“public protests against perceived injustices”

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“That long history of permitting or even glorifying public protests against perceived injustices had naturally been absorbed and taken to heart by the young college students who began their classes in September 2023. Then within weeks, a remarkably daring surprise raid by the Hamas militants of long-besieged Gaza caught the Israelis napping and surmounted the high-tech defenses that had cost perhaps a half-billion dollars to construct. Many hundreds of Israeli soldiers and security officers were killed along with similar numbers of civilians, with most of the latter probably dying from the friendly-fire of Israel’s own panic-stricken and trigger-happy military units. Some 240 Israeli soldiers and civilians were captured and taken back to Gaza as prisoners, with Hamas hoping to exchange them for the freedom of the many thousands of Palestinian civilians who had been held for years in Israeli prisons, often under brutal conditions.

As usual, our overwhelmingly pro-Israel mainstream media portrayed the attack in extremely one-sided fashion, devoid of any historical context, a pattern that had been followed for three generations. As a result, Israel received an enormous outpouring of public and elite sympathy as it mobilized for a retaliatory attack against Gaza. Within days, our own Secretary of State Antony Blinken flew to Israel declaring that he came “as a Jew” and pledging America’s unwavering support in that moment of crisis, sentiments completely echoed by President Joseph Biden and his entire administration. But the Hamas fighters and their Israeli captives were hidden in a network of fortified tunnels and rooting them out might produce heavy casualties, so Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his advisors decided upon a different strategy.”

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“For generations, college students had been heavily indoctrinated with the horrors of the Holocaust, endlessly told that they must never remain silent while helpless men, women, and children were brutally attacked and slaughtered. The images they now saw of devastated cities and dead or dying children seemed exactly like something out of the movies, but they were instead happening in real-time in the physical world.

A couple of years earlier, the Trump and the Biden Administrations had both jointly proclaimed that the Chinese government was guilty of “genocide” against its Uighur minority despite lack of any evidence that significant numbers of Uighurs had been harmed let alone killed. So by that standard, the total destruction of Gaza and the massive slaughter or deliberate starvation of millions of its people obviously constituted an enormous “genocide,” and within weeks student activists all across college campuses had taken up that cry and begun organizing public protests against the horrendous massacre that Israel was committing.

Three years earlier, a lifelong career criminal named George Floyd had died of a drug overdose while in police custody, and a single, highly-misleading video of his last moments had provoked the greatest wave of American public protests since the late 1960s. So it was hardly surprising that the widespread dissemination of hundreds or thousands of videos showing dead and mutilated Gazan children inspired a powerful protest movement. But this time, instead of being praised for their humanitarian commitment, those students—and the university administrators who allowed their protests—were ferociously attacked and punished”

Ron Unz

Read more here.

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