By Julia Wright
” How do we break the cycle ? “
Angela Davis
The U.S. National Security State is worried, very worried behind its mask of bravado.
Just as Israel early on lost the war of narrative, Biden and Blinken are losing their own domestic war of P.R. – that corporate narrative so carefully spun and financed to sell domestic electoral support for genocide.
It can be said that we are reliving the time when the Black Lives Matter movement placed the police force on the defensive nationally – to the extent that in Georgia the police went down with the Blue flu or professional depression and were offered a bonus to boost their spirits affected by the massive protests. That bonus was Cop City. The Stop Cop City movement was born – was it supported enough ?
Cop City has now spread to a nation full of cop cities and the “bonus” enabled a backlash whereby the police considered itself back in the saddle again and the mass arrests throughout the country were as brutal as they were illegal. From Ant Smith’s arbitrary federal sentence in Pennsylvania to Tortuguita’s extrajudicial killing in Weelaunee forest. And hundreds of other non-violent young people framed on RICO charges.
Today again, seven months into the Israeli genocide perpetrated in Gaza with US help, the U.S. police finds itself at a similar point as after George Floyd’s murder – its excessive brutality going viral and its PR disastrous. In fact, an excessively militarized U.S, police has yet again been shown to be on the verge of executing the blood choke that killed George Floyd but this time round against the daughters and sons of those whose property they are paid to protect.
The Marshall Project of May 18 revealed that a police sniper stood watch on the
roof at Indiana University; that bean bag rounds were fired at UCLA and that at
Emory students were met with less-than-lethal bullets. Yet this youth has the
maturity to protest peacefully against military techniques tested in Palestine on
97% of the campuses.
The sharp contrast of excessive police force used against an overwhelmingly peaceful youth speaks louder than the silence of the corporate media. ( Fox News muted the live images of the police repression of the student encampment at UPenn as if in fear of what the sound of the first amendment chants of the students could signify ).
The context is strategically favorable to the students and to those who uphold the students’ demands: a ceasefire in Gaza at least, an end to the occupation of Palestine in fine; disclosure of the links between universities and industries enabling genocide such as arms industries; divestment from those complicit corporations; cessation of scholarships and exchanges with Israel; amnesty from criminal procedures for all the student protesters.
But the context is potentially favorable beyond the student campuses – on other liberation fronts already in historical alliance with the students. More and more workers’ unions, interfaith voices throughout the country and, importantly, the abolition movement against mass incarceration are showing active solidarity.
If the National Security state has some sense of world history, it will remember that
in 1968 in France, it was at the very moment the main workers’ trade unions united
with the students’ demands that Charles De Gaulle’s government almost toppled.
Here are 10 reasons why the National Security state has been placed on the defensive and why it is time to seize the time and “break the cycle” before yet another backlash sets in:
1 – The uranium rich West African state of Niger after driving out French military and economic interests following a coup d’etat last year has now asked the U.S. army to leave. In Niger, the U.S. army had deployed its biggest and most powerful base in Africa, the base of Agadez, under the guise of fighting a terrorism that has only increased since U.S. presence in the Sahel began. The State Department and the Pentagon are jittery because Niger has now formed a radical Pan African federation with two other left leaning African states – Mali and Burkina Faso.
The overwhelming majority of Niger’s population are below 30 years old and for them schools let alone universities cannot be destroyed because they never existed. It is the young daughters and sons of the contaminated and disenfranchised uranium miners, of the same age as the U.S. students today, who were the first to rise up against the western exploitation of their country.
2 – On May 10th , after 50 years as an observer at the UN General Assembly, Palestine was voted as a full fledged member of the UNGA to which historic event the Israeli ambassador to the UN had a tantrum and used a shredder that looked like a toy to destroy the UN charter.
143 countries voted in favor. 25 abstained. 9 voted against including the US and Israel. Those who voted against represent a mere 5% of the world population.
The message is : the United States cannot vote against the world and win.
3 – On May 13 , Egypt, in spite of its being under the autocratic pro-American government of President General Al Sisi, possibly because it was faced with the consequences of the IOF invasion of Rafah on its border, declared it was supporting South Africa and filed a case against Israel’s genocide in Gaza at the ICJ.
4 – Ireland has recognized Palestine as an independent state.
5 – Inside the United States, on May 7th, after 50 years of imprisonment, Black Panther and political prisoner Veronza Bowers was released. We notice that the half a century Veronza Bowers spent in prison coincides with the 50 years Palestine was maintained as an observer at the UNGA.
6 – Meanwhile. inside the United States but also across the world, the list of university student protests for Palestine that have won demands against their Ivy League administrations is getting longer each day.
To date, students at the following universities have prevailed :
Brown University where Mumia Abu-Jamal’s archive is alive and kickin’
Evergreen College where Rachel Corrie is remembered
the Auraria Campuses, Denver,
Northwestern University,
John Hopkins University
Harvard University
Rutgers University
Minnesota University
Wisconsin University
The University of Barcelona
Trinity College Dublin, Ireland
Trinity College, Cambridge, UK
Emory University with its ties to the Stop Cop City movement is resisting
The United Auto Workers Union (UAW) has just voted yes on a strike authorization across University of California campuses against the repression of student protest there.
https://youtube.com/shorts/8C6s0D05egg?si=HeenHtA8RZ3k4rGl
And since April 29, the University of Washington in Seattle has set up a 100-tent encampment called “The Popular University for Gaza”.
https://www.workers.org/2024/05/78703/
7 – It is important to return and dwell here on the extent to which not only the U.S. police but the intelligence community and the Pentagon are worried stiff over developments that prove there is first of all inner conflict and certainly loss of morale within the ranks of the men in blue over the student uprisings – and second of all a much feared “spillover” of the student model of resistance into other areas of corporate and political power.
We mentioned the Auraria campuses of Denver: there the police simply refused to show when called in by the university upper echelons because the police said there was no proof of “unlawful assembly” and there had been millions of dollars paid out to protesters after 2020 for excessive use of force.
In New York City, Mayor Eric Adams, well known for his dependence on Israeli training programs when he was head of police, has been increasingly under criticism since he sent the National Guard into the subway.
After the first shows of force against the encampments, the slick sizzle videos put out by the NYPD were seen as clumsy attempts to disguise the fact that the NYPD’s repression of the encampments at CCNY, CUNY, Columbia and other campuses was disproportionately violent, using riot gear, tear gas, tasering but also hired thugs against civil disobedience by the nation’s youth.
Footage was carefully edited to weed out any semblance of the police violence that took place.
Instead, a sizzle video put out by the NYPD glorifying their heroic clearing of the CUNY encampment to the martial score of a Hollywood action movie is instructive: the pointed reference to the “smell” of the encampment is to be borne in mind because of the need to criminalize or “animalize” students thereby “justifying” police interference. The zionist narrative of Palestinians as “human animals” strikes a familiar chord here.
Meanwhile any New York city councilors who dare challenge the police violence leveled against the students are bullied on social media by … the police themselves.
As for the US intelligence community, the Pentagon and its lackeys in the corporate media – they have been having worried meetings. It is mild to say they are desperately biting their nails.
Max Blumenthal of Grayzone was able to obtain footage of one of these meetings attended by Mark Milley former head of Central Command, Eric Schmidt co-founder of Google and now working at the Pentagon, Alan Sorkin of the New York Times and Alex Karp of Palantir, the intelligence firm that failed to get the Israeli contract for targeting but is working other aspects of Israeli intelligence.
Excerpts from the panel are worth listening to , especially Alex Karp’s inspired epiphany that ” the peace activists are actually war activists” because they are marching for Hamas. They are “an infection inside of our society. They are the reason why Hamas will never give up”.
And even more ominously, Alex Karp adds: ” If we lose the intellectual debate [ in other words the war of ideas with the student protesters ] , we will not be able to deploy an army in the West – ever.”
Max Blumenthal interprets this zionist propagandist’s words to mean: if we allow the model of student resistance against the universities to expand against other institutions that hold up the empire and its army – it will be the end of the United States as we know it with its imperial domination and bases throughout the world.
In other words U.S. intelligence is worried about “spillover.” Just as epidemiologists tell us there is a danger of spillover of zoonotic disease during climate change. But then we have just been told that the students are an “infection”… And we are back to the “animalization” meme.
Also an “infection” is a condition difficult to control. These elites are scared because they are losing control. Hence their fear of “outside agitators.” Would the worry of the anti-Ivy-League model spilling over have anything to do with that fear of losing control ?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s0jxZ-3Tom0
Would the worry about “spillover” have anything to do with the “contamination” of CNN a loyally moderate channel that has recently broken ranks and aired testimony proving that Palestinian prisoners in Israel were tortured for revenge – not to gather intelligence?
https://youtube.com/shorts/jjcFxRsfUyw?si=TOOZjfiY-87hx42U
And what about the revelation by the very pro-White House Washington Post that a group of pro Israel business leaders and millionaires formed a chat group to pressure Eric Adams to send the NYPD to clear Columbia of “perps?” Not only were financial donations funneled but private investigators’ were offered to support the police’s incursion on campus – and a strategy to find Black celebrities who could offer their blessings to the anti-student police assault suggested. Meanwhile the zionist chat group maintained regular contacts with high placed Israeli government officials.
As more and more officials in Biden’s administration are resigning, the damage control stage is spreading and difficult to keep up with.
Already the destabilization of the war mongering elites has become embarrassingly visible on the diplomatic front : US ambassador to the UN Linda Thompson Greenfield has just been canceled as the invited speaker for Commencement at Xavier University, Louisiana, due to the protests of part of the students.
And at Morehouse College, the alma mater of Martin Luther King, students turned their backs on Joe Biden’s commencement speech.
https://youtube.com/shorts/0gPE9IOldIU?si=0xqBjKtWo29J6Fw0
WILL IT BE THE PRISONS NEXT TIME ?
8 – There is incontrovertible evidence that universities in the U.S. are not only heavily invested in industries enabling genocide abroad – these same universities have for a long time been investing in and profiting from slavery and mass incarceration as well as the land and wealth theft of the Indigenous peoples .
In fact there is documented evidence of the recycling of repression techniques between Palestine and the mini Gazas represented by prisons in the U.S. notoriously cut off from sustainable diets, air and space.
The links between United States detention centers and dark torture sites abroad is well known. Mumia Abu-Jamal wrote about Charles Graner’s stunt at SCI Greene as a prison guard on death row who liked placing razors in the food of detainees and who was indicted for domestic abuse before being promoted to become torturer-in-chief at Abu-Ghraib.
The former Holmesburg prison, Pennsylvania, was involved with the University of Pennsylvania in the infamous experiments of creams, shampoos, talcum powder manufactured by various corporations and experimented on mostly Black, brown and poor prisoners in return for a pittance. See ” Acres of Skin” by Allen M. Hornblum. Published in 1998 by Routledge
The monetization of the bones of the MOVE children burned alive while their parents were in prison was encouraged by the Universities of Pennsylvania and Princeton who sent the “still juicy” bones to be used as teaching specimens for forensic anthropology courses. In 2021, hundreds of students alongside folks from the projects in the city of brotherly love marched to protest this cruel and inhumane unrepaired crime.
And, the students who are rising up today against genocidal administrations will be treated as a new rising generation of political prisoners ( “We must treat them fiercely” Alex Karp )
The recorded voices of Mumia Abu-Jamal – whose 42nd year behind bars has just been the occasion of worldwide rallies – and a June Jordan poem read by Angela Davis, “I am Palestine”, are being shared by protesters on the campuses. And these voices are connecting the protest for Gaza to the protest for political prisoners in the USA.
https://www.prisonradio.org/commentary/mumia-free-palestine-columbia-speech/
https://www.prisonradio.org/commentary/mumia-address-u-penn-on-palestinian-encampment/
Angela Davis reading June Jordan’s Moving Towards Home
https://drive.google.com/file/d/10Ruzf6PVJEals3zsPpUik6I45KLhZChq/view
So – will it be the prisons next time ?
9 – We are in countdown to the parole hearing on June 10th of an iconic political prisoner , Leonard Peltier.
His liberation will be celebrated on the campuses. Conversely, a refusal to free this 79 year old Indigenous prisoner who is nearly blind and has so many serious ailments that maintaining him behind bars is tantamount to political assassination – would send a message to protesting students the world over.
10 – It is too early to say and I might seem provocative in conclusion, but I would go so far as to suggest that the National Security state prefers the lone mass shooter situations to thousands of students uprising for Palestine. The U.S. police would prefer a Columbine, yes, even a Robb Elementary to the ripple of free zones unfurling in the universities today. After all, the mass shootings are a living advertisement for further militarization of the police as well as schools – with a few students killed as collateral damage. The mass shooter is the Frankenstein- like, desperate and rogue poster boy of the NRA.
Whereas the students rising up for Palestine are not lone, nor are they rogue – and they are not the ones using guns galore.
(c) Julia Wright May 20, 2024. All Rights.
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