The violent suppression of Free Speech on US college campuses

While Israel continues its genocide with full US support

Published by The National on May 3rd.

I’ve been watching in disbelief and horror what has been happening on US college campuses over the last few days. As a graduate of Columbia’s SIPA (School of International and Public Affairs), I’m both proud of the students and appalled and disgusted by the university administration’s brutal suppression of their right to protest against Israel’s genocide and the US government’s political and financial support for it.

It’s not just the Columbia University administration that has behaved abominably but some members of faculty. A professor at SIPA, Rebecca Weiner, is a former Deputy Chief of the NYPD Counter Terror Division which has an office in Tel Aviv. She appeared alongside pro-Zionist New York City Mayor Eric Adams to justify the arrest and expulsion of students who were exercising their First Amendment rights because they had ‘dangerous ideas.’ [I’m sorry to report that Hillary Clinton and Victoria Nuland are also adjunct professors at SIPA and the SIPA Dean is a former Israeli intelligence officer - enough said.]  

The US constitution protects hate speech, unlike Scotland. Yet the NYPD arrived on campus at 2 am in a bearcat vehicle with tactical assault teams to arrest the students and load them onto NYPD and even city buses which they had taken over. Columbia’s President, Minouche Shafik, a UK Baroness and former Bank of England executive, rejected calls for Columbia to divest from Israel and has demanded that the NYPD occupy the campus until May 17^th.

The lamestream media reporting of the US campus protests has been predictably shameful. It has demonstrated its complete capture by the US security state when it falsely described the students as anti-semitic and violent.  

The hand-wringing US Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, is really running the US. His boss is not Joe Biden but Benjamin Netanyahu and the other nutjobs in the Israeli regime. Last week, Netanyahu attacked the US students, calling them Nazis, and demanded that US federal police wage a military style crackdown on them. Blinken made sure it was done and there’s not been a peep from Zionist-funded members of Congress with a few exceptions like Florida’s Matt Gaetz, Kentucky’s Thomas Massie, Missouri’s Cori Bush and New York’s Jamaal Bowman.

Meanwhile, the fanatical Israeli national security minister, Ben Gvir, is calling for a mass execution of Palestinian ‘prisoners’ held as hostages in Israeli jails, who haven’t even been charged with a crime, in order to ease overcrowding. And last night in Rafah, Israel attacked by air and firebombed people in their tents. You can find pictures of children’s bloody bodies on social media, but hear not a word of condemnation by the US government.

That’s what these students are protesting. And they’ve been badly let down by the babyboomers, who protested the Vietnam war in the 1960s because they didn’t want to be drafted, but who are now silent while their children and grandchildren are arrested for opposing a genocide and their government’s complicity in it.