Apr. 23, 2024 ❧ Huge Gaza protests on campus, Biden's cannibal comments, and nukes in Poland
Plus: Idaho attacks rights to go to the ER, organ harvesting in Alabama prisons, the UK will begin deporting migrants to Rwanda, and the mysteries of the platypus
BIG STORY
As the Media Wrings its Hands About Columbia, Mass Graves Unearthed Under Khan Yunis
This weekend, American media was almost single-mindedly focused on the events at Columbia University, where hundreds of students—led by Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace— have assembled an encampment in protest of the school’s part in funding Israel’s war on Gaza. Last week, more than 100 student demonstrators were arrested for trespassing after Columbia called the NYPD, though the police have since acknowledged that everyone taken into custody was “peaceful.”
Since then, the Gaza Solidarity Encampment has persisted, even despite student activists being suspended and evicted from their homes, with protests continuing and growing larger over the weekend despite the threats. Despite the crackdown, students at more than a dozen other schools have begun similar protests.
This weekend’s coverage focused almost solely on the disruption caused by the student protesters at Columbia, who were often described with some of the most hyperbolic language in recent memory.
Legislators urged the national guard to violently disperse them while one Columbia business professor described the students as “terrorists.” As always, the protesters were widely condemned as violent antisemites by politicians in both parties with little evidence. Senator John Fetterman (D-PA) compared Columbia students to the tiki torch-wielding Nazis in Charlottesville, Senator Tom Cotton (R-AR) described their demonstrations as “nascent pogroms,” calling for President Biden to “break up” the encampment. President Biden himself described them as “antisemitic protests.”
There was meanwhile nary a mention of the fact that hundreds of participants are in fact Jewish themselves. You don’t have to look far to spot protests in the encampment wearing kippahs and holding signs with slogans like “Jews for Palestine.” It’s hard to imagine that these protesters would go from dancing arm and arm at a Shabbat dinner one moment to leading a “pogrom” against Jewish students the next:
As Jewish Currents editor Peter Beinart, who often speaks on college campuses, points out:
When I speak on campus, I ask what % of the pro-Palestine protesters are Jewish. Usually, Jews are overrepresented. Sometimes they're the largest identity group. Maybe folks calling for cracking down on protesters in the name of Jewish safety should consider their safety too.
There were undeniably statements over the weekend that could rightly be described as antisemitic or as incitements to violence. However, they were few and far between, and nobody has been physically attacked. As NBC reporter and Columbia student Alejandra Ramos pointed out, much of the offensive language actually came from non-students from outside the campus gates.
The group leading the on-campus protests, Columbia Students for Justice in Palestine, meanwhile, forcefully condemned these “inflammatory individuals who do not represent us,” adding, “We firmly reject any form of hate or bigotry and stand vigilant against non-students attempting to disrupt the solidarity being forged among students—Palestinian, Muslim, Arab, Jewish, Black, and pro-Palestinian classmates and colleagues who represent the full diversity of our country.”
Student protesters absolutely need to remain vigilant to prevent bad actors from hijacking their protests. But at the same time, the overwhelming majority of students who have been peaceful should not be punished for the actions of the few who are not. For these students to remain steadfast in their anti-war protests despite the risks to their safety and freedom is astoundingly brave. It is a display of humanity and selflessness that is in short supply.
For more on the distorted media coverage of campus protests, check out the latest episode of Jewish Currents’ “On the Nose” podcast about “Unpacking the Campus Antisemitism Narrative”
Meanwhile, this weekend’s news out of Gaza makes any discussion of American campuses feel like a petty triviality.
On Saturday, civil defense crews discovered a mass grave of at least 283 people outside the Nasser Medical Complex in Khan Yunis. The hospital, once the largest in Southern Gaza was reduced to ruins by repeated Israeli raids throughout January and February. According to a harrowing report from Middle East Eye:
The hospital, Gaza's second-largest and the "backbone" of the health system in southern Gaza, was put out of service after deadly Israeli raids in February, when 10,000 people had been sheltering at the medical complex.
The army stormed the hospital twice following a weeks-long siege in January, during which 200 people were detained according to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, and hundreds of patients and displaced people sheltering in the building were forcibly removed.
Medical staff reported being stripped naked, beaten and humiliated by Israeli forces, with many staff and patients targeted by sniper fire.
In March, the BBC released verified footage showing detained and kneeling people inside the complex following the raid. It also verified footage documenting 21 instances of fire targeting staff and patients during the siege.
Health officials said there was no power and not enough staff in the hospital to treat around 200 patients who remained there after the siege.
According to Palestinian health ministry spokesperson Ashraf al-Qudra, the hospital's generators failed, cutting the water supply, while sewage flooded emergency rooms, making it impossible for the remaining staff to treat intensive care patients.
He added that a lack of oxygen supplies, also a result of no power, caused the deaths of at least seven patients.
Israel said the hospital was housing Hamas fighters, a claim it has regularly made when attacking hospitals in Gaza despite not having produced any credible evidence of a military presence inside them.
The grave is just one of three that have been discovered outside Nasser. The excavators say they expect to find at least 200 more bodies in this grave before moving on to the next two. Hani Mahmoud of Al Jazeera reports that many of the people discovered were women, children, and elderly men. Yamen Abu Suleiman, Director of Civil Defense in Khan Yunis told CNN that bodies had been found with their hands and feet tied “and there were signs of field executions. We do not know if they were buried alive or executed. Most of the bodies are decomposed,” though they said they had not yet verified this report.
The attack on Nasser is just one of countless attacks on medical facilities since the war in Gaza began. According to the World Health Organization, there have so far been at least 435 attacks on health facilities or personnel across Gaza in six months of conflict between 7 October 2023 and early April 2024 – equivalent to 73 attacks per month of war—attacks that the UN says has left Gaza’s health system “completely obliterated.”
It’s hard not to question the morality of those who express more horror at student protests against this war than at the war itself. The New York Times, Washington Post, New York Post, Los Angeles Times have all run front page stories about campus protests without publishing anything about the fact that these mass graves were discovered. While this reaction underscores how fantastically warped this country’s priorities are, it also underscored why protests are necessary in the first place: to keep reminding us what actually matters.
NEW IN CURRENT AFFAIRS:
“Palestine Protests are a Test of Whether This is a Free Country” by Nathan J. Robinson
“The test of whether a country is free is what happens to unpopular opinions, those that challenge existing authority. If controversial, despised opinions are punished, a society is not free. It is only pretending to be free. Issues like Israel-Palestine pose important tests to the country’s values: do we mean them, or are they entirely fake? Do we allow “freedom for the speech we hate” or do we call the cops to drag people away for making a noise and standing on the wrong patch of ground? Do we deal with a controversial professor by disagreeing with their ideas, or do we get our member of Congress to pressure the university president to remove them from their job? If this is a free country, the answers to these questions are clear.”
FIGHTING BACK
UAW VICTORY IN TENNESSEE
Last Friday, the United Auto Workers scored what Politico is calling “one of the labor movement’s biggest organizing victories in the South in years.” At the Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee, more than 4,000 eligible workers cast their ballots on whether or not to join the UAW. The results were overwhelming: a full 73 percent voted to unionize, ending the Tennessee facility’s longtime status as the only non-union VW plant in the world. It’s a huge breakthrough for the union, the South, and American workers overall.
The union faced stiff political opposition every step of the way. In the lead-up to Friday’s vote, a group of six Southern governors—all of them Republican—issued a joint statement urging workers not to organize, arguing that it would “put our states’ jobs in jeopardy.” They even busted out some old Red-scare tactics, complaining that some members of the UAW “proudly call themselves democratic socialists.” (You can practically hear the pearls being clutched.) In the past, this kind of political pressure has worked. Back in 2014, influential Tennessee figures like Senator Bob Corker and then-Governor Bill Haslam were able to fend off a previous UAW organizing drive, convincing Volkswagen’s staff to vote against it 712-626. This time, the workers weren’t going to be fooled again.
In a speech celebrating the win, UAW leader Shawn Fain called Chattanooga “the first domino to fall,” saying that “workers are fed up” and he “expect[s] more of the same” to happen across the South. The next big vote will start on May 13, when 5,000 workers at a Mercedes-Benz plant in Alabama will get their own chance to join the union. In Tennessee, the newly unionized VW workers will also need to negotiate a good contract, which will be a whole separate fight. But the ball is rolling.
It should be remembered, too, that this whole process began with the UAW reform campaign of 2019, which made the union more democratic, more militant, and brought people like Fain to positions of leadership in the first place. That campaign was kickstarted by a relatively small handful of workers; now, its effects are shaking the nation. It’s a welcome reminder that ordinary people, when they get together and refuse to back down, can change everything.
POEM OF THE WEEK
“I Am the People, the Mob” by Carl Sandburg (1916)
I am the people—the mob—the crowd—the mass.
Do you know that all the great work of the world is done through me?
I am the workingman, the inventor, the maker of the world's food and clothes.
I am the audience that witnesses history. The Napoleons come from me and the
Lincolns. They die. And then I send forth more Napoleons and Lincolns.
I am the seed ground. I am a prairie that will stand for much plowing. Terrible
storms pass over me. I forget. The best of me is sucked out and wasted. I
forget. Everything but Death comes to me and makes me work and give
up what I have. And I forget.
Sometimes I growl, shake myself and spatter a few red drops for history to
remember. Then—I forget.
When I, the People, learn to remember, when I, the People, use the lessons of
yesterday and no longer forget who robbed me last year, who played me for a
fool—then there will be no speaker in all the world say the name: “The
People,” with any fleck of a sneer in his voice or any far-off smile of derision.
The mob—the crowd—the mass—will arrive then.
CROOKS vs. SICKOS (or, “What’s going on with our politicians?”)
❧ Joe Biden made the incredibly weird suggestion last week that the people of Papua New Guinea ate his uncle…yes, really. During a speech about steel and aluminum tariffs for the United Steelworkers, Biden got somewhat sidetracked telling a story about his uncle Ambrose Finnegan, who disappeared during the Second World War: “He got shot down in New Guinea, and they never found the body because there used to be — there were a lot of cannibals, for real, in that part of New Guinea.” According to military records reviewed by The New York Times, there is no evidence this actually happened, yet Biden discussed it during two different speeches on the campaign trail last week.
Now, Biden is in hot water with the Prime Minister of Papua New Guinea, James Marape. (To be clear, when we say the president is in “hot water,” we mean that Marape is upset with him, not that Marape is cooking him in a giant pot.) “President Biden’s remarks may have been a slip of the tongue; however, my country does not deserve to be labeled as such,” Marape said.
That’s putting it mildly. The suggestion that New Guinea is filled with cannibals is some straight-up old-timey racism. Michael Kabuni, a lecturer in political science at the University of Papua New Guinea told The Guardian, that while cannibalism was practiced in the past on Papua New Guinea, it was reserved for very particular contexts, like eating a deceased relative out of respect to prevent their body from decomposing. “Taking it out of context, and implying that your [uncle] jumps out of the plane and somehow we think it’s a good meal is unacceptable,” Kabuni said of Biden’s comments. “There was context. They wouldn’t just eat any white men that fell from the sky.”
AROUND THE STATES
❧ [CONTENT WARNING: Prison abuse, mutilation] The Alabama prison system has been accused of harvesting inmates’ organs without consent. This story is bizarre and horrifying, but unfortunately all too real. As Birmingham’s WBRC reports, the families of five deceased prisoners have filed lawsuits against the Alabama Department of Corrections and the Department of Pathology at the University of Alabama. They allege that, after their loved ones died in prison, their bodies were returned to them with organs missing—despite having never given consent to donate them.
In one such case, the Department of Pathology conducted an autopsy on Charles Edward Singleton, who died in 2021. When Singleton’s family collected his body, their lawsuit alleges it was “mutilated beyond the scope of a standard autopsy” and “already in a noticeable state of decomposition,” with many organs including the brain missing. When the family made inquiries, they were reportedly told the organs had been “removed and retained by the UAB pathologist(s)” and couldn’t be returned. In another case, the family of a prisoner named Jim Kennedy was reportedly told that “UAB is a teaching institution. And every teaching institution that does autopsies keeps their organs,” suggesting their family member’s remains may have been kept for use in medical classes.
If even half of this is true, the Alabama prison system has put these families through a traumatic nightmare, and they deserve heavy punitive damages in return. At the very least, the people responsible should be forced to resign from their positions in the Department of Corrections and the University. And sadly, it’s all too plausible that it is true. The American carceral system, and particularly prisons in the South, are famous for their flagrant disregard for human life and dignity. In past News Briefings, we’ve told you about the life-threatening lack of sanitation and medical care at Louisiana’s Angola prison, and how hundreds of people were buried in unmarked graves behind a jail in Mississippi, with their families never notified. There’s also a worrying bill in Massachusetts that would grant prisoners early release in exchange for organ donation, effectively allowing the state to buy parts of their bodies. These are just the most extreme cases from institutions that are inherently abusive and degrading in nature. This is precisely why activists say that prisons cannot be reformed in any meaningful way, and need to be done away with altogether.
❧ A new investigative report suggests that Louisiana State University lets oil companies buy influence over its energy studies. According to an in-depth report by Sara Sneath in New Orleans’ The Lens, the university has developed a working relationship in which companies like Shell and Exxon make large donations, and receive decision-making power over academic projects in return. Shell, for instance, has contributed $25 million to create something called the “Institute for Energy Innovation” at LSU. There, Sneath’s report suggests the university gave Shell “license to influence research and coursework” relating to the controversial field of carbon-capture technology.
Soon after, other fossil-fuel firms joined in, with Exxon donating $2 million to the Institute for Energy Innovation. In return, the Lens investigation claims they were granted “robust review of academic-study output[...] with the ability to focus research activities.” The heads of the Louisiana Chemical Association and the Louisiana Mid-Continent Oil and Gas Association, both lobbying groups for their respective industries, also have seats on the Institute’s advisory board, as does Shell itself, which gives them each a vote on whether to continue any particular research project.
The conflict of interest here should be fairly obvious. In the past, companies like Exxon have systematically misled the public about the reality of climate change, despite predicting it themselves as far back as the 1970s. Allowing them to have any role in ongoing research related to energy and the environment is just begging for more deception. By taking their dirty money, LSU has compromised its academic standards, and it’s betrayed its students. After all, it’s their future world the oil companies are burning in front of them.
⚜ LONG READ: In an effort to enforce its near-total ban on abortion, Idaho is attempting to argue before the Supreme Court that pregnant people are not entitled to be given emergency abortions under the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act (EMTALA). In The Intercept, Jordan Smith writes:
[EMTALA] requires all hospitals that receive certain federal funds to conduct a medical assessment of every patient who shows up at the ER and, in a medical emergency, provide necessary stabilizing treatment. The law defers to medical professionals to determine when a medical emergency exists and what stabilizing treatments are needed.
EMTALA operates as a “point of rescue,” said Nicole Huberfeld, a professor at Boston University’s schools of law and public health. “It is the one law that we have that makes it so that anyone can get access to care when they’re having a medical emergency.”
Smith covers the history of EMTALA, describing how it was established in response to a crisis of private hospitals “dumping” pregnant patients without insurance at overburdened public hospitals. She then explores the implications of Idaho’s arguments and the implications for pregnant people in Idaho:
Idaho claims that abortion is not protected under EMTALA, and that the federal government is interfering with state’s ability to ban the procedure. “The whole point of Dobbs was to restore to the states their authority to regulate abortion,” lawyers with the far-right Alliance Defending Freedom, who are representing Idaho, wrote in their brief. “Yet the administration seeks to thwart Idaho’s exercise of self-government on this important topic.” The claim that EMTALA covers abortion, they wrote, “is imaginary.”
If the court were to accept Idaho’s recasting of EMTALA, the safety-net law meant to eliminate discrimination in emergency medical care would be nullified, experts say, singling out pregnant people as a separate and unequal class of patients. Such a ruling would hobble the ability of medical professionals to respond appropriately to emergencies and encourage a new generation of patient dumping.
“Idaho’s arguments would make pregnant people second-class citizens in emergency rooms,” said Alexa Kolbi-Molinas, deputy director of the reproductive freedom project at the American Civil Liberties Union. “That’s the exact evil that Congress was trying to stop.”
AROUND THE WORLD
❧ The President of Poland says he’s “ready” to station NATO nuclear weapons within his borders. Surely that’ll go well! This worrying announcement came from Polish President Andrzej Duda, who said on Monday that his government is open to letting “our allies decide to deploy nuclear weapons as part of nuclear sharing on our territory as well, in order to strengthen the security of NATO's eastern flank.” Duda pointed out that Russia has moved some of its own nukes to Belarus, making a similar counter-move from NATO more likely. It’s always a bad sign when nuclear weapons start moving around, but this development is especially troubling.
By now it’s well known that Vladimir Putin is motivated by longstanding fears about NATO activity near Russia’s borders—which, rightly or wrongly, he sees as an existential threat. Parking nuclear missiles on his doorstep is not going to make Putin less paranoid, or more willing to pursue diplomacy with his neighbors. Rather, there’s a very real chance it could prompt a dangerous escalation toward nuclear war.
We’ve seen this pattern before, when NATO placed Jupiter missiles in Turkey during the late 1950s, causing the USSR to send its own missiles to Cuba. The world as we know it very nearly ended back then—and today, weapons technology has grown even more deadly.
The Russian government has already condemned Duda’s comments, saying it would “take all necessary countermeasures” if nuclear weapons appear in Poland, and even Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk has tried to strike a note of caution, saying he wants to meet with Duda “to understand his intentions.” For everyone’s sake, let’s hope somebody has enough sense to cancel this reckless plan before it’s too late.
NEW IN CURRENT AFFAIRS
“What Everyone Should Know About the ‘Security Dilemma’” by Nathan J. Robinson
The “security dilemma”... refers to the way that countries can take actions they perceive as defensive, but which are perceived by other countries as aggressive, and which create a spiral of hostility that can end in war.
If we are to minimize the chances of a catastrophic global war in our time, we must learn to identify real threats and try to build trust with other countries, rather than interpreting perfectly rational actions as signs of Hitler-like aggressive ambitions. We need to learn to see our country as others see it, to see how our own actions are interpreted as hostile and aggressive, and to see why others respond as they do.
❧ The British parliament has officially passed its plan to deport asylum seekers to Rwanda, clearing the way for it to become law. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has said he intends for the deportations to serve as a “deterrent” to the migrants fleeing to the UK, many of whom make perilous journeys across the English Channel in small boats. By using the word deterrent, Sunak implies they have some choice in the matter. But as The International Rescue Committee points out “The vast majority of the people who make small boat crossings are refugees…individual[s] who cannot return home due to fear of death, violence or persecution.”
The UK’s Supreme Court previously ruled that the asylum ban was unlawful, as Britain is bound by international law to accept asylum seekers or ensure they are sent to a safe third country. Rwanda has a long history of human rights abuses and has long rejected 100 percent of asylum applicants from many conflict zones including Afghanistan, Syria, and Yemen.
Despite this, Sunak is attempting the legal gambit of simply declaring Rwanda to be a “safe” country, even though is not. This will almost surely be met with legal challenges and judges may once again attempt to ground deportation planes. Failing that, migrants and their advocates may attempt to get the flights blocked by the European Court of Human Rights, whose asylum laws the UK is obligated under its constitution to follow. But should the asylum law be put into effect, it could put thousands of vulnerable people in danger.
PLATYPUS FACT OF THE WEEK
Platypi are so bizarre that the scientist who first described them thought he was being pranked.
Upon receiving platypus remains English zoologist George Shaw, who wrote the first scientific description of the animal in 1799, was incredulous that such a creature could exist, according to The Washington Post. Seeing the animal, which has “beak of a Duck engrafted on the head of a quadruped,” Shaw wrote that it “naturally excites the idea of some deceptive preparation by artificial means.” That is to say, according to the Post’s Abby Ohlheiser, that he thought “that some punk had collected the bill of a duck and an otter or mole's body, then shipped it off from Australia as a joke.”
It was only after a more thorough investigation that he determined the platypus was real. But debate raged about its exact nature for years. Olheiser writes: “It took nearly a century for scientists to figure out for certain whether the platypus laid eggs.”
Writing and research by Stephen Prager and Alex Skopic. Editing and additional material by Nathan J. Robinson and Lily Sánchez. Header graphic by Cali Traina Blume. Fact-checking by Justin Ward. This news briefing is a product of Current Affairs Magazine. Subscribe to our gorgeous and informative print edition here, and our delightful podcast here.
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