Oh, give me a break!
Sereen Haddad is a bright young woman. At 20 years old, she just finished a four-year degree in psychology at Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) in only three years, earning the highest honors along the way. Yet, despite her accomplishments, she still can’t graduate. Her diploma is being withheld by the university, “not because I didn’t complete the requirements”, she told me, “but because I stood up for Palestinian life”.
By making such a nuisance of yourself, and preventing the other students who just wanted to study without some screeching lunatic on campus disrupting their education, that eventually the police had to be called to remove you.
Haddad, who is Palestinian American, had been raising awareness on her campus about the Palestinian fight for freedom as part of her university’s chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine.
Maybe ‘raising awareness’ isn’t quite the right phrase to describe what this organisation does?
Israel’s war in Gaza is chipping away at so much of what we – in the United States but also internationally – had agreed upon as acceptable, from the rules governing our freedom of speech to the very laws of armed conflict.
I don’t think that anyone - well, apart from your mob - has changed their view about whether killing, raping and torturing or taking hostages is a legitimate warfare tactic though?
This collapse began with the liberal world’s lack of resolve to rein in Israel’s war in Gaza. It escalated when no one lifted a finger to stop hospitals being bombed. It expanded when mass starvation became a weapon of war. And it is peaking at a time when total war is no longer viewed as a human abhorrence but is instead the deliberate policy of the state of Israel.
And funnily enough, the villain here is - of course - capitalism:
“When students expose the violence of Israel’s occupation and genocide, institutions like VCU, which are deeply entangled with weapon manufacturers and corporate donors, become fearful,” Haddad said. “So they twist the rules, they rewrite the policies, and they try to silence us … But it’s all about power. Our demands for justice are a threat to their complicity.”
You're no threat to anything except your own futures, with the criminal records you're amassing.
In 2003, the historian Tony Judt wrote that the “problem with Israel [is] … that it arrived too late. It has imported a characteristically late-19th-century separatist project into a world that has moved on, a world of individual rights, open frontiers, and international law. The very idea of a ‘Jewish state’ – a state in which Jews and the Jewish religion have exclusive privileges from which non-Jewish citizens are forever excluded – is rooted in another time and place. Israel, in short, is an anachronism.”
Judt’s idea that Israel is a relic of another era requires understanding how the global push for decolonization significantly accelerated after 1945. The result was a new world – but one that forsook the Palestinians, leaving them abandoned in refugee camps in 1948.
Why do these articles always gloss over what happened in Arab countries that accepted Palestinian refugees, like Jordan?
