We're joined by Editor of Veterans Today, Kevin Barrett, who's joining us from Saidia. Mr. Barrett, welcome to the program.
Chants of free Palestine can be heard across the globe once again. But the significance and what's unprecedented this time around is the demonstrations that are taking place across U.S. universities. This is of course something unprecedented regarding Palestinian support inside America. Talk to us about that, about these global demonstrations, how Israel has been cornered and now it's the most isolated it's ever been. And of course about the police clampdown on campuses which is being seen as a attack on freedom of expression in America.
Yeah, it's interesting how this particular issue brings such quick and massive police repression. If you speak out for Palestine in the United States, the authorities are likely to come down on you, attack you, repress you, and jail you much more quickly than if you were protesting about just about any other issue. And examples of this include the protests in the United States that began at Columbia University, and have been quite ruthlessly repressed, with a large number of students actually expelled from the university for protesting.
That's...maybe not entirely unprecedented. But American universities throughout my lifetime have been full of protests. And I can't recall anyone ever being expelled for protesting. And these are generally peaceful protesters too. At Ohio State University, the police arrived just an hour or two after a demonstration started, and they started arresting people almost instantly.
And likewise, I think it was in Chicago, at Northwestern where something similar occurred. They changed the school rules to make tents illegal so they could quickly try to stop the pro-Palestine tent city on campus.
Hundreds, if not well over a thousand by now, of American students have been arrested in these protests, which are continuing to spread like proverbial wildfire. And likewise, it seems that in France, they’ve been unable to stop them (from growing). When the first Sciences Po protest a couple of days ago was massively repressed in the typical style of Macron—though fortunately I don't think they were shooting out people's eyes with rubber bullets like he did to the Yellow Vests—that protest restarted, just today, and it's twice as big as it was a couple of days ago.
So the genocide perpetrators and their enablers in the West are now facing a serious problem, because the younger generation of students across the world, including in the Western world and even in the United States, the belly of the beast, is increasingly aware about this issue. And all of their sympathies are already tending towards the Palestinians. And the more they learn about this genocide, the stronger their sympathies for the Palestinians will be. So the Zionist propaganda machine has run into a really serious roadblock.
And these rallies on U.S. campuses gained more steam to protest the recent congressional approval of more military aid for the Israeli regime. About that aid package, billions of taxpayer dollars will continue to go to Israel to continue its genocide. What was your reaction to the approval of the military aid?
Well, it's, of course, disgusting. It's disappointing that the Republicans caved. Their new speaker Mike Johnson changed his position and caved on the Ukraine issue. But the continued all-out support from both major parties for this genocide in Gaza is just incredibly disgusting and embarrassing. It really makes me embarrassed to be an American, to have a government that is so unanimously pro-genocide, that is paying for this genocide, enabling it, as it has been for more than half a century. But now that this genocide has switched into high gear and is being televised 24-7-365, everybody can see it on social media. Nobody can deny it anymore.
That may have changed some views among younger people on college campuses and also among the general public. According to the polls, we now have in the U.S. about equal numbers of sympathizers with Palestine and with Israel. Whereas in the past, the Israeli propaganda machine had won a huge majority to its side. But that's eroded. Among the younger people, there's a very, very strong majority now favoring Palestine, indeed supporting the Palestinian resistance. And this terrifies the Zionists.
So the people are coming around, especially the younger people. But the United States government is still owned by Zionist billionaires who also own the media. So there's going to have to be a big change before U.S. government policy significantly changes.
Let's go over what the students are actually calling for. They want universities to divest finances from manufacturers that sell weapons to Israel. They want Washington to end its military and financial support for Israel. Those demands, as we mentioned earlier, have been met with violent crackdowns by U.S. police. Now, what's interesting is that these protesters have been called everything from anti-Semites to terrorists. Again, more double standards when it comes to criticizing Israel.
That's right. Words like anti-Semite and terrorist are just smear terms that they use to try to discredit people who are criticizing this genocide. And particularly the anti-Semite label is quite laughable for so many reasons. One of them is that actually among these students, especially in the Ivy League, where this started at Columbia University and elsewhere, there is a massive disproportion of Jewish students represented there. And among the Palestine protesters, a significant number of them are from this Jewish contingent.
The American media is largely owned by either right wing or neoliberal Jewish Zionist billionaires. And much of the media, especially the top people in the media, are of that persuasion. But at these Ivy League schools, it's not Jews versus Arabs or Jews versus people of color, as the media, especially right-wing media in the U.S., are trying to portray it. A significant fraction of the pro-Palestine contingent is actually people from Jewish backgrounds who are horrified at what's being done in their name.
They grew up being terrorized by this paranoid Jewish culture that will never forget World War II and gas chambers and all of that. And then they learned something about what's really going on in the world and noticed there is a Jewish state in occupied Palestine that's committing the world's most televised and most fully documented genocide in all of human history.
And so we do have young Jewish Americans on both sides of this. But probably, I would guess in the Ivy League, a lot more of them are on the pro-Palestine side than on the pro-Netanyahu side.
But the media is still owned by Zionist propagandists, and so they use these smear terms like terrorist, which apparently means anybody who doesn't like genocide, and anti-Semite, which again is the same thing: Anybody who doesn't like genocide must be an anti-Semite.
But these terms have been worn out so badly that they're really not frightening people any more. And they certainly aren't frightening the students who are flocking to these protests in greater and greater numbers. If this continues to spread, it could create a situation that embarrasses the genocide perpetrators so much that they might actually have to dial back their mass murder campaign.
Campus Anti-Genocide Protests vs. Zionist Billionaires