Pro-Palestine Protests Proliferate

But they're losing the propaganda war, so far

Students at San Diego State University and California State at San Marcos walked out of classes on Tuesday to join protests against university complicity with the Israeli military offensive currently underway in Gaza.

The Union-Tribune reported that the SDSU rally drew about 1,000 people; and mentioned they were calling for the university to divest from business interests beneficial to Israel in its war in Gaza.

• Marchers hoisted signs as they walked around the campus and protested in front of the school’s Hepner Hall, where they gathered to hear speeches from student organizers.

• There, they surrounded a lawn with several dozen white cloth bundles that resembled child-sized burial shrouds, which event organizers said represented young people who have died in the war.

• In an Instagram post promoting the walkout, Students for Justice in Palestine said that the action was to “support fellow universities and the resilience they have shown on campuses” as well as to show solidarity for the people of Gaza.

The UT headline on the same article told a different story: Several hundred SDSU students rally in support of Gaza.

NBC7SanDiego ran an Associated Press story leading with the SDSU demonstration that also included coverage of protests at 21 other campuses around the nation.

A combo KUSI/FoxFive News team reported that “Over a hundred San Diego State students walked out of class Tuesday”

SDSU’s Daily Aztec website had no coverage of the campus protest as of Wednesday morning.

***

Nationally, there's been a shitstorm of news coverage over the past 24 hours, almost all of it aimed at discrediting the pro-Palestine protests occurring on college campuses nationwide. As a reverent anti-war protester back in the day, I had forgotten what it’s like when zealots control the narrative.

Two things I want to establish at the top of this post:

• Pro-Palestine demonstrations have been uniformly non-violent, consisting of marches, encampments, and occupations. 

• Since documentation of acts of violence are scarce, mainstream media sources have dishonestly implied violence occurring at nearly every protest site throughout their reports.

On social media, those opposed to the protests have taken to calling participants as terrorists, Hamas supporters, puppets of George Soros, and worse. The act of opposing Israel’s ongoing assault in Gaza is characterized as being driven by antisemitism. And there’s a virulent strain of “what aboutism” cursing through commentary on all media platforms.

The tone and frequency of misinformation on just about all media is serving to create manufactured consent for violent unhinged right wingers.

Here’s the headline from Fox News:

NYPD crushes anti-American mob on NYC campuses as mayor blasts 'despicable' school environment

At UCLA, a pro-Palestine student encampment was attacked by a couple of hundred counter protesters on Monday night. By “attacked,” I mean fights were started, barricades were forcibly removed, bear spray was used, and fireworks were fired into the crowd. The Los Angeles Police Department and campus police stood by and did nothing as violence mounted over a four hour period. At three am, counter protesters were finally pushed out of the area. 

The Los Angeles Times had a reporter present. This coverage is likely going to be an outlier as the violence will be recast as being caused by those in the encampment.:

• Violence broke out early Wednesday at the pro-Palestinian encampment at UCLA, hours after the university declared that the camp “is unlawful and violates university policy.”

• Just before midnight, a large group of counterdemonstrators, wearing black outfits and white masks, arrived on campus and tried to tear down the barricades surrounding the encampment. Campers, some holding lumber and wearing goggles and helmets, rallied to defend the encampment’s perimeter.

• Videos showed fireworks being set off and at least one being thrown into the camp. Over the next few hours, counterdemonstrators threw objects, including wood and a metal barrier, at the camp and those inside, with fights repeatedly breaking out.

Here’s the New York Times, pitching in to rewrite the narrative.

There are videos documenting the counter protester attack here, here, here, here, and here.

Here’s the BBC’s teaser for UCLA coverage: California university calls in police after "horrific acts of violence" at pro-Palestinian protest

UCLA’s student press –the Daily Bruin– had several reporters on site.

• As counter-protesters pushed forward, some began aggressively hitting those inside the encampment with sticks, and others continued to break down the metal fences. Individuals also threw wooden planks, cones, a Bird scooter and water bottles at the encampment while chanting “USA, USA.” 

• Counter-protesters continued to spray noxious gasses at around 12:10 a.m. Another large round of gas from an unknown source was released at 12:23 a.m., and another at 12:37 a.m. The UC Divest representative said in a text message statement that the tear gas originated from counter-protesters, and encampment participants had only thrown back the canisters. However, a Daily Bruin reporter witnessed a hand inside the encampment spraying an aerosol out of a can toward the counter-protesters. 

• A counter-protester smashed the finger of a protester inside using a wooden slab at around 12:28 a.m. Counter-protesters also shouted an anti-Black racial slur at around the same time.

NPR “both sided” UCLA coverage by Associated Press reporters, with the headline: Police step in to separate fighting protesters at UCLA

As Zeteo editor Mehdi Hasan noted while sharing a video of the violence at UCLA:

•  If the politicians/pundits who lined up to condemn Columbia pro-Palestine students for the past week do or say nothing about this, don’t condemn this, it’ll be further proof that they don’t actually care about hate or safety on campus. Only on silencing protests against Israel.

And then there were commentaries about how Gaza anti war protests were going to damage President Biden’s reelection prospects in the fall. These stories, in places like Politico and NPR, are bullshit. The election is 6 months away. The conflict in Gaza could change; possibilities include a peace settlement or more mass slaughter of civilians or Hamas could surrender. The president keeps dropping hints that there is a limit for his support for the war. The Israeli government keeps flipping the bird at the US government. There could be an area-wide escalation of the conflict. The Netanyahu coalition could collapse.

What’s more, way too much reporting and commentary on what’s happening in Gaza and the Middle East is concerned with potential repercussions as opposed to what is actually happening on the ground. 

More than a million people are trapped in a place soon to be a battlefield. Israeli government promises about civilians not being targeted are being ignored. Its leader says the offensive will continue despite any cease fire agreement. Hamas (whose leaders are safely tucked away in Qatar) has used civilians as shields. And people are starving.

LA Times columnist Michael Hiltzik noted that there can be consequences for university administrators who cave to outside pressure and use police to break up protests.

• Students are massed peacefully on campus, making politically charged demands on university presidents. The police are summoned, leading to mass arrests and even to violence — and to the collapse of confidence in the administration.

• You may see the punchline coming: This picture isn’t drawn from USC and Columbia University of the present day, but Berkeley in 1964.

• The lessons should be obvious. Bringing police onto a college campus on the pretext of preserving or restoring “order” invariably makes things worse. It’s almost always inspired not by conditions on campus, but by partisan pressure on university administrators to act. Often it results in the ouster of the university presidents who condoned the police incursions, and sometimes even in the departure of the politicians whose fingerprints were on the orders.

• In other words, nobody wins.

As far as the larger picture is concerned, corporations and their puppets are winning. It’s going to take a lot more protests to get beyond narratives about outside agitators, individual acts of hate speech, and the concept that opposing Israel’s military response to the terrorist attacks by Hamas that took place on October 7th is an expression of antisemitism. 

***

Wednesday News to Peruse

***

The NRA is falling apart, and the gun cult may be going with it via Mark Sumner at Daily Kos:

• GOP candidates routinely place guns right next to God in their campaign material, and Republican Christmas cards feature every family member clutching a ridiculous weapon.

• But it appears that Republican members of Congress aren’t putting enough guns in the hands of their adolescent children. According to the FBI, gun sales in the United States have declined for three straight years. The Trace estimates that Americans bought 665,000 fewer guns in 2023 than in 2022. That trend is continuing. Comparing year-over-year data, sales in March of 2024 were down 5% from the same month in 2023. 

• There are reasons other than the declining influence of the NRA for that drop in sales. The truth is only about 6% of Americans hunt, and even for them an expensive assault weapon is rarely, if ever, the right tool. While an AR-15-style weapon may be the perfect tool for war, it’s a poor choice for personal defense. 

***

The CIA and Zionism: A Complex History by Jefferson Morley at SpyTalk

• Anti-Zionism is “incontestably” anti-Semitic, argues Bari Weiss of the Free Press, an online news site devoted to “the ideals that were once the bedrock of American journalism.” Anyone who doesn’t support the existence of a Jewish state, she asserts, is a hater of Jewish people. “We need an exodus from Zionism,” counters Naomi Klein in the Guardian. She calls political Zionism “a deeply immoral path that now has them justifying the shredding of core commandments: thou shalt not kill. Thou shalt not steal. Thou shalt not covet.” And so, like “genocide” and “anti-Semitism,” “Zionism” is now a flash point in Jewish conversation and American politics.

• This is the lexicon of a seismic political conflict. The generationally solid consensus behind Israel in the Democratic Party has fractured over Gaza. The conflation of anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism distills a potent pro-Israel Republican talking point. The issue has defenestrated two female Ivy League university presidents and prompted a third to order the massive arrest of student protesters. The result: campus demonstrations proliferating across the country—and ever more widespread debate about the meaning of Zionism.

• Nowhere is the story of Zionism in America more influential, and less well known, than that of the Central Intelligence Agency. As the siege of Gaza continues with U.S. supplying the bombs and the bullets for Israeli forces, the CIA is deeply implicated in the war, providing intelligence on Hamas leadership and taking the lead in the hostage negotiations.  (Prior to Oct. 7, the CIA relied on Israel for intelligence on Hamas.) 

***

Live Nation/Ticketmaster is buying Congress via Cory Doctorow at Pluralistic

• It's not that event tickets are the most consequential aspect of our lives. The monopolies over pharma, fuel, finance, tech, and even beer are all more important to our day-to-day. But while Ticketmaster - and its many ramified tentacles, like Live Nation - may not be the most destructive monopoly in our world, but it pisses off people with giant megaphones and armies of rabid fans.

• It's been a minute since Ticketmaster was last in the news, so let's recap. Ticketmaster bought out most of its ticketing rivals, then merged with Live Nation, the country's largest concert promoter, and bought out many of the country's largest music, stage and sports venues. They used this iron grip on the entire supply chain for performances and events to pile innumerable junk fees on every ticket sold, while drastically eroding the wages of the creative workers they nominally represented. They created a secret secondary market for tickets and worked with ticket-touts to help them run bots that bought every ticket within an instant of the opening of ticket sales, then ran an auction marketplace that made them gigantic fees on every re-sold tickets, - fees the performers were not entitled to share in.

• The Ticketmaster/Live Nation/venue octopus is nearly impossible to escape. Independent venues can't book Live Nation acts unless they use Ticketmaster for their tickets. Acts can't get into the large venues owned by Ticketmaster unless they sign up to have Live Nation book their tour. And when Ticketmaster buys a venue, it creams off the most successful acts, starving competing venues of blockbuster shows. They also illegally colluded with their vendors to jack up the price of concerts across the board