Is Freedom of Speech Being Further Deteriorated with the Anti-Israel Protests on College Campuses?
What is going on at university campuses across the country? Are the police bullying students and trying to prevent their free expression in public spaces, or are there antisemitic and unlawful protests that legitimately need to be quelled? Is the lack of major coverage in the corporate media (there are articles, but you have to look for them) an indication that news networks are protecting President Joe Biden from negative press ahead of the election?
Almost one thousand arrests have been made nationwide, including two at Schenley Park near the University of Pittsburgh, eighty at Washington University in St. Louis (Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein was among them), one hundred at Northeastern University in Boston, seventy-two at Arizona State University in Tempe, fifty-seven at the University of Texas in Austin, six at Tulane University in New Orleans, 108 at Columbia University in New York City, ninety at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, and forty-five at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. Police were called in almost all of the protests, and some of these law enforcement agents came in with full riot gear and hidden scopes on top of roofs (some suggest that there were snipers), ready to force a bunch of college students to disperse or be pushed to the ground. The police and protesters clashed, but the question becomes: why were the police needed? There was no real evidence of any violence prior to the dispatch of law enforcement, so why did these colleges seemingly want their “campus policies” enforced so badly? In other words, the staff at the universities felt uncomfortable that students were protesting in mass and camping out on public lawns, and in an ironic shift in mentality, they wanted the police involved.
At Columbia University, there was little to no violence until the school started to suspend students who did not leave the protest, and after that, protesters began breaking windows at Hamilton Hall, which later became occupied by the students (kind of like the January 6th pro-Trump protests?). This led to an intense showdown with law enforcement (the building is still occupied, and the university continues to suspend students). At George Washington University in Washington, D.C., students broke down barricades and swarmed University Yard, but only after the police took away one of the protesters by force.
So, if a police presence made things worse, why would sending more to the scene be a prudent course of action? Speaker of the House Mike Johnson and other Republican Senators and Representatives proposed plans to bring in the National Guard to quell the protests and threatened to withhold federal funding from universities if demonstrations continued (bribery). Florida Governor Ron DeSantis warned students who did not vacate the premises that they could be expelled, and Texas Governor Greg Abbot threatened further police action.
Do police wrestling college students to the ground and marching onto college campuses across the country in militarized gear to quell protests sound American to you? Do students not have free speech and the right to assemble? Just because you might disagree with what the students are protesting does not give you the right to prevent them from speaking their minds or demonstrating on public and taxpayer property (it gets murky when the protesters are on the grounds of private colleges that still get some of their funding from the government, and in most cases, private colleges have the right to enforce campus policies), and some of the colleges even have policies that permit protesting on campus (the police did not care and were still arresting people). Even presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who is a staunch advocate of the Israeli government, has stated that he supports the students protesting on college campuses because it is their First Amendment right.
So, what exactly are people even protesting? Of course, many government officials and political pundits will claim that the protesters are antisemitic (by the way, Palestinians are also Semites, so advocating for their destruction is antisemitic), and although there have been reports that agitators have infiltrated the protests to fuel hatred toward Jewish people, most of the protesters are actually opposing the actions of the Israeli government (and Zionism), which since October has killed over 34,000 people (almost three-quarters of which are women and children) and destroyed a large portion of Gaza and starved half of the population. By falsely claiming that the majority of the protesters hate Jews, it distracts from the real issues at hand. Some will also claim that billionaire agitator George Soros is funding the protests, and he may be doing so to stoke division in this country in order to profit off of it and bring about certain agendas, but at the end of the day, it does not take away from the fact that American policy toward Israel needs to change. Our government’s unconditional support is making Americans less safe because countries that oppose what Israel is doing consider the United States to be a belligerent in the war, and it puts Israeli citizens in danger because it increases terrorism against them.
The demands of the students include: moving the Biden administration toward a ceasefire that would prevent further Palestinian casualties, ending the weapons transfers and other American aid to the Israeli government, pressuring colleges and universities to divest their investments and funding away from pro-Israeli sources and defense contractors that profit from the war in Gaza, and amnesty for the protesters who have risked their livelihoods to speak their minds. Although these seem like reasonable demands, it is unlikely that any of them will come to pass, as colleges rely on funding, even if the sources are suspect. Additionally, American politicians, media, and academia are bought and paid for by the Israeli lobby, and it is near impossible to break through and oppose such a powerful force (the United States has an Israel first and America near the bottom policy), especially when you have Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu scolding American officials and university faculty and telling the United States government that it needs to bypass the First Amendment and crack down on free speech and assembly (why would we violate the Constitution on behalf of a foreign leader?).
As the 2024 election season heats up, President Joe Biden (as well as his handlers) is in a difficult spot. Does he let go of his seemingly unbreakable support for the Netanyahu regime and cave to the demands of the pro-Palestinian protests, or does he continue following his corporate masters and big donors to support genocide and the status quo? Could this be why many in the United States are not really aware of what is going on at college campuses across the country? Could the corporate media be covering for the president so that it does not affect his chances against Donald Trump in November? Could this be another way that the deep state (establishment bureaucracy and behind-the-scenes controllers of power) is rigging the election (another method being censorship and partnering with corporations to prevent anti-Biden rhetoric from surfacing and to elevate anti-Trump views)?
What will become of these pro-Palestinian protests? Will they fizzle out and then become a distant memory like most current events do? Since we live on a short cycle of news and hardly ever remember the tiny steps in our conditioning away from freedom, this allows the powers that be to manipulate us and to never have to worry about Americans questioning the system at large and overthrowing it. The American government’s support for the Israeli government may not end any time soon, but at least people are talking about it now. It took long enough.
Thank you for reading, and please check out my book, The Global Bully, and website.