Money-mad universities fail to stop violence against protesters

Inaction from liberal universities has turned U.S. campuses into battlegrounds as Zionists war against pro-Palestinian students. Australia is beginning to see similar violence, writes Tom Tanuki.

*CONTENT WARNING: This article contains video footage depicting violence

THE UNENDING horror of what is happening to the remains of Gaza isn’t enough for the humane world to bear witness to, apparently, so Israel’s greatest enabler, America, is contributing its own localised fascist spectacle: brutalising college students with military tech before leaving them to fend for themselves against fascist vigilantes.

U.S. police and National Guard have been sending in military-grade vehicles and equipment to deal with the great American arch-enemy: students in tents.

They’ve been camping out at colleges, including New York’s Columbia University and the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), to demand that universities divest from Zionist financial interests, such as arms manufacturers which supply and further enable the annihilation of Gazans.

First violently ousted by police, the students rallied with popular support to peacefully reclaim their encampment spaces with numbers. That’s when fascist Zionist thugs rolled into the UCLA campus to attack.

With minimal police presence on site at the time, chaos ensued. There’s recorded footage of black-clad Zionist thugs beating up students and shooting firecrackers into their lines as police officers stood back and filmed the conflict on their phones.

Students erected makeshift barricades out of wooden boards. The fascists beat against them, breaking through to attack students with batons, planks and other weaponry. It took hours for a coordinated state response to quell the violence.

It seems a natural progression for America, but I’ve still never seen it this bad in the U.S. in my lifetime; some say it’s reminiscent of the Vietnam War protests I am too young to have experienced or perhaps students battling the state in Hong Kong.

To rationalise this alarming downward spiral into greater violence against the domestic American Left, there is reinvigorated attention on Martinican writer and politician Aimé Césaire’s thesis about fascism essentially existing as colonialism at home.

That is, societies which propagate colonisation’s countless brutalities abroad will eventually bring those tactics home for the purpose of beating their own into submission. And that is true — although many leftists also fret at this renewed spotlight on domestic Western violence taking the attention off Rafah – now under bombardment – which ultimately favours Israel’s desire to slaughter in secrecy.

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And I can see from the usual array of ghouls online that as the Left calls for the safety of these brave students, attacked by thugs in and out of uniform, we are called hypocrites because some of us are police abolitionists. Suddenly, we want police protection now?

The ghouls misunderstand: this violence isn’t happening because the thugs in uniform are spurned by nasty abolitionist leftist students. Half of the violence toward students, you’ll note, is, in fact, coming from them.

But the police aren’t the reason these battles are happening. I argue that fundamental blame lies with the milquetoast, money-grubbing institutions whose inaction turned their own town square into a battleground: the liberal universities themselves.

Academia is topped by a bloated, heavy old crown that weighs it down. The decrepit remains of yesteryear’s decaying activist generation who never left uni and came into power there — and their penny-pinching neoliberal successors accompany them.

Together, they hoard managerial positions like treasures to be popped on the pile along with their institutions’ money and power. They have learned to mimic modern liberal language and practices while steadily moving to the Right on the substantive politics of money and power.

And now, when they’re tasked with showing some spine on matters of meaty human rights, university leadership simply can’t.

It can’t divest from Zionist money. Because then it wouldn’t have any more Zionist money! What then? This is like asking a jellyfish to grow a spine — obviously, it can’t: it evolved all wrong.

On the campuses of America, fascist Zionist vigilantes are warring against students on the wet surface of this dying jellyfish’s back. Ostensibly seen as Left-liberal spaces – historically, many of them were – now, in the absence of purpose and leadership, these academic squares devolve into battlegrounds.

Pissed-off students rage at management to take a stand, entitled to think that knowledge-generating spaces might be among the first to do so. Grassroots fascists begin to notice the weakness created by this inertia. They creep in.

In 2021, the Construction, Forestry and Maritime Employees Union (CFMEU) trade union’s façade was all but demolished by anti-lockdown activists. It was the same effect. A notoriously strong union suddenly became weak enough for a bunch of cookers to get bold enough to front up to and trash it because construction union boss John Setka became a jellyfish over mandates and the safety of his workers.

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We even saw the State Library of Victoria, recently – a liberal arts and knowledge-keeping organisation which couldn’t own up to its own proximity to liberal Zionism – suffer a damaging series of rolling artist walkouts and internal mutinies.

But mostly, we see it on university campuses, which refuse to put down the bloody Zionist bag of coin — and we are beginning to see the same violence here.

Far-Right Zionists attacked a student encampment at Monash University Clayton campus earlier this week. They trashed a gazebo, knocked down a few tents and took students’ food.

Australasian Union of Jewish Students (AUJS) members attended Sydney University on 2 May, when another pro-Palestinian effort to pressure that university into divestment was planned. It appears they are trying to organise greater numbers to mirror what’s going on in America.

Unless a jellyfish can suddenly conjure a spine out of thin air, I don’t think the management of these universities can do anything to quell the battlegrounds that their weakness summoned into existence.

And the cops only appear to be interested in beating activists up and protecting private property, so they won’t help anyone. We on the Left ought to be rallying and showing up in support of these students. Urgently. They deserve our protection against vigilantism.

A number of groups are organising solidarity efforts to help show support for these encampments. Please keep your eye out for them at your local university, where you can show your support to the only people in academia who appear to have a notion of what principles are: the students.

Tom Tanuki is a writer, satirist and anti-fascist activist. Tom posts weekly videos on YouTube commenting on the Australian political fringe. You can follow Tom on Twitter @tom_tanuki.