Why Are Pro-Israeli Protesters Yelling Anti-Black Slurs At Pro-Palestinian Students In The US?
Robert Inlakesh
In one case, a young Black woman is violently shoved to the ground by a crazed Zionist man, while in another case that was caught on video, a young man is caught yelling the N-Word repeatedly.
As the American corporate media and government mobilize in opposition to student protests across the United States, ridiculously attempting to portray pro-Palestinian demonstrations as being in support of terrorism and anti-Semitism, pro-Israeli counter-protesters launch a campaign of racist hate. Repeatedly there have been reports of and videos in which Zionists yell the N-word, but why do they direct their hate towards Black people?
While student encampments are being set up on University campuses across the United States and beyond, with protests urging academic institutions to divest from Israeli-linked companies, the establishment is employing every tactic available to discredit and combat these efforts. Suddenly, US corporate broadcast media outlets, such as CNN and FOX News, who would usually object to the others' description of the color of the sky being blue, are condemning pro-Palestinian students together. With few exceptions, a bipartisan effort between Democratic and Republican Party representatives - who only seem capable of agreeing on financing war - has been launched to smear the anti-war movement as violent and anti-Semitic.
US President, Joe Biden, along with his ally in genocide, Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, have both condemned the students. The Zionist regime's leader actively called for American authorities to violate their own Constitution in his service. Netanyahu's speech about the issue has provided the framework for the US media and government commentary. It argues that the peaceful student protesters are being led by anti-Semites, that they support terrorism, that Jewish students are feeling unsafe, and that the entire demonstrator movement is comparable to the anti-Jewish hate present in 1930s Germany.
Recently, on one of MSNBC's flag-ship shows 'Morning Joe', a presenter went on an unhinged rant in which she called for the protesters to be mature and "watch the news". Meanwhile, on CNN, Dana Bash tried to draw a comparison between the protests and what happened in 1930's Germany. Uncritically, US media peddled several victim stories about Jewish professors experiencing incidents that were deemed "not okay," such as being locked out of their university, without thoroughly following up on the details. Additionally, there were claims, without sufficient scrutiny, including one alleging that a Jewish woman was "stabbed in the eye". Then, around 2 weeks into the encampment at Columbia University, the first case of identifiable "violence" occurred, when students smashed windows in a building that they occupied and renamed "Hind Hall". In response, the NYPD deployed armed police units who proceeded to smash more windows and violently expel the students.
The Boston Globe reported that the phrase "kill the Jews" was shouted during a protest at Northeastern University, which was caught on video and came from pro-Israeli counter-protesters. Despite later issuing a clarification, The Boston Globe used language that omitted who uttered the phrase that was then used by the University as a reason to call the police to violently disperse pro-Palestinian protesters. This occurred despite the video of the incident clearly showing the pro-Palestinian crowd objecting to and booing the pro-Israeli disrupters of their event for uttering such a hateful phrase.
Meanwhile, pro-Israeli protesters - many of whom are not students - are not being condemned for their violent attacks on the anti-war students. Anti-Muslim bigotry has been shouted, while Zionists have spat on people, attacked them with pepper spray, fireworks, and hammers, and have been caught on video bringing weapons to the protests to intimidate students, who are already facing violence from militarised police forces.
Anti-Black Racism and The US Culture War – Yet, another development has been ignored by the media and political establishment, and that is the virulent anti-Black racism of the Zionist counter-protesters. In one case, a young Black woman is violently shoved to the ground by a crazed Zionist man, while in another case that was caught on video, a young man is caught yelling the N-word repeatedly. In a separate incident, a man calls a student the N-word and spits at them, while at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) another case was reported of a Zionist counter-protester yelling the N-word on Tuesday night.
To understand why the Zionists would be yelling anti-black slurs at pro-Palestinian demonstrators, we have to understand that another kind of tactic is being employed here. Firstly, those screaming racist remarks at Black people are bigots. However, their actions fit into a particular trend that we see throughout the West with the Zionist movement. It is clear that young people in the United States and throughout the collective West are turning against the Zionist entity at a growing rate, which has come to the attention of the likes of ADL head, Jonathan Greenblatt, who stated that "we have a generational problem".
While there is no chance that the Israelis can recruit Leftists to their cause, the Zionists have for some time been pivoting to the right to scavenge supporters. If you are familiar with the types who show up to pro-Israeli counter-demonstrations in the United Kingdom for instance, you'll know that for some time, members of the 'English Defence League (EDL) will always show up for their major counter-protests and chant racial slurs. The Israelis have long recruited well-known bigots like Tommy Robinson and others to their cause. This only manages to affect the anti-Muslim segment of the right, which was very active during the post-9/11 and Daesh insurgency eras.
Yet, when the Hamas-led offensive on October 7 occurred, the Israelis quickly conjured up the narrative surrounding the event, using fabricated atrocity propaganda, to argue that Operation Al-Aqsa Flood was "Israel's 9/11". To this effect, they even started referring to October 7 as 10/7, while also inserting fake orientalist stories about what happened on that day into the narrative. Their portrayal of October 7 was carefully designed to portray the stereotypical Arab man, who fetishizes white flesh and was unleashed on a primal campaign of beheading babies, ripping fetuses out of mothers stomachs, perpetrating a pre-meditated mass rape of Jewish women, mutilating their private parts and burning infants alive. Despite all of this being demonstrated to be false and lacking any credible evidence, we still hear the likes of Mike Johnson, the Republican speaker of Congress, repeat these blatant lies and even introduce new claims that Palestinians raped babies. This is a racist portrayal, which specifically fits into the anti-Muslim bigots' stereotypical understanding of what a Muslim man is.
With this all being said, what does this have to do with Black people? Well, this is where the US culture war comes into play. While anti-Muslim bigotry may, by definition, be the specific targeting of a vast religious group, its undertones have always included a pseudo-intellectual racial element, just as was the case with European anti-Semitism. The very phrase "anti-Semitism" was a creation of European Philologists, who sought to categorize European Jews as being part of the linguistic group known as Semites; indigenous speakers of Hebrew, Arabic, and Aramaic. This categorization of the Jews in Europe paved the way for further pseudo-science that argued that Jews were genetically different from their compatriots throughout the continent and hence the anti-Semites would justify persecuting them on this basis.
For Muslims, all sorts of different criminal trends that exist across West Asia, Africa, and beyond - which are not common amongst Muslim populations throughout the world and certainly are not enshrined in Islamic Doctrine - are used to build an argument against the archetypical "Muslim". While the Islamophobe will retreat to "Islam is a religion", as their defense when labeled a racist, the examples of "honor killings" and Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) are arguments rooted in ethnic and ideological supremacy; not common practices across the Muslim world or tolerated in across nations that uphold Islam-inspired legal systems.
When it comes to hatred of Black people, similar varying kinds of pseudo-scientific explanations were used to justify the enslavement, murder, torture, and depravation of basic rights. While the Upper Middle Class may have been behind "intellectualizing" their bigotry, to make it seem palatable, it was always a bunch of logically-inconsistent nonsense concocted to target a group due to their appearance or orientation solely. Frantz Fanon, the renowned revolutionary writer, and psychiatrist, in his book 'The Wretched of The Earth', pointed to the pseudo-science of his day, espoused during the 1950's to justify the European colonization of Northern Africa. At that time, it was even argued that the Frontal Lobe of Northern Africans was underdeveloped and made them both irrational and predisposed to violence, this was ridiculous pseudo-science, yet believed by many supporters of colonialism.
At this time, in the United States and throughout the collective West, there is an ongoing culture war, rooted in both Right-wing and Left-wing Identity Politics, which has been weaponized by both the Republican and Democratic Parties. While the Democratic Party has assumed the performative role of standing as the defender of minority communities, without actually having to do much for their newly acquired constituents, Republican Party representatives and the social media Right have played to the idea of White Identity Politics and varying degrees of Nationalism.
The problem for the likes of FOX News and social media pundits such as Ben Shapiro has been to convince White conservatives that not only are the Israelis their allies, but that they should oppose the pro-Palestinian student movement. After all, Palestine is a foreign issue and Jewish Israelis are not Americans. While some Evangelical Christians may be willing to make "Israel" a primary concern, it's difficult to convince anyone outside that demographic circle. So, the Right points to the orientation of many students across college campuses, they outline many of them being supporters of Black Lives Matter, wearing George Floyd shirts, using an intersectional approach, and so on.
The Right, and for that matter the entire US establishment, all oppose free speech. Yet, for the likes of Ben, "facts don't care about your feelings" Shapiro, Jordan Peterson, Matt Walsh, and broadcast media outlets like FOX News, they have been using their platforms to preach "free speech absolutism", to call out "the Left" for being "snowflakes" and stifling "free speech on campus". Now they are out in public calling for censoring free speech on campus, advocating safe spaces for Zionists, screaming anti-Semites at protest groups that are disproportionately populated by Jewish students and are coming off as "snowflakes" themselves.
So, this mainstream Right-wing crowd knows that they have built a base of support, by going after supporters of Black Lives Matter, LGBTQ groups, and Muslims. Often condescendingly using straw man arguments to corner individuals who cannot articulate their beliefs coherently, then posting these segments online to portray themselves as intellectuals. Now they are trying to group the pro-Palestinian anti-war protesters with this invention of the archetypical "Woke Leftist", to justify a pro-Israeli stance. To do this effectively, they know they have to ramp up anti-Black and anti-Muslim hatred, tying Black Lives Matter to pro-Palestinian protests on University campuses. Another tactic they have employed is to go along with the Israeli narrative regarding the Gaza war being a war "for the West", which is to say that the Israelis are part of the "East-vs-West" conflict. All of this suggests that pro-Apartheid racists are simply expanding their campaign of hate to include Black people because they think it will make it sell better to fellow racists.
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Source: Al Mayadeen. Image: © Spencer Platt / Getty Images; CNN
AWIP: http://www.a-w-i-p.com/index.php/2024/05/04/why-are-pro-israeli-protesters
