With the “outside agitator” narrative, the media and politicians are puking up the worst of this country’s past.
More than 2,000 people have been arrested on US college campuses for peacefully protesting Israel’s war on the people of Palestine. For the “crime” of forming tent cities, or “encampments” on campus, students have been attacked by mobs, brutalized by police, and even faced gunfire at Columbia University after occupying a building. (I occupied several administration buildings in decades past and never had to face live ammo.)
President Joe Biden gave his tacit approval to release the hounds when he said, “Threatening people, intimidating people, instilling fear in people is not peaceful protest, it is against the law.”
If that’s the case, then police and violent counterprotesters should have been arrested in droves. Biden’s wink and nod is also politically derelict; it will repel the youth voters he desperately needs to defeat Donald Trump. Biden is sacrificing his election chances and perhaps any pretense of democracy for his support for Israel’s war crimes.
An incurious media in a state of bloodlust has egged on the violence. CNN’s Dana Bash’s comparison of campus protests to 1930s Germany is an insult to every victim of the Holocaust and their descendants—and I have met several descendants of Jewish Holocaust victims at the encampments. There is a Jewish presence at every one of the three dozen encampments that I have been able to research. In a sane media world, Bash would be looking for work, perhaps with a sign that reads, “Will lie for food.”
This is what the powerful do when they lose an argument. There is no moral or political justification for what Israel is doing to the people of Gaza, and students, professors, and community members are pointing that out. Being unable to argue with reason, political leaders have turned to deceit, state repression, and encouraging stochastic terrorism.
We have heard the greatest lie: that the encampments are “antisemitic”—an Orwellian falsehood told to justify state violence. But there is another dangerous narrative taking root: that those arrested are “outside agitators.” It has been striking to see the exhuming and resuscitation of that relic of an insult. One would have thought that calling citizens “outside agitators” had d