Washington and New York, May 3.- Protests by university students demanding an end to U.S. support for Israel's war in Gaza and the withdrawal of investments and other ties with Tel Aviv have continued unabated across the country, despite police and academic authorities cracking down on the protests. More than 2,000 arrests have already been made. Meanwhile, new allies among academic unions are emerging, threatening strikes in support of student demands, further fueling alarm among the national political establishment.
President Joe Biden was forced to respond to the protests yesterday in a message where he attempted to acknowledge the validity of the expressions while criticizing them. "We are not an authoritarian nation where we silence people," he stated in comments to the media. "In fact, peaceful protest is in the best tradition of how Americans respond to issues of consequence," he said.
But Biden emphasized that “we are also a nation of laws” and, as he has done previously, characterized some of the protests as violent and anti-Semitic. “Vandalism came in without permission, breaking windows, shutting down campuses, forcing the cancellation of classes and graduations, and none of that is peaceful protest,” he charged.
That message struck many as contradictory. “President Biden’s assertion that ‘dissent should never lead to disorder’ defies American history, from the Boston Tea Party (an act of protest against the British Empire, part of the beginning of the independence struggle) to the tactics used by civil rights activists, anti-Vietnam War protesters, and anti-apartheid activists to confront injustice,” said Edward Ahmed Mitchell, deputy national executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the largest Muslim civil rights organization in the United States. “And if the president is truly concerned about the conflict on campuses, he should specifically condemn law enforcement and pro-Israel gangs for attacking students and stop facilitating the genocide in Gaza that has sparked the protests,” he concluded.
