旧金山,美国,9月6日(IPS)——今年秋天,美国大学校园里有近1800万名学生,加沙战争的捍卫者不想听到任何反击。沉默是同谋,这是以色列的盟友喜欢的方式。
对他们来说,新学期重新开始对现状构成威胁。但对于人权支持者来说,这是一个新的机会,可以让高等教育不再只是一个舒适区。在美国,新兴的大学镇压的程度和傲慢程度,毫不夸张地说,令人震惊。每天都有人因为巴勒斯坦人的呼吸问题而死亡。加沙的死亡人数加起来每天不止一次——持续了333天,而且还在增加,看不到结束的迹象。一个社会的整个基础设施的崩溃是可怕的。
Months ago, citing data from the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, ABC News reported that "25,000 buildings have been destroyed, 32 hospitals forced out of service, and three churches, 341 mosques and 100 universities and schools destroyed." Not that this should disturb the tranquility of campuses in the country whose taxpayers and elected leaders make it all possible. Top college officials wax eloquent about the sanctity of higher learning and academic freedom while they suppress protests against policies that have destroyed scores of universities in Palestine. A key rationale for quashing dissent is that anti-Israel protests make some Jewish students uncomfortable. But the purposes of college education shouldn't include always making people feel comfortable. How comfortable should students be in a nation enabling mass murder in Gaza? What would we say about claims that students in the North with southern accents should not have been made uncomfortable by on-campus civil rights protests and denunciations of Jim Crow in the 1950s and 1960s? Or white students from South Africa, studying in the United States, made uncomfortable by anti-apartheid protests in the 1980s? A bedrock for the edifice of speech suppression and virtual thought-policing is the old standby of equating criticism of Israel with antisemitism. Likewise, the ideology of Zionism that tries to justify Israeli policies is supposed to get a pass no matter what -- while opponents, including many Jews, are liable to be denounced as antisemites. But polling shows that more younger Americans are supportive of Palestinians than they are of Israelis. The ongoing atrocities by the Israel "Defense" Forces in Gaza, killing a daily average of more than 100 people -- mostly children and women -- have galvanized many young people to take action in the United States. "Protests rocked American campuses toward the end of the last academic year," a front-page New York Times story reported in late August, adding: "Many administrators remain shaken by the closing weeks of the spring semester, when encampments, building occupations and clashes with the police helped lead to thousands of arrests across the country." (Overall, the phrase "clashes with the police" served as a euphemism for police violently attacking nonviolent protesters.) From the hazy ivory towers and corporate suites inhabited by so many college presidents and boards of trustees, Palestinian people are scarcely more than abstractions compared to far more real priorities. An understated sentence from the Times sheds a bit of light: "The strategies that are coming into public view suggest that some administrators at schools large and small have concluded that permissiveness is perilous, and that a harder line may be the best option -- or perhaps just the one least likely to invite blowback from elected officials and donors who have demanded that universities take stronger action against protesters." Much more clarity is available from a new Mondoweiss article by activist Carrie Zaremba, a researcher with training in anthropology. "University administrators across the United States have declared an indefinite state of emergency on college campuses," she wrote. "Schools are rolling out policies in preparation for quashing pro-Palestine student activism this fall semester, and reshaping regulations and even campuses in the process to suit this new normal. "Many of these policies being instituted share a common formula: more militarization, more law enforcement, more criminalization, and more consolidation of institutional power. But where do these policies originate and why are they so similar across all campuses? The answer lies in the fact that they have been provided by the ‘risk and crisis management' consulting industries, with the tacit support of trustees, Zionist advocacy groups, and federal agencies. Together, they deploy the language of safety to disguise a deeper logic of control and securitization." Countering such top-down moves will require intensive grassroots organizing. Sustained pushback against campus repression will be essential, to continually assert the right to speak out and protest as guaranteed by the First Amendment. Insistence on acquiring knowledge while gaining power for progressive forces will be vital. That's why the national Teach-In Network was launched this week by the RootsAction Education Fund (which I help lead), under the banner "Knowledge Is Power -- and Our Grassroots Movements Need Both." The elites that were appalled by the moral uprising on college campuses against Israel's slaughter in Gaza are now doing all they can to prevent a resurgence of that uprising. But the mass murder continues, subsidized by the U.S. government. When students insist that true knowledge and ethical action need each other, they can help make history and not just study it. Norman Solomon is the national director of RootsAction.org and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. His latest book, War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine, was published in paperback this month with a new afterword about the Gaza war.
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