The above image was made with stable diffusion using the prompt 'american flag on a bomb.'
Students and some of their teachers have been demonstrating on college campuses across the country. At Columbia University in New York, they're demanding that the school administration divest from every company that does business with Israel, and they're camping out in tents until their demands are met. Here in Minneapolis, campus protests included a surprisingly large percentage of protesters in masks. Are they still worried about COVID or are have the masks become some kind of activist fashion statement?
Student protests are in general unsurprising. Given how screwed up our society is, they should be happening constantly. But I don't recall seeing any major protests since 2020. And now suddenly pro-Palestinian protests have erupted at campuses nationwide. Of all the causes these students could be championing, why this one? And why now?
The dire plight of the Palestinian people is obviously concerning. Israel's decision to raze Gaza in response to the October 7 Hamas attack maximized civilian deaths. Some say this placed Israel in violation of international law. According to Amnesty International, Israel is using American munitions to perpetrate war crimes in Gaza. Of course, Hamas has also been seen with American weapons.
The situation in Ukraine is no better. According to former CIA officer John Kiriakou, "the CIA and the State Department ... were responsible for the 2014 overthrow of the Ukrainian government." US and UK officials have been actively collaborating with Nazis there ever since. Western powers have sabotaged peace negotiations while sending enormous quantities of military aid to Ukraine. At this point, over 10k civilians have been killed and 14 million people have fled their homes.
Terrible things are happening in other parts of the world too. The war in Yemen killed hundreds of thousands of people. Here's a quote from a recent article about that:
The aerial bombardment of Yemen has caused a level of devastation reminiscent of Israel's current campaign in the Gaza Strip. ... Like Israel, the Gulf coalition has justified its bombings by claiming that seemingly civilian sites were being used for military purposes — claims that are very difficult to evaluate independently. ... The majority of weapons used by the Saudi coalition originate from the United States, the UK, and EU countries. The UK has deployed its own troops, who were embedded with Saudi forces accused of torture.
The nature of US involvement in each of these countries is deeply suspect. Financially, American interests profit from all three conflicts, with defense contractors and financiers leading the way. It's socially acceptable to support these atrocity profiteers by investing in their enterprises. From my perspective, the recent campus protests are attempting to assert that it's no longer acceptable to support atrocity profiteers that do business with Israel.
That assertion seems reasonable enough. But I wonder where all the protesters were for Yemen's war. Working in news media, I can't help but notice that the news barely covered Yemen whereas Gaza got nonstop coverage, especially across independent media outlets.
When AdBusters magazine published a photo of a ballerina on the iconic Wall Street bull, its call to action ignited Occupy Wall Street. This call to action was only effective because enough people were so fed up with the status quo that they were willing to take to the streets. What we're seeing now are students so fed up with the status quo that they're willing to risk academic standing to make their support for the Palestinian people heard.
These students are strangely not protesting the war machine in general. And I have uncomfortable suspicions about their politics. But if their main demand is for their schools to pull investments from atrocity profiteers, I hope they succeed.
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