Since the student revolt against Israel’s genocide in Gaza began to spread across the US and the world from mid-April, there has been no shortage of pearl-clutching from politicians and the media over supposed threats to “student safety” on campuses. 
In the US, the New York Times has churned out several scolding op-eds, with John McWhorter claiming in one that “what began as an intelligent protest has become, in its uncompromising fury and ceaselessness, a form of abuse”. In Australia, the Murdoch press has called on vice-chancellors to listen to “pleas to stamp out rising hate on campus” while, following a meeting with a small delegation of Jewish community leaders, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese <a href="https://x.com/AlboMP/status/1786227126750134769">posted on X/Twitter</a>
that “students must feel safe at university classes”.
The supposed threat to student safety represented by campus protests for Palestine is a complete beat-up. The pro-Palestine encampments on university campuses around the world have been attended, endorsed and sometimes led by a myriad of Jewish students and community groups who rightly reject the conflation of anti-Zionism or criticism of Israel with anti-semitism. 
When faced with questions from the media, students have reiterated their opposition to every form of racism. But despite the complete absence of evidence of anti-semitism at the encampments, the narrative persists, while the media remain silent about the actual threats to student safety: cops and far-right thugs.
Under the guise of upholding “student safety”, universities have mobilised legions of cops to smash up student protests. Take the crushing of the occupation of Columbia University’s Hamilton Hall on 30 April. The NYPD mobilised hundreds of cops after Columbia President Minouche Shafik implored them to deal with the protest after she “determined the building occupation, the encampments, and related disruptions pose a clear and present danger” to students. 
The NYPD surrounded the Hall from all sides, including entering a second-story window via a ladder, and drove out the several dozen student protestors with weapons drawn. One student was pushed down the stairs and knocked unconscious. A cop <a href="https://www.thecity.nyc/2024/05/02/nypd-officer-fired-gun-columbia-hamilton-hall-raid/">accidentally</a>
fired a live round into a wall. A photo posted by Columbia Students for Justice in Palestine showed one officer texting, “Thought we fucking shot someone”. More than 100 students were arrested.
This scenario has played out at dozens of campuses around the US. After a peaceful pro-Palestine march of no more than 200 students at the University of Texas in Austin, the administration called in state troopers in massive numbers, including some on horseback, to arrest and disperse the students. A <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aAgYWr7y4U0&amp;ab_channel=Reuters">video</a>
from Emory University showed three cops kneeling on a zip-tied Black student and tasing him. 
At Dartmouth, Annelise Orleck, a history professor and former chair of the Jewish Studies department, was <a href="https://youtu.be/XsIPSamKYow?si=E7rhqxfxVlZoOSN2">violently arrested</a>
and banned from campus as a condition of her release. Images of snipers <a href="https://x.com/Lowkey0nline/status/1783640960649289905">positioned on a roof at Ohio State University</a> while students were beaten and arrested below sent shockwaves on social media.
Possibly the most appalling example of police violence wielded against students using the excuse of protecting “student safety” has been at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA). After the university declared the Gaza solidarity encampment there to be unlawful, the LAPD mobilised hundreds of cops to break it up. They systematically dismantled the students’ barricades while spraying them with teargas, throwing flashbangs and igniting flares. <a href="https://edition.cnn.com/videos/us/2024/05/02/police-shoot-rubber-bullets-ucla-encampment-pro-palestinian-protest-digvid.cnn">One video</a> shows a cop telling students to move back “for [their] safety” before shooting them with rubber bullets. Twenty-five students were hospitalised. More than 200 were thrown in jail. 
Gene Block, UCLA’s chancellor, <a href="https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2024-05-01/la-me-ucla-camp-police">wrote</a>
that the university sent the cops to break up the encampment out of a desire to “support students, free expression and to minimise disruption”. Talk about doublespeak. 
The university crackdown on students peacefully protesting a genocide stands in stark contrast with how they have handled genuinely violent counter-protestors. The night before the LAPD moved in to smash the UCLA encampment, hundreds of extremist Zionists, Iranian monarchists, and other far-right agitators showed up in the early hours and <a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/5/1/ucla-clashes-pro-palestinian-protesters-attacked-by-israel-supporters">violently assaulted the camp.</a> They wielded sticks, physically beat protestors, sprayed bear repellent and aimed fireworks at the middle of the encampment where hundreds of students were still packed in. 
Utterly unsurprisingly, LAPD and campus security idly stood by as the reactionary mob attacked students. UCLA officials later made comments decrying the “horrific acts of violence” that had “occurred at the encampment” but conveniently neglected to mention who the perpetrators were. 
Similarly, in <a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/zionists-attach-monash-university-gaza-encampment">Australia</a>, right-wingers wielding Australian and Israeli flags, one of whom claimed to be a member of the Israeli army, attacked the peaceful encampment at Monash University as students slept. They blasted Australian nationalist songs and virulently racist right-wing Israeli music about inflicting violence on Palestinians. The attackers destroyed the students’ marquee and kitchen, including food that the community had donated. 
Just like at UCLA, campus security at Monash showed what activists described as “determined inaction”. After the police finally arrived in response to student calls on them to remove the assailants, the cops took down the students’ details and let the counter-protestors leave scot-free. 
Clearly, actual student safety matters little to university administrations, politicians and the media. If they genuinely cared about student safety, they would denounce the police and vigilante violence inflicted on students peacefully protesting a genocide rather than hysterically railing against them. 
If Albanese truly cared about student safety, he would denounce Israel’s destruction of universities and the murder of thousands of students in Gaza. But the ruling classes in the US and Australia stand four-square behind Israel even as it carries out a genocide and oppose all those who condemn it. To deflect attention from Israel’s crimes, our rulers have to whip up hysteria about non-existent threats to safety posed by a few hundred students sitting in tents, painting banners and making demands of their universities. 
As US historian Howard Zinn said: “They say we’re disturbing the peace, but there is no peace. What really bothers them is that we’re disturbing the war”.

Riley K

Cops and the far right are threats to student safety, not Palestine encampments

Columbia
University President Minouche Shafik made international headlines on 18 April
when she called in the NYPD to disperse the university’s Gaza solidarity encampment.
It was the first time the university had forcibly ended a student protest since
a 1968 occupation opposing the Vietnam War. One hundred students were arrested.
In the following days New York University followed Shafik’s lead. More than 130
students and university staff were zip tied and thrown into a city bus
commandeered for the mass arrest. 
This initial repression turned the
isolated spark of Columbia’s encampment into a wildfire. Across US (and, in
recent days, <a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/palestine-solidarity-encampments-spread-across-australia">in
Australia</a> and around the world) thousands of students incensed by Israel’s
genocide in Gaza and the complicity of their universities built their own
encampments, and have in many cases faced intense police repression themselves.
Those who hadn’t heard of Minouche
Shafik before Columbia students pitched their tents may be curious about the
history of a university president who so quickly unleashed the NYPD’s Strategic
Response Group on her own students. To put it simply: Shafik is a warrior for
the ruling class. Her assault on the democratic rights of students is only the
latest in a litany of crimes committed against ordinary people the world over. 
Born in 1962 to a wealthy landowning
family in Alexandria, Egypt, Shafik moved to the US at the age of four when
Nasser’s government nationalised her parents’ property. After studying
economics at some of Britain’s most elite universities, she began a stint at
the World Bank, where she held a variety of positions before becoming the
youngest vice president in the institution's history. 
Starting in 2011, Shafik oversaw
the International Monetary Fund’s (IMF) operations in Europe and the Middle
East. Her work at the IMF included ensuring that the neoliberal policies and
festering inequality that ignited the Arab Spring remained in place once the
revolutions were crushed. She also administered the IMF’s work in Greece during
its intense debt crisis. In just the first year of Shafik’s term, austerity measures
implemented to repay IMF loans saw unemployment hit a record high of 23.1
percent and 20,000 Greeks made homeless. By the end of her term, 36 percent of
people in Greece lived below the poverty line. 
Shafik continued her work as a
foot soldier for the global ruling class when she began her career as a
university boss. After becoming director of the London School of Economics (LSE)
in 2017, she unleashed a vicious campaign of academic casualisation. Fixed term
contracts at the LSE increased, inflation ate into staff wages, and the
student-to-permanent staff ratio became the worst in the United Kingdom. 
When LSE staff decided to take
legal strike action, management, directed by Shafik, punished them by imposing
50 percent pay deductions, with some receiving deductions of up to 75 percent.
In laughable contrast to her treatment of Columbia University students
protesting genocide, Shafik allowed the admission to the LSE of a white
supremacist who publicly participated in the deadly “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville
in 2017. When questioned by students, she simply shrugged and stated the LSE
was a “place of learning”. 
Shafik’s battle with the students
of Columbia is certainly her most public yet. From the beginning of the Gaza solidarity
encampment, dozens of Columbia students have been suspended, evicted from
university housing, and threatened with expulsion. And since she made the call
to send in the NYPD while holed up in a veritable war room at a Washington DC
law firm on 18 April (where she had gone to appear before a congressional
committee “investigating” the supposed scourge of anti-semitism on US
university campuses) the situation has only intensified. 
Days later, hundreds of Columbia
staff walked out in protest against the mass arrests of students. Shafik
responded by announcing that all in-person instruction would be cancelled and
the university would shift to remote learning for the remainder of the academic
year—a move designed to isolate the students and sympathetic staff members and clear
the ground for more repression.
At every turn, Columbia students
have bravely defied Shafik’s attacks and threats. Multiple rounds of
negotiation between university administrators and protestors have floundered—little
surprise given the choice the university offered students has been between imminent
arrest or surrender without any significant change being won. Shafik is
determined to not back down. In a statement published on 29 April, she didn’t
mince words. “The university”, she said, “will not divest from Israel”. 
On 30 April, she sent in the cops again,
this time on students occupying Hamilton Hall, which the students renamed
“Hind’s Hall” after murdered Palestinian child Hind Rajab. In a letter calling
on the NYPD for assistance, Shafik claimed “the events on campus ... have left
us no choice”. Seemingly endless streams of cops stormed the occupied building carrying
weapons with live ammunition. Once again, more than 100 student protestors were
arrested and the student encampment was smashed-up. 
Where the protests will continue
from here is uncertain. However, the many crimes of Minouche Shafik make the
answer to the question “which side are you on?” a very easy one.

Cops and the far right are threats to student safety, not Palestine encampments

The many crimes of Columbia University President Minouche Shafik

Other Media

Shop

Manage Your Subscription

Contact Us