Factbox: How students in US bravely stood up and Zionists cowardly cooked up

By David Miller

On April 17, in the wee hours of the morning, anti-genocide protestors in a bold and brave move infiltrated campus at Columbia University on New York’s upper West side.

They pitched tents and declared that the university must end its complicity in the genocide in Gaza.

This was not the first student action over the Israeli genocidal war on Gaza. Campuses across the world have seen protests since the launch of Operation Al Aqsa Flood, but the campus encampment lit a fuse that ignited all over the US and in other Western countries. 

After Columbia, encampments sprang up at five university campuses in New York alone, with protests at dozens of campuses and on-campus encampments at more than half of all US states.

This growing campus movement aims to demand divestment from the Zionist entity, including through share ownership and investments, research links to arms manufacturers who are directly complicit in genocide and links to Zionist universities in occupied Palestine.

At Columbia, the New York Police Department (NYPD) was called in after only a day of protest.

By the end of the month, an attempt to clear the student encampment led them to escalate the protest to occupy the symbolically important Hamilton Hall, the same building occupied by students protesting Vietnam in 1968 and those protesting the apartheid system in South Africa in 1985.

The student protesters immediately renamed it “Hind’s Hall” in memory of the six-year-old Palestinian girl Hind Rajab, who was found murdered by occupation forces along with family members in a destroyed car in Gaza days after she called emergency services for help.

The student protests all over the US have been met with brutal repression from the US police. The Mayor of New York denounced “outside agitators”, a slogan as old as it is transparently fictitious.

Over 1,700 protesters had been arrested by May 1, and that number has significantly gone up now, according to media reports. These include faculty members on more than 30 US campuses, with more than 500 in Manhattan alone.

Universities have suspended or expelled many students and professors, as the Press TV website reported in this feature published on May 5.

Tear gas has been fired on multiple campuses and young students have been tasered. More than 100 students have been injured and journalists have also been at the receiving end.

Snipers have been positioned on the roofs of campus buildings in Ohio – portentously reminding of the “four dead in Ohio” unarmed students shot dead by state troopers at Kent State University in May 1970.

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Campus movement a bright shining light

The student movement is a bright shining light against the US-backed Israeli genocide – a light that can be seen with the naked eye from Gaza. It will have many challenges to face but its potential to force the issue of the genocide in Gaza, and perhaps beyond, is immense.

The Zionist strategy of dealing with the ever-growing student movement against genocide betrays a sickness at the heart of its illegitimate identity -- a self-victimising stance that pushes it to simply fake attacks by anti-genocide protestors.

For example, a student alleged that she was stabbed in the eye at Yale University. She wasn’t attacked as video of the incident showed. The hoax was then deconstructed by the TV channel Breaking Points.

It’s worth listening closely to the young woman who claimed to have been stabbed for an insight into the mind of the narcissistic personality disorder that is the ideology of Zionism.

No. There was no stabbing in the eye at all, as can be seen by the fact that she sustained no injury whatsoever. To be fair, she did claim she felt “pressure” on her eye and got a headache.

However, if you listen closely to her words in a video for Racket News by Matt Orfalea, she claimed several other aspects of the supposed assault were "antisemitic".

These included that the protestors who were filing past her “started taunting me and giving me the middle finger". About the chanting, she said, "They all, one after the other, taunted me".

What was this "antisemitic" taunting? "Disclose! Divest! We will not stop. We will not rest." In addition, she claimed that “they'd throw up peace signs."

Further on in her interview, she talked about a different incident in which students were: "singing and holding hands, singing anti-Jewish, like, I guess, chants."

Which chants exactly? "I ain't gonna study war no more".

She also explained an “anti-Jewish” symbol that some of the students were wearing or carrying: "It's supposed to be a symbol, basically, against the Jewish people... In favour of violent, terrorist acts against Jews".

What was this? She was describing a watermelon.

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She topped this litany of fake and fraudulent accusations with the statement that "It's really painful to realize that your peers have joined the Nazi Party."

Other similar incidents included a Zionist in Philadelphia who claimed on film that he was “hit” by a flagpole after he manifestly deliberately head-butted the pole and its Palestinian flag.

A Chicago public school teacher walked onto campus at Northwestern University and called the police saying she was surrounded by anti-genocide protestors.  She wasn’t.

In Boston, an Israeli naval officer “who participated in the atrocities in Gaza” later “went on Fox News and said he was ‘truly afraid’ to walk on campus due to the protesting students.”

After that, he proceeded to walk “into the middle of the MIT encampment and start[ed] screaming for the police to save him because he fe[lt] unsafe, while the students ignore[d] him.”

In Sydney Australia, a Zionist attempted to steal protestors’ banners and claimed they were not being peaceful when they tried to stop her: “This is not peaceful, you are grabbing something out of my hand”, she said, to which the very patient students replied, “we’re not going to let you steal from us.”

Perhaps, the worst was the story of a Jewish student being beaten unconscious which was then used as a pretext to justify actual violent attacks by Zionist thugs on peaceful anti-genocide protestors on campus at UCLA.

In fact, she had launched herself into the anti-genocide protestors, was pulled back by fellow Zionists (her mother as it turned out), and fell back and hit her head. She wasn't unconscious.

In an interview with the student Eleanor Sonbolian, recorded after the supposed assault, the news presenter framed her as “a student who was kicked in the head and knocked unconscious”. 

But the interview itself makes clear that any injury she received as a result of her falling backward as her mother pulled her out of the crowd as a result of which she hit her head.

Ideology of false entitlement

Zionists present as entitled children, who have never been told ‘no’. But this should not surprise us since the whole ideology is premised on them being entitled to steal Palestinian land.  Zionism is a kind of collective narcissistic personality disorder.

As Bassem Youssef has put it: “Israel wants you to believe that they are the victim. Dealing with Israel is so difficult.  It's like being in a relationship with a narcissistic psychopath. He ***** you up and then makes you think it's your fault.”

The Zionist movement literally spends millions each year inculcating narcissistic entitlement in their youth via the so-called Birthright programme of free trips to the Zionist entity.

But no Jew outside Palestine has a birthright to occupy and colonize Palestine. Nevertheless, more than 850,000 young Jews from 68 countries have reportedly participated in Birthright Israel since it started in 1999.

One survey showed that “nearly half of those who participated” on trips to the occupied territories “come away at least considering” becoming a settler colonist (p.202).

After a short hiatus, following the launch of Operation Al Aqsa Flood on 7 October, Birthright trips resumed in January this year.

The trips are often accompanied by members of the occupation forces and one of the functions of Birthright is to funnel young Jews from outside occupied Palestine into the occupation forces via the Masa Journey programme.

Birthright, like so much of the radicalization programmes of the Zionist movement, encourages young Jews to feel they are special, that they have special rights to settle in stolen land and to ethnically cleanse and murder Palestinians - that they are in a word, entitled.

This entitlement breeds a kind of psychological disorder that only encourages Zionists to ask for more.  What else is the new US Antisemitism Awareness Act but legislation giving special protections to Zionists? 

These are superior to those enjoyed by American citizens. No wonder key sections of the American right are increasingly detaching from Zionism.

David Miller is the producer and co-host of Press TV’s weekly Palestine Declassified show. He was sacked from Bristol University in October 2021 over his Palestine advocacy. 

(The views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of Press TV)

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