Genocide: Today Gaza, Before Vietnam

Hundreds of arrests, violent police repression and threats of expulsion have failed to stop tens of thousands of American university students who express their repudiation of the genocide that Israel is carrying out against the Palestinian people in Gaza, which it’s already practicing in much of the West Bank.

Student demonstrations spread to several more universities, after police arrested more than 140 young people at Yale University and Columbia University.

The wave of demonstrations in favor of Palestine and against the Biden government's support for Israel in the most important universities in the United States does not stop growing, AFP points out, while other Western media highlight that students demand that universities stop financing weapons manufacturers.

The protests first began at Columbia University in New York, spread to Harvard, the University of Southern California (USC), the University of Texas at Austin and many more, in addition to the aforementioned Yale.

As at Columbia, Yale students said they will continue their protests until the University divests from investments in military weapons manufacturers. However, that doesn't seem likely in the near future. Last week, Yale's Advisory Committee on Investor Responsibility declined to take action on the university's investments in military weapons manufacturers.

After the arrests, many of the campuses of the main universities in the United States were taken over by their students, despite threats from the authorities of the universities.

At New York University,  authorities built a kind of wall, with wood, after the arrests of students. Faced with this, it was the professors who set up a human barrier in front of the university students, to defend them from arrests.

President Biden, in his greeting last Sunday for the Jewish Passover (Pesach), condemned the protests in solidarity with the Palestinian people that take place on university campuses, speaking of alleged “harassment and calls for violence against Jews.” .

By launching this lie, Microsoft News concedes, he gave arguments to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu himself, who this week stated exactly the same thing: that the "university students occupying the campuses were anti-Semitic." Another lie to discredit the huge student movement that is emerging in defense of the Palestinian people, which demands an immediate ceasefire and an end to Israel's occupation.

But Biden is not alone in attacking the protests. Both the Republican Party and the Democratic Party in Congress praised the comments of administrators at Columbia and other universities, who promised to restrict academic freedom in the name of confronting “anti-Semitism.”

The officialist The Jerusalem Post called the student protest against the genocide in Gaza “an extreme escalation that endangers not only Israelis, but all Jews.”

While an even stronger repression against those protesting a genocide that has already claimed nearly 35,000 lives in Gaza, two-thirds of them children and women, is already in sight, the event itself demonstrates how those who govern politically and economically the United States unite so that those demonstrations that got out of hand are not repeated and helped the most open rejection of the aggression perpetrated against the Vietnamese people.

Despite the regrets, imperialism was completely defeated, despite the power exhibited there.

During the aggression, the United States dropped more than twice as many bombs as the total dropped by all the contenders during World War II.

It devastated 25 million acres of arable land and 12 million acres of forest, in addition to dropping 70 million liters of extremely poisonous herbicidal agents across the country.

The US aggression caused 3.8 million deaths and 6.2 million injuries, while 4 million fell victim to defoliants.

When the United States was forced to withdraw, Vietnam was left with 879,000 orphans, one million widows, and 11 million refugees.

The United States, to my knowledge, has never apologized for the above and, of course, has not paid compensation either.

To a lesser but increasing extent, the university demonstrations against the genocide in Gaza are presented, I emphasize, as anti-Semitic by the establishment controlled by Jewish finances to justify an increase in repression that is difficult to contain, mainly due to the power controlled by the creators and manipulators of hate politics.

In this context, 18 million dollars have already been withdrawn from the Jewish subsidy to one of the universities.

Translated by Amilkal Labañino / CubaSí Translation Staff