Israel's smears of campus protests reveal their own plans..
May 06, 2024
UCLA protest Image: Episcopal News Service
“Every accusation is a confession.” T C Gibians (among others)
What’s happening here? Speaking in his perfectly American-accented English, Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu said “Antisemitic mobs have taken over leading universities. They attack Jewish students. They attack Jewish faculty. This is reminiscent of what happened in German universities in the 1930s.”
CNN host Dana Bash went further, comparing campus pro-Palestine protesters to “Nazi brown shirts.” Promoting her show, Bash tweeted “Destruction, violence and hate overtake college campuses across the country with Jewish students feeling unsafe at their own schools. It is unacceptable, harkening back to the 1930s in Europe.”
Anyone who has visited or seen the student encampments knows there is no violence or hate there. Neither Jewish students nor any others are being threatened. Sometimes Israel supporters or random weirdos show up and try to start trouble. They make up stories about being kept out of class or feeling scared, but video clearly shows that violence only happens when Israel-supporting thugs or the police assault protesters. You have only to watch a few short videos to see where the violence comes from, and it’s not from the pro-Palestinian side.
Hopefully, you know all this already, but my point is to understand why these claims are made and what they tell us about the future. Writer T C Gibians said, “Every accusation is a confession.” Psychologists call this “projection,” a defense mechanism people use when their own thoughts or actions are too troubling. They attribute the negatives to someone else.
Projection can also be a political strategy, sometimes called accusation in a mirror (AIM.) Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels said, “Always accuse your enemies of your own sins.” We see this over and over again in political discourse, as with Israel accusing Palestinians of ‘wanting to drive us into the sea,’ while working full time to drive Arabs into the desert.
According to propaganda expert Susan Benesch, AIM has the weakness of telling the world your plans, but it has the advantage of appealing to people’s deepest fears. “A false accusation of planned genocide,” she wrote, is an “almost invariable harbinger of actual genocide. One of the most famous examples is the Nazi assertion, before the Holocaust began, that Jews were planning to wipe out the German people.” Hutu leaders did the same thing in Rwanda before the genocide of the Tutsis.
So, looking at people’s accusations is a window into the accusers’ own minds. What would lead a Netanyahu or a Bash to call the extraordinarily peaceful campus protesters Nazis? They’re camping out, doing seminars, reading poetry, making signs. The comparison with 1930s Germany is over the top, even for propaganda.
Israel supporters, including the whole political class of the USA, make these comparisons because they themselves want a movement to suppress dissent. It’s what they’re actually doing, creating a public/private partnership to enforce ever-greater dominance by the national security state and the 1%. Such a system is usually called fascism. Israel is already there, and they are pulling the US and much of Europe with them.
A history minute — who were the Brown Shirts Bash mentioned? Known as the SA, they were militant, mostly young supporters of Adolf Hitler who acted as Nazi bodyguards, fought against communist and socialist groups in the streets and attacked labor unions, Jews and Romani people. They wore brown clothes as a uniform and are credited with a major role in the Nazis’ rise to power. They would disrupt meetings and beat people up, then leave them for the government to deal with. Eventually, they were eclipsed by the even more violent and racist SS.
Campus pro-Palestinian demonstrators don’t go around attacking people, but their Israel-inspired attackers do. At UCLA, dozens of masked thugs showed up at an encampment, shot fireworks and teargas into it, pulled down the fence surrounding it and beat protestors with long sticks and wooden pallets. Campus and state police stood by and did nothing. Then, citing violence at the camp — all of which had come from the pro-Israel mob — the university called in the LAPD to clear out the pro-Palestinian protesters, arresting over 100 of them, while doing nothing to their pro-Israel attackers.
Law enforcement, university admins, and corporate media create narrative to justify such scenarios. The demonstrators are “pro-Hamas” or “trained by terrorists.” Jewish students are “frightened” by the protests, even though many of the protesters are Jewish themselves. Politicians call for shutting down the campuses or using more violence against them. Several, like Cal Poly at Humboldt have completely closed their schools. US Rep Tom Cotton called for sending in the National Guard to stop the protests.
The violent suppression of dissent is what Netanyahu is signaling with his comparisons to Nazi Germany. His accusation is a confession. They are recruiting their street gangs and backing them up with state power. Israeli settlers do this every day in the West Bank. They assault and terrorize Palestinians and destroy their stuff. The military stands aside or helps the settlers. If the Palestinians fight back, the military arrests or shoots them. At some point, the courts decide the Palestinians must leave, or they decide to flee settler violence and lose their land.
This process is what the Nazis did in 1930s Germany, threatening real horrors to come. This is how we get to fascism, and this is what is happening in the US and much of Europe. Israel is spearheading this slide, including working directly with the NYPD to suppress protests, but it wouldn’t be happening if our rulers weren’t already desperate.
The time to fight back is now. Come out to defend the encampments and demand an end to US support for Israeli crimes. If you are connected with any institution, demand they divest from Israel and from war. Support the people of Palestine. Organize. Otherwise, Gaza won’t be the last genocide in our lifetimes.
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