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Photograph: Spencer Platt/Getty Photographs
A lone Trash can lay on its facet on the intersection of W. 139th St and Amsterdam Ave in Harlem, in entrance of the gates of the Metropolis Faculty of New York.
At round 11 p.m. on Tuesday night time, this was the extent of broken property that I witnessed outdoors the faculty campus. On the similar time, New York Police Division officers in riot regalia had amassed of their a whole lot, together with members of the Strategic Response Group — a unit devoted to public unrest and “counterterrorism.”
Extra police had stormed via the college’s neo-Gothic gates lower than an hour earlier than, on the behest of the faculty’s president, to arrest protesting college students en masse.
Twenty blocks south, police had locked down and barricaded all streets in a two-block radius of Columbia College, brutally arresting college students contained in the inaccessible campus.
Between Columbia and Metropolis Faculty, over 200 protesters — nearly all college students — had been arrested earlier than the night time was out.
It was a police response paying homage to the repression that met protesters within the 2020 George Floyd uprisings. Practically 4 years in the past, police additionally responded with extraordinary violence to a mass protest. Then, the alleged provocation concerned essential acts of militant resistance, together with low-level however widespread property injury, scattered looting, and the burning of a number of empty police automobiles.
Tuesday was totally different. In current days on the campuses in Manhattan and throughout the nation, huge police operations got here in response to peaceable pupil encampments. College students gathered to share meals, sustaining house to carry teach-ins and rallies, and demand their universities divest from Israel.
At Columbia, pupil protesters took over one college constructing: Hamilton Corridor, the identical constructing seized by college students in 1968 in protest of the Vietnam Struggle. At most, the newest constructing occupation noticed a couple of damaged windowpanes and a few furnishings moved round.
I’ve by no means witnessed, on the scene of a protest, the usage of police energy so disproportionate to the kind of demonstration happening.
The negligible acts of property injury weren’t, after all, what was being policed. Nor was the holding of campus house; college students have achieved this earlier than in current a long time with out their college directors inviting the pressure of militarized police.
As a substitute, it was the protesters’ message that was being handcuffed — the condemnation of Israel and the requires a free Palestine — and younger peoples’ dedication to it.
I’ve been reporting on political dissent and violent policing for 15 years, notably in New York Metropolis. In comparison with Tuesday night time, I’ve by no means witnessed, on the scene of a protest, the usage of police energy so disproportionate to the kind of demonstration happening.
Make no mistake: That is an authoritarian escalation.
The “Exterior Agitator” Delusion
The crackdown on campuses supplied a grim continuity: Police and different officers churned out all the identical outdated excuses for quashing resistance. Most notably, their rhetoric relied on the predictable canard of the “outdoors agitator.”
New York Mayor Eric Adams trotted it out as grounds for sending in a military of baton-wielding cops in opposition to the town’s college students. And Deputy Police Commissioner Tarik Sheppard went even additional on MSNBC Wednesday morning, brandishing an unremarkable chain lock — the kind of which I’ve seen on bikes in every single place — as proof that “professionals,” not college students themselves, had carried out the takeover of the Columbia constructing.
The bike-lock enterprise shortly got here in for rightly deserved mockery, however the “outdoors agitator” fantasy isn’t any joking matter.
On this present second, the “outdoors agitators” conjured are each the perennial anarchist bogeymen or Islamist terror teams sending funds to maintain pupil encampments flush with the most affordable tents out there on-line.
The “outdoors agitator” trope has a protracted, racist legacy, together with use by the Ku Klux Klan. Within the Thirties, the Klan issued flyers in Alabama claiming that “paid organizers for the communists are solely making an attempt” to get Black individuals “in hassle.” The allegation does double rhetorical hurt by denying the company and dedication of organizers themselves and suggesting that “outdoors” help from past a given locale or establishment is someway a foul factor.
Extra just lately, the canard has been hauled out in protection of motion repression in Atlanta, in opposition to Cease Cop Metropolis protesters who had made a nationwide name for backup. And it was a standard chorus for politicians nationwide in the course of the 2020 rebellion, in addition to discourse across the earlier Black Lives Matter protests in Ferguson after police killed Mike Brown.
Blaming outdoors agitators or pursuits at all times was a propaganda ploy and stays so now. The concept that Palestinian liberation wrestle is a mere proxy for Iranian pursuits repeats the delegitimizing logic of the previous.
In truth, the Gaza solidarity encampments on campuses are student-organized and led, with Palestinian college students at entrance and heart, and a disproportionately massive presence of Jewish college students too. It’s college students, over 1,000 of them, who’ve confronted arrest.
It additionally occurs that thousands and thousands of individuals have referred to as for an finish to Israel’s genocidal warfare, and help for Palestinian liberation shouldn’t be and should not be restricted to the mythic and maligned terrain of campus activism.
Authoritarian Americanism
Brutal policing and groundless excuses are nothing new, neither is bipartisan help for the crackdowns.
What’s new, although, is a most pernicious constellation coming collectively: far-right assaults on training; white supremacist police repression, additional escalated and enabled since 2020; a time of greedy U.S. hegemony overseas; Islamophobic and anti-Arab racism sanctioned in public for the reason that warfare on terror; and, crucially, an enfeebled left, at the very least on the electoral degree.
Antisemitism allegations are cynically deployed in opposition to anti-Zionist speech and twisted to allow each method of authoritarian abuse — together with a genocidal warfare.
These circumstances set the backdrop for the one unassailable excuse, a declare past problem and ripe for manipulation and weaponization: the cost of antisemitism.
Conscientious observers have grow to be all too conscious of how this allegation is cynically deployed in opposition to anti-Zionist speech and twisted to allow each method of authoritarian abuse — together with a genocidal warfare.
It’s no accident that this indefensible police crackdown is available in service of an indefensible warfare. The very extremity of protest repression speaks to desperation on the a part of establishments of the American institution.
Israel’s decimation of Gaza has — at the very least for thousands and thousands extra individuals — given mislead the redemptive myths of the post-World Struggle II political liberal order. Younger individuals, even the kids of the elite, even youngsters of Zionists, are standing with Palestine. Their peaceable acts of protest rely as disruptive as a result of they rely as un-American — which needs to be a badge of honor amid a U.S.-backed genocide.
Metropolis Faculty President Vince Boudreau, in his letter inviting the NYPD to storm the campus, made particular be aware of the truth that protesters had refused to take down a Palestinian flag from a flagpole.
After the police had cleared the campus of the scholars who belong there and crammed the house with cops as an alternative, NYPD Deputy Commissioner Kaz Daughtry pulled down the Palestinian flag and raised the American one to full mast as an alternative.
Riot cops cheered beneath.
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