Link.
Quoting:
The ease and speed with which law enforcement and prosecutors have moved to suppress First Amendment speech, assembly, and petition rights is breathtaking. That they’re doing it at the instance of university administrations – including at the University of Minnesota – is ominous.
Older readers will recognize the echo from the Vietnam era. That time of dissent and protest brought down a sitting president: this might, too. The criminal Richard Nixon followed Lyndon Johnson, and the criminal Donald Trump may follow Joe Biden. If President Biden trades democracy for Bibi Netanyahu, it will make the Vikings’ trade for Herschel Walker look really good.
The protests seem only to grow with each crackdown.
This was all foreshadowed for me by the suspension of two Somali Muslim teenage girls by the administration at Edina (Minnesota) High School in October of last year. The U.S. Department of Education opened a Title VI investigation into the suspensions. I think you can draw a straight line between Edina’s actions and that of Columbia, Emory, the University of Texas at Austin, and the University of Minnesota.
[...]
Really, I KNOW you can draw that straight line. You can read about the involvement of the Jewish Community Relations Council in the Edina suspensions at the links above, and if you read reporting surrounding campus arrests around the country, you will also read about pressure on university administrations by Israeli advocacy groups like the America Israeli Public Affairs Council (AIPAC) and by Israeli-aligned university donors. Over half of the Congress has received money from AIPAC-aligned groups; it seems often that they are a congress member’s largest contributor.
Don Samuels’ primary campaign against Ilhan Omar last cycle was funded by a lot of AIPAC-aligned dollars, and it will be this cycle, too. According to news reports, AIPAC is committed to spending $100 million to defeat congressional candidates who do not express adequate fealty to Zionist Israel.
Groups like AIPAC and the JCRC have been working hard for years to take criticism of Israeli apartheid, land grabbling, and violence against Palestinians off the table for criticism. They’re behind the anti-BDS (Boycott, Disinvest, Sanction) legislation passed around the country, including in Minnesota, as well as efforts in Congress to sanction BDS speech and activity.
Ilhan Omar called all of this the effect of the ‘Benjamins,’ and she was right. For the sin of telling the truth, Rep. Omar was heavily criticized by Democratic leadership in the Congress. Well, and by Ron Latz, too.
People make fun of Boomers these days, but a lot of Boomers got their heads cracked bringing about a change in attitudes about the Vietnam war. Their grandkids seem embarked on the same mission about Israel. Good for them.
It was heavy on my mind that reporting of the arrests and suppression of free speech arising out of Gaza protest movements was not cast by any major media in a deja vu context; as if the sixties were something to be ashamed of. The truth - the Kent State murders and the immediately following Jackson State murders were an eye opener which has allowed this set of eyes to stay open, skepticism over government suppression of free speech being not easily forgotten once eyes have been opened to it.
Timmer deserves accolades for casting current events in a sane historical context to see power misuse being a thing which is not a one-time happening.
Of note - the greater purity of the current unrest. It is not our military industrial complex flexing and posing, this time, as in Iraq back in Bush days, but instead events unfolding on the other side of the globe now happen with no US boots on that ground; with no threats of our youth being drafted into death so that the complex could flex, as was the case in Vietnam. (Being the armory, however, is nothing to which pride can easily attach.)
It is a sense of the difference between decency and indecency; of offense and grossly disproportionate repercussions at play, something both more subtle but also more fundamental at play. The Hamas incursion into southern Isreal being more real than the Tonkin Gulf lies is a fact, and Israel has cause to seek to visit retribution on Hamas. Nonetheless, killing civilians is not a legitimate way of acting, while an understandable motive is that in doing it "Israel's way" the Israelis do lessen the IDF military death toll of revenge, which is a legitimate aim.
But with Mossad and Shin Bet and all the spooks and spook skill sets Israel has, do you trust entirely the claim that Israeli leadership was caught pants-down, by surprise? Or was a bit of carnage a prior price to pay in order to terrorize the entire millions of Gaza citizens facing starvation, disease, and killing by air and land, as the way to cancel Hamas? A figleaf for a policy awaiting an event to pose as the figleaf - is hard to avoid suspecting.
A parallel does hold, Vietnam and the secret Laos war were to "contain China" and now Israel seeks to "confront Islamic terror." The US reached a post-Mao consensus that China's turn to capitalism was a fair trade for our not fighting any longer against a bogus Communist major menace, when that elitist control bloc of their nation moved from ideology to money counting, the same ostensible god of our own control-bloc elite. They changed behavior, we eased up on the "contain 'em" bit of silliness. Oligarchies understand one another.
Much more meandering of thought - in multiple directions - can follow Timmer's correctly analogizing Gaza protests to Vietnam protests generations ago. He wrote what needed writing.
UPDATE: Timmer further fleshes out his theme via in-item links and the sidebar links posted next to his opening image. It all hangs together more tightly if links are followed.
FURTHER UPDATE: After Bibi claimed student protests and others protestding Israeli conduct against Gazans was "antisemitism," Bernie created a video instructing Bibi Netanyahu what "antisemitism" is and is not, with a caveat to Bibi, "Don't insult the intelligence of the American people." Forbes' post on YouTube of that video - THIS LINK.
Netanyahu lies as unconvincingly as Trump lies. Kindred souls, lying similarly.
FURTHER: Both Netanyahu and Trump face charges of corruption. Moreover, HuffPo, reporting of the Sanders rebuttal of Bibi fiction, wrote:
The video and an accompanying written statement came the day after Netanyahu called the recent upswell of antiwar protests at American college campuses “horrific,” characterizing them as “antisemitic mobs.”
The student protesters are broadly calling for the U.S. to stop sending military aid to Israel and for educational institutions to divest financially from Israel.
Several instances of anti-Jewish remarks or inflammatory signs have gone viral amid the protests, though multiple student organizations behind the demonstrations have condemned such incidents.
“At universities across the nation, our movement is united in valuing every human life,” said a statement from one such group, Columbia University Apartheid Divest, per ABC News.
Link for homepage, https://cuad.org/
Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD)
Guardian coverage - https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/apr/22/columbia-university-student-protests-israel-gaza
Howie Klein at DWT:
They Called Us Commies When We Protested Vietnam... Today They Call Students Anti-Semites
FURTHER: The CUAD homepage, already linked, deserves this partial quote:
The CUAD Coalition initially formed in 2016 and passed a Columbia College-wide referendum in 2020 in favor of divestment that former University President Lee Bollinger overturned. Our coalition was reactivated in October 2023 in response to the overwhelming support for Palestinian freedom from students on Columbia's campus. We are further moved to action by the ostensibly politically-motivated suspension of Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace.
As a coalition, our chief goal is to challenge the settler-colonial violence that Israel perpetrates with the support of the United States and its allies. We have previously refused to focus on concerns pertaining to free speech, academic freedom, and student safety on campus, as they distract from Israel's actively committing genocide and ethnic cleansing. However, the University's weaponization of policy to silence students enables the atrocities that Israel has subjected Palestinians to for decades - atrocities that began when Zionist militias violently forced over 700,000 Palestinians, 75 percent of the population, out of their homes in 1948, and which have continuously escalated with virtual impunity since.
The Zionist project is reaching its apex as Israel continues to violate international law by indiscriminately bombing civilians and cutting off their access to food, water, medicine, and fuel. According to reports from the World Health Organization, during the time we spend writing this, a Palestinian child is killed every 10 minutes. These attacks are explicitly connected to Israel's attempt to annex and ethnically cleanse more Palestinian land of its indigenous population. As such, it is imperative that we act now. If we wait, there may not be a Gaza left to defend.
We cannot take action to stop further atrocities if individuals and authoritative bodies at the University distort and stifle our message. The Columbia administration's negligence severely compromises the safety of students, and threatens our ability to advocate for this issue. The Columbia administration has set a dangerous precedent by erasing the Palestinian struggle through one-sided decisions and emails that threaten and suppress the voices of students who support justice for Palestine, enabling a violent, repressive environment that puts Palestinian students, as well as all their Arab, Muslim, Jewish, and BIPOC peers, at risk through surveillance and policing.
We know that antisemitism, Islamophobia, and racism - in particular racism against Arabs and Palestinians - are all cut from the same cloth: Western colonization, imperialism, white supremacy, and anti-Blackness. Silencing Jewish voices for Palestine is arguably antisemitic: it conflates Judaism with Zionism and imposes an external definition on an entire group's religion and culture. The University ignores, misreports, and twists the reality of the brutality unfolding in Gaza while erasing Jewish voices from the Palestinian liberation movement.
Think about it. People do not protest without something deserving protest, or at least deserving attention. So, pay attention. Form your own opinions, but inform yourselves before locking your mind into one belief.
FURTHER: https://theintercept.com/2024/04/18/columbia-suspends-ilhan-omar-daughter-gaza-encampment/
FURTHER: Here is a screen capture, top of the AIPAC home page: https://www.aipac.org/
 | |
| Central zone timestamp: 3:39 PM Monday, April 29, 2024 |
AIPAC has a Wikipedia page - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page
Explore both of those sites, with an open mind please, and if they are not about exerting political influence and pressures, and about "the Benjamins," then wtf are they about?
Rep. Omar spoke truth.