{"id":262083,"date":"2024-05-13T12:01:00","date_gmt":"2024-05-13T11:01:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=262083"},"modified":"2024-05-12T05:18:39","modified_gmt":"2024-05-12T04:18:39","slug":"the-nations-conscience","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2024\/05\/the-nations-conscience\/","title":{"rendered":"The Nation\u2019s Conscience"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Strangelove 2024 \u2014 by Mr. Fish<\/p><\/div>\n

\n

The courageous stance of students across the US in defiance of genocide is accompanied by a near total blackout of their voices. Their words are the ones we most need to hear.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

8 May 2024 <\/em>– I am sitting on a fire escape across the street from Columbia University with three organizers of the Columbia University Gaza protest. It is night. New York City Police, stationed inside and outside the gates of the campus, have placed the campus on lockdown. There are barricades blocking streets. No one, unless they live in a residence hall on campus, is allowed to enter. The siege means that students cannot go to class. Students cannot go to the library. Students cannot enter the labs. Students cannot visit the university health services. Students cannot get to studios to practice. Students cannot attend lectures. Students cannot walk across the campus lawns. The university, as during the Covid pandemic, has retreated into the world of screens where students are isolated in their rooms.<\/p>\n

The university buildings are largely vacant. The campus pathways deserted. Columbia is a Potemkin university, a playground for corporate administrators. The president<\/a> of the university \u2014 a British-Egyptian baroness who built her career at institutions such as the Bank of England, World Bank and International Monetary Fund \u2014 called in police in riot gear, with guns drawn<\/a>, to clear the school\u2019s encampment, forcibly evict students who occupied a campus hall and beat and arrest over 100 of them. They were arrested for \u201ccriminal trespassing<\/a>\u201d on their own campus.<\/p>\n

These administrators demand, like all who manage corporate systems of power, total obedience. Dissent. Freedom of expression. Critical thought. Moral outrage. These have no place in our corporate-indentured universities.<\/p>\n

All systems of totalitarianism, including corporate totalitarianism, deform education into vocational training where students are taught what to think, not how to think. Only the skills and expertise demanded by the corporate state are valued. The withering away of the humanities and transformation of major research universities into corporate and Defense Department vocational schools with their outsized emphasis on science, technology, engineering and math, illustrate this shift. The students who disrupt the Potemkin university, who dare to think for themselves, face beatings<\/a>, suspension<\/a>, arrest<\/a> and expulsion<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The mandarins who run Columbia and other universities, corporatists who make salaries in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, oversee academic plantations. They treat their poorly paid adjunct faculty, who often lack health insurance and benefits, like serfs. They slavishly serve the interests of wealthy donors and corporations. They are protected by private security. They despise students, forced into onerous debt peonage for their education, who are non-conformists, who defy their fiefdoms and call out their complicity in genocide.<\/p>\n

Columbia University, with an endowment<\/a> of $13.64 billion, charges<\/a> students nearly $90,000 a year to attend. But students are not allowed to object when their tax and tuition money funds genocide, or when their tuition payments are used to see them, along with faculty supporters, assaulted and sent to jail. They are, as Joe Biden put it, members of \u201chate groups.\u201d They are \u2014 as Senate Majority leader Chuck Schumer said of those who occupied Hamilton Hall at Columbia renaming it Hind Hall, in honor of a six-year-old Palestinian girl, Hind Rajab<\/a>, who was murdered<\/a> by Israeli forces after spending 12 days trapped in a car with her six dead relatives \u2014 engaged in<\/a> \u201clawlessness\u201d.<\/p>\n

During the assault by dozens of police on the occupied hall, one student was knocked unconscious, several were beaten and sent to hospital and a shot was fired<\/a> by a police officer inside the hall. The excess use of force is justified with the lie that there are outside infiltrators and agitators directing the protest. As the protests continue, and they will continue, this use of force<\/a> will become more draconian.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe university is a place of capital accumulation,\u201d says Sara Wexler, a doctoral student in philosophy, seated with two other students on the fire escape. \u201cWe have billion dollar endowments that are connected to Israel and defense companies. We are being forced to confront the fact that universities aren\u2019t democratic. You have a board of trustees and investors that are actually making the decisions. Even if students have votes saying they want divestment and the faculty want divestment, we actually don\u2019t have any power because they can call in the NYPD.\u201d<\/p>\n

There is an iron determination by the ruling institutions, including the media, to shift the narrative away from the genocide in Gaza, to threats against Jewish students and antisemitism. The anger the protesters feel for journalists, especially at news organizations such as CNN and The New York Times, is intense and justified.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m a German-Polish Jew,\u201d says Wexler. \u201cMy last name is Wexler. It\u2019s Yiddish for money-maker, money-exchanger. No matter how many times I tell people I\u2019m Jewish, I\u2019m still labeled antisemitic. It\u2019s infuriating. We are told that we need a state that is based on ethnicity in the 21st century and that\u2019s the only way Jewish people can be safe. But it is really for Britain and America and other imperialist states to have a presence in the Middle East. I\u2019ve no idea why people still believe this narrative. It makes no sense to have a place for Jewish people that requires other people to suffer and die.\u201d<\/p>\n

I have seen this assault on universities and freedom of expression before. I saw it in Augusto Pinochet\u2019s Chile, the military dictatorship in El Salvador, Guatemala under Rios Montt, and during my coverage of the military regimes in Argentina, Peru, Bolivia, Syria, Iraq and Algeria.<\/p>\n

Columbia University, with its locked gates, lines of police cruisers, rows of metal barricades three and four deep, swarms of uniformed police and private security, looks no different. It looks no different because it is no different.<\/p>\n

Welcome to our corporate dictatorship.<\/p>\n

The cacophony of the streets of New York City punctuates our conversation. These students know what they are risking. They know what they are up against.<\/p>\n

Student activists waited months before setting up encampments. They tried repeatedly to have their voices heard and their concerns addressed. But they were rebuffed, ignored and harassed. In November, the students presented a petition to the university calling for divestment from Israeli corporations that facilitate the genocide. No one bothered to respond.<\/p>\n

The protesters endure constant abuse. On April 25, during Columbia\u2019s senior boat cruise, Muslim students and those identified as supporting the protests had alcohol poured on their heads and clothes by jeering Zionists. In January, former Israeli soldiers studying at Columbia used<\/a> skunk spray to assault students on the steps of Lowe Library. The university, under heavy pressure once the attackers were identified, said they had banned the former soldiers from campus, but other students reported seeing one of the men on campus recently. When Jewish students in the encampment attempted to prepare their meals in the kosher kitchen at the Jewish Theological Seminary, they were insulted by Zionists who were in the building. Zionist counter demonstrators have been joined<\/a> on campus by the founder\u00a0 of the white supremist Proud Boys organization. Students have had their personal information posted<\/a> on the Canary Mission<\/a> and found their faces on the sides of trucks<\/a> circling the campus, denouncing them as antisemites.<\/p>\n

These attacks are replicated at other universities, including UCLA, where masked Zionists released rats<\/a> and tossed fireworks<\/a> into the encampment and broadcast the sound of crying children<\/a> \u2013\u00a0 something the Israeli army does to lure<\/a> Palestinians in Gaza out of hiding to kill them. The Zionist mob<\/a>, armed with pepper and bear spray, violently attacked<\/a> the protesters<\/a>, as police and campus security watched passively and refused to make arrests.<\/p>\n

\u201cAt the General Studies gala, which is one of the undergraduate schools that has a large population of former IDF soldiers, at least eight students wearing keffiyehs were physically and verbally harassed by students identified as ex-IDF and Israelis,\u201d Cameron Jones, a sophomore majoring in urban studies and who is Jewish, tells me. \u201cStudents were called \u2018bitch\u2019 and \u2018whore\u2019 in Hebrew. Some were called terrorists and told to go back to Gaza. Many of the students harassed were Arabs, some having their keffiyehs ripped off and thrown to the ground. Several students in keffiyehs were grabbed and pushed. A Jewish student wearing a keffiyeh was cursed at in Hebrew and later punched in the face. Another student was kicked. The event ended after dozens of students sang the Israeli national anthem, some of them flipping off students wearing keffiyehs. I have been followed around campus by individuals and been cursed and had obscenities yelled at me.\u201d<\/p>\n

The university has refused to reprimand those who disrupted the gala, even though the individuals who carried out the assaults have been identified.<\/p>\n

Universities have hired people such as Cas Halloway, currently the chief operating officer at Columbia, who was the deputy mayor for operations under Michael Bloomberg. Holloway reportedly oversaw the police clearance of the Occupy encampment at Zuccotti Park. This is the kind of expertise universities covet.<\/p>\n

At Columbia, student organizers, following the mass arrests and evictions from their encampment and Hind Hall, called for university-wide strikes by faculty, staff and students. Columbia has canceled<\/a> its university wide commencement.<\/p>\n

I am on the campus of Princeton University. It is after evening prayers and 17 students who have mounted a hunger strike<\/a> sit together, many wrapped in blankets.<\/p>\n

As universities escalate their crackdowns, the protesters escalate their response. Students at Princeton held rallies and walk-outs throughout October and November, which culminated in a protest at the Council of the Princeton University Community, made up of administrators, students, staff, deans and the president. They were met at each protest with a wall of silence.<\/p>\n

Princeton students decided, following the example at Columbia, to set up a tent encampment<\/a> on April 25 and issued a set of demands<\/a> calling on the university to \u201cdivest and disassociate from Israel.\u201d But when they arrived early in the morning at their staging areas, as well as the site in front of Firestone Library which they hoped to use for an encampment, they were met with dozens of campus police and Princeton town police who had been tipped off. The students hastily occupied another location on campus, McCosh Courtyard. Two students were immediately arrested<\/a>, evicted from their student housing and banned from campus. The police forced the remaining students to take down their tents.<\/p>\n

Protesters at the encampment have been sleeping in the open, including when it rains.<\/p>\n

In an irony not lost on the students, dotted around Princeton\u2019s campus are massive tents set up for reunion weekend<\/a> where alumni down copious amounts of alcohol and dress up in garish outfits with the school colors of orange and black. The protesters are barred from entering them.<\/p>\n

Thirteen students at Princeton occupied Clio Hall<\/a> on April 29. They, like their counterparts at Columbia, were arrested and are now barred from campus. Some 200 students surrounded Clio Hall in solidarity as the occupying students were led away<\/a> by police. As they were being processed by the police, the arrested students sang the Black spiritual Roll Jordan Roll<\/a>, altering the words to \u201cWell some say John was a baptist, some say John was a Palestinian, But I say John was a preacher of God and my bible says so too.\u201d<\/p>\n

The hunger strikers<\/a>, who began their liquid-only diet on May 3, issued this statement:<\/p>\n

The Princeton Gaza Solidarity Encampment announces the initiation of a hunger strike in solidarity with the millions of Palestinians in Gaza suffering under the ongoing siege by the state of Israel. The Israeli occupation has deliberately blocked access to basic necessities to engineer a dire famine for the two million residents of Gaza. Since the announcement on October 9 by the Israeli Defense Minister prohibiting the entry of food, fuel and electricity into the Gaza Strip, Israel has systematically obstructed and limited access to vital aid for Palestinians in Gaza, even intentionally destroying existing cropland. On March 18, the U.N. Secretary General declared that \u201cThis is the highest number of people facing catastrophic hunger ever recorded by the integrated food security classification system.\u201d To make bread, Gazans have been forced to use animal feed as flour. To break their fasts in Ramadan, Gazans have been forced to prepare meals of grass. 97% of Gaza\u2019s water has been deemed undrinkable since October 2021 and they have been forced to drink dirty salt water to survive. The consequences of this unprecedented famine created and maintained by Israel will devastate Gaza\u2019s children for generations to come and cannot be tolerated any longer. We have begun our hunger strike to stand in solidarity with the people of Gaza. We are drawing from the tradition of Palestinian political prisoners going on salt-water-only hunger strikes in Israeli prisons since 1968. Our hunger strike is a response to the administration\u2019s refusal to engage with our demands for disassociation and divestment from Israel. We refuse to be silenced by the university administration\u2019s intimidation and repression tactics. We struggle together in solidarity with the people of Palestine. We commit our bodies to their liberation. Participants in the hunger strikes will abstain from all food or drink except water until the following demands are met:<\/p>\n

\u2022 \u00a0 Meet with students to discuss demands for disclosure, divestment and a full academic and cultural boycott of Israel.<\/p>\n

\u2022 \u00a0 Grant complete amnesty from all criminal and disciplinary charges for participants of the peaceful sit-in.<\/p>\n

\u2022 \u00a0 Reverse all campus bans and evictions of students.<\/p>\n

The university and the world must recognize that we refuse to be complicit in genocide and will take every necessary action to change this reality. Our hunger strike, though small in comparison to the enduring suffering of the Palestinian people, symbolizes our unwavering commitment to justice and solidarity.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

University President Christopher Eisgruber met<\/a> with the hunger strikers \u2013 the first meeting by school administrators with protesters since Oct. 7 \u2013 but dismissed their demands.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is probably the most important thing I\u2019ve done here,\u201d says Areeq Hasan, a senior who is going to do a PhD in applied physics next year at Stanford, who is also part of the hunger strike. \u201cIf we\u2019re on a scale of one to 10, this is a 10. Since the start of encampment, I have tried to become a better person. We have pillars of faith. One of them is sunnah, which is prayer. That\u2019s a place where you train yourself to become a better person. It is linked to spirituality. That\u2019s something I\u2019ve been emphasizing more during my time at Princeton. There\u2019s another aspect of faith. Zakat. It means charity, but you can read it more generally as justice\u2026economic justice and social justice. I\u2019m training myself, but to what end? This encampment is not just about trying to cultivate, to purify my heart to try to become a better person, but about trying to stand for justice and actively use these skills that I\u2019m learning to command what I feel to be right and to forbid what I believe to be wrong, to stand up for oppressed people around the world.\u201d<\/p>\n

Anha Khan, a Princeton student on hunger strike whose family is from Bangladesh, sits with her knees tucked up in front of her. She is wearing blue sweatpants that say Looney Tunes and has an engagement ring that every so often glints in the light. She sees in Bangladesh\u2019s history of colonialism, dispossession and genocide, the experience of Palestinians.<\/p>\n

\u201cSo much was taken from my people,\u201d she says. \u201cWe haven\u2019t had the time or the resources to recuperate from the terrible times we\u2019ve gone through. Not only did my people go through a genocide in 1971, but we were also victims of the partition that happened in 1947 and then civil disputes between West and East Pakistan throughout the forties, the fifties and the sixties. It makes me angry. If we weren\u2019t colonized by the British throughout the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth century, and if we weren\u2019t occupied, we would have had time to develop and create a more prosperous society. Now we\u2019re staggering because so much was taken from us. It\u2019s not fair.\u201d<\/p>\n

The hostility of the university has radicalized the students, who see university administrators attempting to placate external pressures from wealthy donors, the weapons manufacturers and the Israel lobby, rather than deal with the internal realities of the non-violent protests and the genocide.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe administration doesn\u2019t care about the well being, health or safety of their students,\u201d Khan tells me. \u201cWe have tried to get at least tents out at night. Since we are on a 24-hour liquid fast, not eating anything, our bodies are working overtime to stay resilient. Our immune systems are not as strong. Yet the university tells us we can\u2019t pitch up tents to keep ourselves safe at night from the cold and the winds. It\u2019s abhorrent for me. I feel a lot more physical weakness. My headaches are worse. There is an inability to even climb up stairs now. It made me realize that for the past seven months what Gazans have been facing is a million times worse. You can\u2019t understand their plight unless you experience that kind of starvation that they\u2019re experiencing, although I\u2019m not experiencing the atrocities they\u2019re experiencing.\u201d<\/p>\n

The hunger strikers, while getting a lot of support on social media, have also been the targets of death threats and hateful messages from conservative influencers. \u201cI give them 10 hours before they call DoorDash,\u201d someone posted<\/a> on X. \u201cWhy won\u2019t they give up water, don\u2019t they care about Palestine? Come on, give up water!\u201d another post<\/a> read. \u201cCan they hold their breath too? Asking for a friend,\u201d another<\/a> read. \u201cOK so I hear there\u2019s going to be a bunch of barbecues at Princeton this weekend, let\u2019s bring out a bunch of pork products too to show these Muslims!\u201d someone posted.<\/p>\n

On campus the tiny groups of counter protesters, many from the ultra orthodox Chabad House<\/a>, jeer at the protesters, shouting \u201cJihadists!\u201d or \u201cI like your terrorist headscarf!\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIt is horrifying to see thousands upon thousands of people wish for our deaths and hope that we starve and die,\u201d Khan says softly. \u201cIn the press release video, I wore a mask. One of the funnier comments I got was, \u2018Wow, I bet that chick on the right has buck-teeth behind that mask.\u2019 It\u2019s ridiculous. Another read, \u2018I bet that chick on the right used her Dyson Supersonic before coming to the press release.\u2019 The Dyson Supersonic is a really expensive hair dryer. Honestly, the only thing I got from that was that my hair looked good, so thank you!\u201d<\/p>\n

David Chmielewski, a senior whose parents are Polish and who had family interned in the Nazi death camps, is a Muslim convert. His visits to the concentration camps in Poland, including Auschwitz, made him acutely aware of the capacity for human evil. He sees this evil in the genocide in Gaza. He sees the same indifference and support that characterized Nazi Germany. \u201cNever again,\u201d he says, means never again for everyone.<\/p>\n

\u201cSince the genocide, the university has failed to reach out to Arab students, to Muslim students and to Palestinian students to offer support,\u201d he tells me. \u201cThe university claims it is committed to diversity, equity and inclusion, but we don\u2019t feel we belong here.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re told in our Islamic tradition by our prophets that when one part of the ummah, the nation of believers, feels pain, then we all feel pain,\u201d he says. \u201cThat has to be an important motivation for us. But the second part is that Islam gives us an obligation to strive for justice regardless of who we\u2019re striving on behalf of. There are plenty of Palestinians who aren\u2019t Muslim, but we\u2019re fighting for the liberation of all Palestinians. Muslims stand up for issues that aren\u2019t specifically Muslim issues. There were Muslims who were involved in the struggle against apartheid in South Africa. There were Muslims involved in the civil rights movement. We draw inspiration from them.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is a beautiful interfaith struggle,\u201d he says. \u201cYesterday, we set up a tarp where we were praying. We had people doing group Quran recitations. On the same tarp, Jewish students had their Shabbat service. On Sunday, we had Christian services<\/a> at the encampment. We are trying to give a vision of the world that we want to build, a world after apartheid. We\u2019re not just responding to Israeli apartheid, we\u2019re trying to build our own vision of what a society would look like. That\u2019s what you see when you have people doing Quran recitations or reading Shabbat services on the same tarp, that\u2019s the kind of world we want to build.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019ve been portrayed as causing people to feel unsafe,\u201d he says. \u201cWe\u2019ve been perceived as presenting a threat. Part of the motivation for the hunger strike is making clear that we\u2019re not the people making anyone unsafe. The university is making us unsafe. They\u2019re unwilling to meet with us and we\u2019re willing to starve ourselves. Who\u2019s causing the un-safety? There is a hypocrisy about how we\u2019re being portrayed. We\u2019re being portrayed as violent when it\u2019s the universities who are calling police on peaceful protesters. We\u2019re being portrayed as disrupting everything around us, but what we\u2019re drawing on are traditions fundamental to American political culture. We\u2019re drawing on traditions of sit-ins, hunger strikes and peaceful encampments. Palestinian political prisoners have carried out hunger strikes for decades. The hunger strike goes back to de-colonial struggles before that, to India, to Ireland, to the struggle against apartheid in South Africa.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cPalestinian liberation is the cause of human liberation,\u201d he goes on. \u201cPalestine is the most obvious example in the world today, other than the United States, of settler-colonialism. The struggle against Zionist occupation is viewed accurately by Zionists both within the United States and Israel, as sort of the last dying gasp of imperialism. They\u2019re trying to hold onto it. That\u2019s why it\u2019s scary. The liberation of Palestine would mean a radically different world, a world that moves past exploitation and injustice. That\u2019s why so many people who aren\u2019t Palestinian and aren\u2019t Arab and aren\u2019t Muslim are so invested in this struggle. They see its significance.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIn quantum mechanics there\u2019s the idea of non-locality,\u201d says Hasan. \u201cEven though I\u2019m miles and miles away from the people in Palestine, I feel deeply entangled with them in the same way that the electrons that I work with in my lab are entangled. As David said, this idea that the community of believers is one body and if one part of the body is in pain, all of it pains, it is our responsibility to strive to alleviate that pain. If we take a step back and look at this composite system, it\u2019s evolving in perfect unitary, even though we don\u2019t understand it because we only have access to one small piece of it. There is deep underlying justice that maybe we don\u2019t recognize, but that exists when we look at the plight of the Palestinian people.\u201d<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a tradition associated with the prophet,\u201d he says. \u201cWhen you\u2019ve seen an injustice occur you should try to change it with your hands. If you can\u2019t change it with your hands then you should try to adjust it with your tongue. You should speak out about it. If you can\u2019t do that, you should at least feel the injustice in your heart. This hunger strike, this encampment, everything we\u2019re doing here as students, is my way of trying to realize that, trying to implement that in my life.\u201d<\/p>\n

Spend time with the students in the protests and you hear stories of revelations, epiphanies. In the lexicon of Christianity, these are called moments of grace<\/a>. These experiences, these moments of grace, are the unseen engine of the protest movements.<\/p>\n

When Oscar Lloyd, a junior at Columbia studying cognitive science and philosophy, was about eight-years-old, he and his family visited the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota.<\/p>\n

\u201cI saw the vast distinction between the huge memorial at the Battle of the Little Bighorn compared to the small wooden sign at the massacre at Wounded Knee,\u201d he says, comparing the numerous monuments celebrating the 1876 defeat of the U.S. 7th Cavalry at the Little Big Horn<\/a> to the massacre of 250 to 300 Native Americans, half of whom were women and children, in 1890 at Wounded Knee<\/a>. \u201cI was shocked that there can be two sides to history, that one side can be told and the other can be completely forgotten. This is the story of Palestine.\u201d<\/p>\n

Sara Ryave, a graduate student at Princeton, spent a year in Israel studying at the Pardes Institute of Jewish Studies, a non-denominational yeshiva. She came face to face with apartheid. She is banned from campus after occupying Clio Hall.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was during that year that I saw things that I will never forget,\u201d she said. \u201cI spent time in the West Bank and with communities in the south Hebron Hills. I saw the daily realities of apartheid. If you don\u2019t look for them, you don\u2019t notice them. But once you do, if you want to, it\u2019s clear. That predisposed me to this. I saw people living under police and IDF military threats every single day, whose lives are made unbearable by settlers.\u201d<\/p>\n

When Hasan was in fourth grade, he remembers his mother weeping uncontrollably on the 27th<\/sup> night during Ramadan, an especially holy day known as The Night of Power<\/a>. On this night, prayers are traditionally answered.<\/p>\n

\u201cI have a very vivid memory of standing in prayer at night next to my mother,\u201d he says. \u201cMy mother was weeping. I\u2019d never seen her cry so much in my life. I remember that so vividly. I asked her why she was crying. She told me that she was crying because of all of the people that were suffering around the world. And among them, I can imagine she was bringing to heart the people in Palestine. At that point in my life, I didn\u2019t understand systems of oppression. But what I did understand was that I\u2019d never seen my mother in such pain before. I didn\u2019t want her to be in that kind of pain. My sister and I, seeing our mother in so much pain, started crying too. The emotions were so strong that night. I don\u2019t think I\u2019ve ever cried like that in my life. That was the first time I had a consciousness of suffering in the world, specifically systems of oppression, though I didn\u2019t really understand the various dimensions of it until much later on. That\u2019s when my heart established a connection to the plight of the Palestinian people.\u201d<\/p>\n

Helen Wainaina, a doctoral student in English who occupied Clio Hall at Princeton and is barred from campus, was born in South Africa. She lived in Tanzania until she was 10-years-old and then moved with her family to Houston.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think of my parents and their journeys in Africa and eventually leaving the African continent,\u201d she says. \u201cI\u2019m conflicted that they ended up in the U.S. If things had turned out differently during the post-colonial movements, they would not have moved. We would have been able to live, grow up and study where we were. I\u2019ve always felt that that was a profound injustice. I\u2019m grateful that my parents did everything they could to get us here, but I remember when I got my citizenship, I was very angry. I had no say. I wish the world was oriented differently, that we didn\u2019t need to come here, that the post-colonial dreams of people who worked on those movements actually materialized.\u201d<\/p>\n

The protest movements – which have spread around the globe<\/a> – are not built around the single issue of the apartheid state in Israel or its genocide against Palestinians. They are built around the awareness<\/a> that the old world order, the one of settler colonialism, western imperialism and militarism used by the countries in the Global North to dominate the Global South, must end. They decry the hoarding of natural resources and wealth by industrial nations in a world of diminishing returns. These protests are built around a vision of a world of equality, dignity and independence. This vision, and the commitment to it, will make this movement not only hard to defeat, but presages a wider struggle beyond the genocide in Gaza.<\/p>\n

The genocide has awakened a sleeping giant. Let us pray the giant prevails.<\/p>\n

______________________________________________<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize\u2013winning journalist who was a foreign correspondent for fifteen years for\u00a0<\/em>The New York Times,\u00a0where he served as the Middle East Bureau Chief and Balkan Bureau Chief. He previously worked overseas for\u00a0<\/em>The Dallas Morning News,\u00a0The Christian Science Monitor, and<\/em> NPR. He used to be the host of the Emmy Award-nominated <\/em>RT America show\u00a0<\/em>On Contact.<\/em><\/p>\n

Copyright 2024 Chris Hedges<\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original – chrishedges.substack.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

8 May 2024 – The courageous stance of students across the US in defiance of genocide is accompanied by a near total blackout of their voices. Their words are the ones we most need to hear. The genocide has awakened a sleeping giant. Let us pray the giant prevails.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":262084,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[229,87,865,88,427,3294,70],"class_list":["post-262083","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-anglo-america","tag-activism","tag-gaza","tag-genocide","tag-israel","tag-palestine","tag-students-anti-genocide-gaza","tag-usa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/262083","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=262083"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/262083\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":262087,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/262083\/revisions\/262087"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/262084"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=262083"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=262083"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=262083"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}