police to loosen the zip ties on Sivalingam, a process that took several minutes as they had to remove her from the vehicle and the scissors were unable to cut through the plastic.
They had to find wire cutters. They were taken to the university’s police station.
Sayed was stripped of his phone, keys, clothes, backpack and AirPods and placed in a holding cell. No one read him his Miranda rights.
He was again told he was banned from the campus.
“Is this an eviction?” he asked the campus police.
The police did not answer.
He asked to call a lawyer. He was told he could call a lawyer when the police were ready.
“They may have mentioned something about trespassing but I don’t remember clearly,” he says. “It certainly was not made salient to me.”
He was told to fill out forms about his mental health and if he was on medication. Then he was informed he was being charged with “defiant trespassing.”
“I say, ‘I’m a student, how is that trespassing? I attend school here,’” he says.
“They really don’t seem to have a good answer. I reiterate, asking whether me being banned from campus constitutes eviction, because I live on campus. They just say, ‘ban from campus.’ I said something like that doesn’t answer the question. They say it will all be explained in the letter. I’m like, ‘Who is writing the letter?’ ‘Dean of grad school’ they respond.”
Sayed was driven to his campus housing. The campus police did not let him have his keys. He was given a few minutes to grab items like his phone charger. They locked his apartment door. He, too, is seeking shelter in the Small World Coffee shop.
Sivalingam often returned to Tamil Nadu in southern India, where she was born, for her summer vacations. The poverty and daily struggle of those around her, to survive, she says, was “sobering.”
“The disparity of my life and theirs, how to reconcile how those things exist in the same world,” she says, her voice quivering with emotion. “It was always very bizarre to me. I think that’s where a lot of my interest in addressing inequality, in being able to think about people outside of the United States as humans, as people who deserve lives and dignity, comes from.”
She must adjust now to being exiled from campus.
“I gotta find somewhere to sleep,” she says, “tell my parents, but that’s going to be a little bit of a conversation, and find ways to engage in jail support and communications because I can’t be there, but I can continue to mobilize.”
There are many shameful periods in American history. The genocide we carried out against indigenous peoples. Slavery. The violent suppression of the labor movement that saw hundreds of workers killed. Lynching. Jim and Jane Crow. Vietnam. Iraq. Afghanistan. Libya.
The genocide in Gaza, which we fund and support, is of such monstrous proportions that it will achieve a prominent place in this pantheon of crimes.
History will not be kind to most of us. But it will bless and revere these students.
Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who was a foreign correspondent for 15 years for The New York Times, where he served as the Middle East bureau chief and Balkan bureau chief for the paper. He previously worked overseas for The Dallas Morning News, The Christian Science Monitor and NPR. He is the host of show “The Chris Hedges Report.”
This is from the author’s Scheer Post. Republished with the author’s permission.
The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
Free Palestine! From the river to the sea!
If you look at Snowden’s college protest map, it clearly reflects the areas of land deeply contaminated with Zionism. Look at Florida, Georgia, Missouri , California: Zionist Superfund Sites Too bad we can’t call FEMA…oh but wait, FEMA is broke from Climate Change…so Biden Keeps funding the slaughter! Emory President Greg Fenves escaped back to LULLWATER MANSION in full panic mode for double bourbon after his letter to campus was FALSE STATEMENT to his own students and faculty…many of whom were body-slammed, tazer’d, tear-gassed and caught rubber bullets, (which easily blind people) by beefy IDF-KKK-ADP Cops.
The US is not a democracy, people aren’t ‘free’, they don’t have freedom of speech and expression, what’s left of their human and civil rights are trampled upon, and the regime has become openly totalitarian. The rest of the West is just as bad, in some cases worse.
Why even pretend anymore? It’s so far out in the open, that only an un-‘infected’ person could doubt the harsh reality of what the country has become.
November’s elections, after which the outcome will not be accepted by many – regardless of who wins, will probably be the trigger for mass uprisings, and possible civil war.
I have never experienced the sensation of feeling “allied” to any large group of contempory Americans before this week.
I was born in 1961, in Texas, and wiggled my way through intense cognitive dissonance until my mid-teen years, often waiting for Walter Cronkite to tell me what’s up (oh, really?) in Vietnam, and listening to idiots’ explanations of its cause and purpose — cuz there’s Cohmuhnism. Through study of that conflict (during the continuing US war binging in Latin America), I finally resolved the dissonance in my late-teens. It morphed into alientation from my “Pepsi Generation” contemporaries at UT in Austin, and onwards into work-life in TX, CA, and London. I finally moved out in 1999, to Brazil.
I endured at least 15 years of being attacked by large numbers of US Stasi apparatchiks, high and bloated on the US’ GWOT Torture Budgets, allocated to the massive COINTELPRO 2.0+ industry that exploded after Sept. 11, 2001. It was torture; no other word or phrase can more precisely describe it. No one reading this post could actually listen to the stories I can tell. (Naturally, torturers experience euphoria about my stories. Psychopaths do what psychopaths do.)
All my suspisions about The Great American People were validated, and my hatred and disrespect for the US gen-pop became pure.
Now, I am reading reports and watching videos coming from US campuses, and I see people who identify themselves as Americans, who I can also see as allies. This is quite novel. I see a large group of Americans I can admire, whether they like it or not.
I do not relish the idea that many protesters are being put on lists the US domestic torture industry constantly update. Their experiences will not be pleasant, and they will find out who their friends and familiy really are (not), when they try to explain how they are being attacked. Some will not survive it, some (like me) will come out of it with more self-respect. I can lend a bit of helpful advice: never view yourself through any coward’s eyes, no matter who, no matter what.
To those of you who deserve my respect, best of luck. You’ll need it. To the radically evil civil-cowards who make up the majority of that society, no so much.
At what point does a country lose its soul?? Its right to criticize any other country when as the U,S. does, violates every norm, every value extolled by institutions and their so called leaders? At what moment did the bell toll announcing the end of decency and morality. I must have missed the sound of the bell, but before my eyes I see the cruelty, hear the lies, and watch as innocent students, many of whom are first generation college attendees, stand up and say no, never, we won’t be part of this ugliness even if you threaten to destroy our young lives with expulsion, jail terms, prison, and a criminal record. We will persevere, we will fight for decency, rule of law, moral or legal, because above all, we value integrity, kindness and equality for all. And genocide is the antithesis of all that the U.S. and the universities are doing. Bravo, my darling students and all who support you. Your Bravery stands in contrast to the world around you. Blessings from a former student at Columbia who stood up against the wrongful Vietnam war, and the misappropriation of land belonging to the people of Harlem. Justice will be served, but not unless we block those who would kill our constitution and universal values.
Only the people can save themselves; and that means a bottom up revolution to take the reins of our countries, and that means go against our governments and elites which see our sons and daughters as they see the Ukrainians in Ukraine, expendable resources, cannon fodders, weapons to be dispose when no longer works, impossible to repair or too costly.
This is perhaps the type of dehumanization that goes unnoticed; when our sons and daughters are no longer relevant as individuals and they become mere tools for the few who believe (for some reasons we can’t quite understand) to be superior (other than because we elected them out of stupidity, laziness, boredom and naivety), when they feed our children only one source of information to nourish their brain, when governments deny the right to protest and express their feelings and emotions. That is also dehumanizing people.
Is also dehumanizing our children when they make them guilty for seeking truth, for exploring, for mistrusting, for wanting to know more and go deeper, for challenging the narrative, calling them antisemitic or Putin apologists.
It is also dehumanizing them for seeking peace, for feeling empathy for the “enemy”, for still seeing it as a human, for not rejoicing when many of them are killed, for feeling anger and disappointed of our politicians and governments…
The worst type of dehumanization is when the governments dehumanize their own people in order to dehumanize the enemy.
We can save ourselves, with simple actions, for example many youtubers from the west now go to China, Iran, Russia to show the beauty of those countries and people, to re-humanize the people our media and government have dehumanized. That is going to war as well.
I am a Jew. I am a 97 year old woman who is appalled at what Israel does in my name.
I am NOT and antisemite.
You are a genuine human being. Our leaders are not.
The tactics employed by the police in smashing the encampments set up in protest to the Israeli genocide and the arrest and expelling of students appear identical to those used to crush the Occupy Movement. Launched by the Obama administration local, state and federal authorities carried out coordinated attacks on Occupy encampments essentially at the same time across the country. If current actions do not suppress the student protests against genocide I fear the authorities move to plan B: lethal violence. Students protesting the Vietnam War were gunned down at Kent State, Jackson State and violence and the threat from violence prevailed elsewhere.
As Chris Hedges pointed out not one university president has mentioned genocide, supported the students, or challenged the false narrative that opposing Israeli genocide is synonymous with antisemitism.
WHEN IN THE HORROR OF HUMAN EVENTS)
A nation declares war on the People.
When those who speak out, the police rush in —
Enshrine them all in the sheriff’s steeple.
When do we too -have a chance , we must win!
Jailed for the crime — but we’re not criminal!
To pummel us all— how dare we exist!
In a daze we see — no fairness– life’s dismal!
In what land do we live ? Where cops rule all?
America,—-oh so quickly you fall. : (
The Jewish people are the Jewish people, who exist everywhere like most ethnic classes. The protests are not really against them. Israel is a military launch pad, with a military mission in support of Deep State objectives. The 7.6 million Jewish people in Israel are placeholders to justify the launch pad (like US placeholders in Germany, Korea, etc.). The Deep State’s tendrils are all over this mess. I do understand the issue of supporting a state’s objectives, and the inherent guilt involved. We used to condemn the German public for supporting Hitler (while trying not to be arrested or tortured). Now, what can we say?
My respect to all opposed to the genocide in Gaza, Especially the good people of USA standing up and opposing this. You too Chris, you paragon of truthful reporting. Solidarity from a citizen of the UK.
Why should the ruling class oppose genocide? After all, this nation was built on genocide.
you are right. Guilty as charged, and still doing it, here and in other countries.
I got a simple question. If Jews can have a country, why can’t the Palestinians?
And of course, we now know that the IHRA definition of anti-Zionism as simply antisemitism, adopted several years ago by the UK, Germany and the US after intensive lobbying by the Israeli government and its US thinktank supporters, was the planned predecessor of this ongoing genocide. These things don’t occur in the order in which they occur by accident. It is so obviously coordinated that one must question the actions of many people in the past being key players to the genocide now occurring. That is why they are shutting down (illegally) the legal protests of college students. This whole event has been in planning for a long time. There can be no question of that fact anymore. And there can be no question of either political party in the US being known as “the lesser of two evils.”
I constantly think I am beyond being shocked but am then proved wrong. Today I saw videos of the Atlanta PD – invited there by the University management – treating peaceful protestors at Emory University with the utmost brutality. A black person on the ground, handcuffed and then totally gratuitously tasered. A female professor trying to reason with a policeman slung to the ground and handcuffed. An eye witness alleged black students were being targetted…..
In the 70’s I went on anti-racism, workers’s and women’s rights, and pro abortion protests, and everything seemed so optimistic. It now seems everything we fought for then is being rolled back at an alarming rate. I am obviously getting on in years now, and never in my wildest imagination did I think there would be so much conflict in the world and such suppression of rights the world over. I suspect I shall go to my grave a very sad and despairing old woman. If, after reading Drew Hunkin’s comment, I get the privilege to even do that…
Eternal thanks to Chris Hedges for his invaluable witness to the courage and brilliance of the students opposing the ongoing genocide of the Palestinians. The g word was rejected on MSNBC this morning by a US spokesman. We are in an upside down world.
The massive pressure organized by Zionists on everyone demonstrates not only the extent of their control over US foreign and domestic policies, but how they have utterly undermined the pillars of the United States constitution and its experiments with democracy and liberty. Thankfully, a large number of Jews are making clear that Zionism is not synonymous with Judaism as nothing increases antisemitism more worldwide than the crimes against humanity of which Israel has been blatently guilty for three quarters of a century, seamlessly filling the space in immorality vacated by the Nazis. Zionism is succeeding where the Nazis failed and fascism, apartheid and genocide in their most brutal forms ever, have utterly corrupted many decent people in the United States and Europe with only brave university students, now seeing their lives destroyed in reprisal, standing in the way. The phrase “never again” has never rung more hollowly.
As a student at Princeton in the late 1960s, we led one of the major college uprisings after Richard Nixon’s invasion of Cambodia in the spring of 1970, exactly 54 years ago.
It is a joy to see Princeton, once again, “in the nation’s service” . . .
In this atmosphere, beware any would-be Terry Normans!
“In the four decades since Ohio National Guardsmen fired on students and antiwar demonstrators at Kent State University, Terry Norman has remained a central but shadowy figure in the tragedy.
The 21-year-old law enforcement major and self-described “gung-ho” informant was the only civilian known to be carrying a gun — illegally, though with the tacit consent of campus police — when the volatile protest unfolded on May 4, 1970. Witnesses saw him with his pistol out around the time the Guardsmen fired.
[…]
In October, a Plain Dealer-commissioned exam of a long-forgotten audiotape from the protest focused new attention on Norman. Enhancement of the recording revealed a violent altercation and four gunshots, 70 seconds before the Guard’s fusillade. Forensic audio expert Stuart Allen said the shots are from a .38-caliber pistol, like the one police confiscated from Norman minutes after the Guard shootings.”
Source:
John Mangels, “Kent State Shootings: Does Former Informant Hold the Key to the May 4 Mystery?,” The Plain Dealer (Cleveland), December 19, 2010
I get it is a cushy job with prestige but not a single one of the university presidents financially needs it. They all choose status over common sense and soul.
Evidently their fealty to wealth has destroyed their souls. Money corrupts.
Just read today that the guy was from the FBI who fired prior to the Guardsmen responded in a column written by Dennis Kucinich.
I suppose it’s going to become more obvious to people: this government is pro-genocide, pro-censorship, anti-Constitution, anti-free speech, prone to mischief and mayhem.
Blessings to the good people who are standing against it. Let us mark clearly that the tendencies that we have called fascist are running not just one major party but both. That said, the internationalist, globalist fascism might deserve that we coin another name–not because it is less vicious or onerous than its predecessors, but because through refinements in propaganda and in financial sleight-of-hand it has left authentic dialogue and representation of stakeholders yet another step further back.
We have long lived through a time of assassins. These days the killers reach populations.
The absolutely magnificent student demonstrations that are currently taking place at several prestigious private colleges and major state universities are a clear indication that American support for Israel is slowly beginning to wither away. Over the past half-century pro-Israel zealots and Zionist partisans have wielded an extremely strong hand throughout the mass media. With the advent of the Internet, social media, TikTok, and Twitter to a certain extent, the fact that Israel has been a repugnant colonial power presently committing genocide has finally seeped into the consciousness of millions. This is one of the big reasons the powers-that-be are trying to ban TikTok and censor other independent online outlets. The technology has made an end run around the Zionist gatekeepers.
Israeli leaders and pro-Israel functionaries understand better than anyone via extensive polling and sociological research that soon a majority of the US population will no longer support the racist and sadistic land-grabbing Zionist state.
This is precisely why the Israeli Defense [sic] Forces just committed one of the most odious war crimes of the past 50 years in bombing the Iranian consulate in Damascus, killing at least eight high-ranking Iranian military officials. This deplorable act was done to bait Iran into a massive military response in order to force Washington’s hand to attack Iran. Israel’s dream, virtually since its founding, is for a complete regime change to take place in Tehran so a Zio quisling leadership takes over. Tel Aviv doesn’t have the power to defeat Iran by conventional military means and has consistently desired that the US wage war on Iran.
It’s noteworthy that the Zionist power configuration is so pervasive and powerful throughout the West that the UK, France and the United States all failed to condemn Israel’s unprecedented war crime against the consulate in Damascus!
Moreover, Israeli leaders bombed the Iranian consulate in the hopes of precipitating a major Washington attack on Iran because Russia, China and the rest of the BRICS along with the New Silk Roads (BRI) are swiftly moving the world into a novel paradigm of multi-polarity in which Israel and the US will merely be regular nation-states; no longer will they be able to unilaterally sanction and violently attack and invade independent nations across the Middle East and the world.
Ergo we currently see a desperate Israel incredibly eager to speed things up in which a quick and decisive American attack on Iran occurs before it’ll be politically and economically impossible to carry out. Tel Aviv’s paranoia has reached a fever pitch.
Hovering in the background of all this is the Samson Option. Arguably the most terrifying phenomenon today. Israel’s declared Samson Option is such that if Israel ever perceives itself to be jeopardized to the point that Israel would no longer exist, Tel Avi will commit murder suicide against the rest of the world by launching its 250 nuclear weapons. The Zionist entity thereby destroys humanity.
Israel’s Samson Option is nothing compared to the US Nuclear First Strike doctrine. Blaming it all on Zionism is inaccurate: recall Kent State?
Recall Occupy? The Battle of Rincon Hill? The West Coast General Strike? This is nothing new at all, and is typical. The US has been a brutal imperial power since day one. Ask the American Indians, Indigenous Peoples and ask Native Hawaiians about it.
As Chris Hedges will tell you, and has written: Bombing Korea into the Stone Age in the early 1950s, Carpet bombing SE Asia and mass murdering over a million people, leaving a toxic legacy and unexploded ordinance to this day. Supporting Death Squads in Haiti, El Salvador etc. has nothing to do with Zionism. Please don’t be so selective in your criticism of imperial policy.
Zionism is thee number one problem right now, period. The Zionist power configuration’s control of our media and the ZPC’s McCarthyite attacks on free speech are completely intolerable and must be challenged.
You ignore the points I made, and ignore the points Chris Hedges makes. WTF? Have you read any history?
Agreed.
Yes, the entire series of wars in the Mideast is due to Zionist bribery of the US government.
The other militarist factions are the MIC, favoring war anywhere, and the anti-socialists.
Excellent points Sam F. One can see you’re well read in all facets of the paradigm of the Zionist-Washington imperial power