Protesters have been creating disorder for weeks, vandalizing university buildings and disrupting academic activities in the name of “peace” in Palestine and demanding that the White House end its support for Israel. The unrest has increased as graduation ceremonies are approaching.
According to police reports, more than 2,000 people have been arrested in the context of the seizure of buildings. The police were deployed on several campuses in the United States after the eviction of universities in Los Angeles and New York, which have become the main scenes of protests against Israel’s war on Hamas in the Gaza Strip that began after the terrorist attack on Islamist group to Israeli territory on October 7, leaving 1,200 dead, mostly civilians, and 250 kidnapped, 130 of those hostages remain in the hands of the terrorists.
Students have ignored calls by university authorities to leave the buildings, a situation that has forced administrators to resort to various responses: arrests, filing criminal charges and suspension.
UCLA (University of California) announced the cancellation of classes after the riots, while Columbia reported that it will end the semester remotely. The police declared the protests illegal.
Ignorance?
Support for Hamas would be spreading in the country and for now the influence of extremist groups can be observed within the universities that are no longer safe for students, mainly for young people of Jewish origin.
The political analyst on Middle East and antiterrorism issues, Joseph Hage, warned about the vulnerability that the United States is showing and the “very weak” response of President Joe Biden to chaos in the universities.
“I understand that they do not want to get involved in the matter due to the proximity of the elections and President Biden is considering more what the elections could cost him, rather than the cost to the country. “It is a serious mistake because we cannot let the short-term benefit, which is the elections, undermine the well-being, stability and public order of the country for the coming years.”
For Claudio Valencia, a Hispanic of Jewish origin, it is a broad movement and he believes that in the protests “there is everything,” but fundamentally ignorance.
“I’m sure there are people who are pro-Palestine, but clearly there are others who support the violent methods of terrorist groups like Hamas and Hezbollah and that was seen in the demonstrations with Hezbollah flags and Hamas symbols. I think that this is a minority and that the majority is there because they are against the war without understanding why and how the conflict began. There is a misconception and that is that (they believe) they are fighting for land and that in my opinion is not the main thing, it is a mainly ideological fight. First it is ideological and second it is land, because otherwise peace would have already been achieved with the land swaps (that have been made) in the past. The organizers are very ideologized and that is the problem because it is a radical ideology and one knows where it begins, but not where all this ends and that is the concern,” he stated.
Hage agrees that it is an ideological issue that prevails in protests at universities. “There is no doubt about this. The agitators are the progressives, liberals, leftists, all these factions take advantage of the opportunity to agitate,” he maintained.
Iran, a country that finances Hamas, has already intervened in the issue, condemning the police interventions on US university campuses and stating that it “does not accept in any way the police treatment of student demands” and asked the international community to address the issue. issue.
Israel and its supporters have called the university protests anti-Semitic. While the House of Representatives approved a bill that redefines anti-Semitism supported by Democrats and Republicans in the face of escalating unrest at universities.
The president of Israel, Isaac Herzog, reacted to the chaos in higher education centers in the United States. “We are seeing prominent academic institutions, halls of history, culture and education contaminated by hatred and anti-Semitism fueled by arrogance and ignorance (…) We watch with horror as the atrocities of October 7 against Israel are celebrated and justified” , he expressed in a statement in which he offers support to Jewish students at American universities.
¿Propalestina o proterrorismo?
Hamas, founded in 1987, is considered a terrorist organization by the US and the European Union, for which it faces sanctions, including no access to the international financial system.
As a political and social organization, it collects taxes and receives international aid from like-minded foreign governments and charitable organizations that have allowed them to receive million-dollar funds; In addition, he has access to an obscure international investment portfolio that often uses cryptocurrencies to circumvent sanctions, a BBC article reveals. But it also has access to military material, something that was evidenced by Israel’s war in Gaza and the discoveries made in the territory of weapons and tunnels.
For the analyst on Middle East issues and the terrorism, The university students would be falling into a trap because in their opinion the majority of the protesters do not know how to distinguish between the Palestinians and Hamas, “they are two different things,” he said.
And he explained it with four arguments. “One, Hamas forcibly confiscated, killing Palestinians, the Gaza Strip and eliminated the government that had been elected, the Palestinian Authority in 2005, and expelled them to the West Bank; two, Hamas does not recognize the Palestinian Authority elected and recognized by the world as the representative of the Palestinian people; three, the mastermind of Hamas is Iran, not the Palestinian people; Four, the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip are being used by Hamas as a human shield to achieve their political goals and ambitions, not to save the Palestinian people from any oppression.”
He gave as an example the statements of one of the senior leaders of Hamas. Said by them (Hamas) because after October 7 when the number of victims began to increase in the Gaza Strip, the Al Jazeera news network asked a member of the Hamas political bureau in an interview how after 2005, that the Gaza Strip was independent from Israel, a time when it received more money than many States in the world received, and they did not use it to build the Gaza Strip as if it were a Dubai, on the contrary they have built tunnels for military purposes, and the Hamas leader’s response was that of the 2 million inhabitants of the Gaza Strip, there are 1.5 million refugees and that they are the responsibility of the UN and not Hamas.”
“They used all the donated money to build tunnels, factories for weapons, ammunition, howitzers and missiles and they have not built an infrastructure to protect the population in the Gaza Strip in case of emergency, they do not even have shelter for a tornado,” he noted.
“Here we can make many accusations against Israel, but if we are going to be fair we must share the responsibility of the Hamas leaders in the Gaza Strip and the other is the increase in the number of victims, it is the damage that the bombing of Israel,” he noted.
According to Hamas, more than 34,000 Palestinians have died, but no independent body has confirmed that number.
Who are behind?
In addition to Columbia in New York and UCLA in California from where they spread to other higher education centers in the country, other affected universities are Indiana University in Bloomington, Arizona State University, Washington University in St. Louis, and the University of South Florida, USF, where riots were quelled and 10 people were arrested. Other universities with the same situation are Harvard, Yale, Berkeley in California, Ohio State University, and Emory in Georgia where they set up tents under the Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) organization financed by magnate George Soros.
Another group promoting the protests is the “American Campaign for Palestinian Rights (USCPR), which also receives funding from Soros, according to an investigation by the New York Post. The group would have received at least $300,000 from Soros’ organization, the Open Society Foundation since 2017, and $355,000 from the Roskefeller Brothers Fund since 2019.
“It has already been proven in a few media outlets that first, not all those who are participating in the universities are students, there are agitators; Two, they are getting money because when you start seeing printed posters, tents, all these things that we are seeing, this costs money.”
“The first two that appeared are the organization of George Soros and the Rockefeller Brothers, here we began to see links to what the organizations that smuggle immigrants on the border do, that hold demonstrations with Black Lives Matter during the riots in the US, all of them. These organizations are the leftists,” Hage said.
He pointed out that a video is circulating on social networks in which they call for a socialist revolution to change the United States system. “When we see all these screams, all these people calling to annihilate Israel, although they are not the majority, the fact that there are these voices among this crowd is cause for alarm because in reality it is not only supporting the Palestinians in the Strip of Gaza but to oppose Israel first; two, to the United States in particular and to the Jews in general.
Danger
Valencia assures that Jews no longer feel safe in universities because there is a lot of antagonism due to the lack of information. “The fact that you are Jewish is enough, even if you have nothing directly to do with the war, it is enough for there to be antagonism, there have been generalized threats and constant antagonism that makes it very uncomfortable to be in universities, that’s it,” he asserted. .
For Valencia, that ideology that is observed today in Universities is not the result of something that happened from one day to the next. “This is an ideological movement within the Universities that has been going on for years, this is the result of that radicalization and there is danger, it has been going on for a long time because there are exchanges with Middle Eastern countries, of professors, students. American universities have opened campuses in Middle Eastern countries, including Israel, and those countries also work with universities in the United States. It is a relationship that goes back a long time and was silent, but now it can no longer be ignored that there is a presence. very big and that is why the universities caught on so quickly,” he stressed.
Valencia pointed out that all protests on university campuses have the same pattern, the same songs, slogans, the same message on the posters, and the same tactics when taking over the campuses and the patio of the universities, “everything is very similar.”
“It’s a danger. Individual freedoms cannot be taken. In free countries the Jews are the first attacked, but they are not the last. Start with the Jews,” he warned.
In that sense, Valencia recommended that what must be done to reverse what is happening in universities, “is to occupy spaces, respect and be heard, one cannot be intimidated or afraid.”
The crisis in universities is the focus of attention of Americans and the international community. The elections are approaching and the Republican candidate Donald Trump reacted and attributed the chaos to the radical left that seeks to divert attention from what is happening on the border with the entry of millions of immigrants since Biden occupies the White House in 2021. a chaos that has moved to cities in the US and is affecting local budgets, a burden that falls on taxpayers.
“Do you think the radical left lunatics who are causing all the chaos at our colleges and universities are doing it to take focus away from our southern border, where millions of people, many of them from prisons and mental institutions, are coming to our country? he questioned
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