Reprinted from Bracing Views with the author’s permission.
I’d like to highlight this Twitter/X post by Lee Camp and his take on improving NPR’s BS headline:
Lee Camp: Ummm, NPR, I believe you meant to say “Nearly 300 peaceful unarmed people brutally attacked by fascist police for exercising their freedom of speech”
I’d add that students are protesting the Israeli government’s genocide against Palestinians in Gaza, and the U.S. government’s complicity in the same. They are not protesting against “the war in Gaza,” unless you modify that as “Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza.”
It’s funny indeed that NPR has a reputation as being “left” or even “far left.” Anything critical of Joe Biden is “radical left” in America (unless you’re a Trumper, in which case you’re “fascist”). Anyone that questions and challenges the U.S. government’s total subservience to Israel’s current genocidal agenda is dismissed as unrealistic or as Kremlin stooges. Or maybe apologists for China. It’s nonsense, of course, but it seems to work for some people.
Confuse and obscure the issue. Baffle with BS. And don’t forget Tasers, handcuffs, tear gas, rubber bullets, and good old-fashioned truncheons for those who refuse to obey.
I suppose deceptive headlines don’t hurt quite as much as being beaten to the ground and hauled off to jail. But they are even more effective, I think, at quietening dissent.
Update (4/29): At Indiana University, snipers and armored cars showed up as well as circling helicopters for a modest student encampment. The snipers were apparently escorted into rooftop and tower positions by university administrators. Check out this report:
Update 2 (4/29): A good cartoon is sometimes worth 1000 words:
William J. Astore is a retired lieutenant colonel (USAF). He taught history for fifteen years at military and civilian schools. He writes at Bracing Views.
“They are not protesting against “the war in Gaza,” unless you modify that as ‘Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza.'”
Is there a difference? Or as Don Rickles used to day, “What, that’s better?” Granted, the electorate is too stupid to notice the 100-year history of Israeli oppression of the Palestinians before there was an OBVIOUS genocide, but there was an ONGOING genocide.
They shouldn’t be protesting “the war” or “the genocidal war” – they should be protesting US involvement in the Middle East (or most other places in the world where the US shouldn’t be involved) as well as the US support of Israel, an occupying, colonial, fascist, racist, imperialist, terrorist state in ANY context. But the US electorate is “trained stupid and ignorant.”
The key administrators who made these decisions are facing calls from their own faculty to resign. Among them is Erroll Southers, the university’s “Associate Senior Vice President of Safety and Risk Assurance”, who oversees USC’s campus police and collaboration with LAPD. The L.A. Times notes that not only was Southers involved in the decision to silence Asna Tabassum but that the university has “referred questions about security” to him.
Who is Erroll Southers?
A longtime police official, Erroll Southers is a prominent figure within LA city politics. He is the president of LAPD’s Board of Police Commissioners, the “civilian” oversight body that rubber stamps every LAPD expenditure. LAPD’s Police Commission purports to offer a forum for public conversation and input. However, at a Police Commission Community Meeting at Bishop Alemany High School just after Tabassum’s speech was canceled, Southers and his Police Commission colleagues shut down every public comment about Tabassum as “off-topic” and forcibly ejected three public commenters – all of them Black men – from the meeting.
https://mondoweiss.net/2024/04/meet-the-homegrown-violent-extremism-researcher-behind-the-crackdown-on-pro-palestinian-students-at-usc/?ml_recipient=120137588872841204&ml_link=120137524365493667