Acknowledging the existence of Palestinians is not anti-semitic. Acknowledging the brutal suffering of Palestinians is not anti-semitic. Objecting to brutality is not anti-semitic. We are capable of acknowledging this while still acknowledging what happened on October 7th. However, if the conditions we place upon reality are as such that the choices before us are either acknowledging reality or enacting violence, then maybe we should ask ourselves why these choices are the way they are.
I write in reference to the eager way in which school administrators have sent cops into college campuses across the United States to arrest and assault students protesting the United States’s material support of a far-right Israel government’s actions in Palestine. I write in reference to the snipers that were put on the roofs of UCLA, Ohio State, and Indiana University. I write in reference to police officers at Dartmouth being ‘brutal’ to faculty trying to protect their students and said faculty being subsequently banned from campus. I write in reference to police arresting a faculty member at UW-Madison asking police officers to leave students alone. I write in reference to a professor at Emory being arrested because they asked police officers what they were doing. I write in reference to what appears to be a Palestinian student being suspended just because they were Palestinian. I write in reference to faculty being fired. I write in reference to cops using rubber bullets on UCLA students who were previously assaulted by outside agitators — and, in the case of at least four UCLA journalists, specifically targeted. I write in reference to purported flashbangs, dislocated shoulders, and more, including colleges quite simply shutting down in response to a protest. I write in reference to the thousands of arrests across the country that have been documented at The Appeal, and elsewhere.
It used to be something of a cliche to reference Noam Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent in the 1990’s — and, to a degree, given how Bernie Sanders’s comments on the media have been received, it still is — but it is difficult to avoid referencing the book once again when we look at Anderson Cooper offering up a line that had to be corrected by WKCR student journalists or Dana Bash offering what can only be described with charity and restraint as a counterfactual or the LA Times changing their headlines in noticeable ways.
