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.”
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UAW VICTORY IN TENNESSEE
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