My friend Steve Tamari, professor of History at the Southern Illinois University in Edwardsville, was violently tackled and physically manhandled by police on the campus of the Washington University in St. Louis. He and his wife Sandra were subsequently arrested, with many others at the Washington University Campus in St Louis.
Steve was hospitalized for broken ribs and a broken hand, and was told he was lucky to be alive, because he came close to having punctured lungs. What was his offence? He was participating in a protest on the campus of the Washington University in St. Louis. He was recording the video of the student-led action called at Wash-U to protest, and demand an end to what they are calling the genocide in Gaza, and to compel the university to divest from corporations like the Aerospace giant, Boeing, doing business with Israel. The image of Steve – a gentle, softspoken, non-violent Quaker – body slammed, and dragged on the floor by Policemen who had been invited on campus to disperse the encampment and quell the pro-Palestinian protests organized by students and activists, was deeply disturbing on many levels.
It triggered my own repressed trauma from the years of students-led protests on Nigerian universities during the era of military rule in the 1980s which were also violently suppressed. What is happening on American university campuses in the last month does remind me of events in Nigerian universities in the 1980s under military rule, when some of us were very active in organizing and leading anti-military and pro-democracy protests on the campuses of Nigerian universities. It is déjà vu for me, and it is not a very pleasant feeling.
The US has always positioned itself as the bastion of freedom and free democratic expression. But what has happened on the campuses of the US universities over the last month is fascism. It speaks very disturbingly to the American contradiction. Just imagine, folks, that the wave of violent response by authorities on US College Campuses had happened in Nigeria, with such forceful crackdowns, what would have been the American response to the Nigerian authorities? The State Department will swing into action. They would cry more than the bereaved, and condemn the violent suppression of students right. And they would be right to do so. But in the last month, there has been fire on the campuses of the American universities. By fire, I mean sustained, spontaneous students protests.
It started a little way back, when the US Congress (that is, their own version of Nigeria’s National Assembly) invited the Presidents of Harvard, University of Pennsylvania, and MIT (for those who still think these universities are “private” universities, think again!) to testify before the Congressional Committee on Education and the Workforce, to defend what some of the members of Congress described as the “rise of antisemitism” on American University campuses following Israel’s military brutalities in Gaza and in Palestine in general.
The launch of the Israel-Hamas war on October 7, 2023 has led to a blowback with students leading very serious protests against Israel’s actions in Palestine and American support for Israel against the people of Palestine. Active students’ involvement in these protests against Israel led to accusations of “antisemitism” – term which many now consider a dog whistle against opposition and criticism of the Israeli government. Palestinians are also, Semitic. But that fact is often lost in the divisive debates about Israel’s occupation and expansion of their settlements in Palestinian lands.Well, then comes the brutal war which Israel currently conducts in Gaza.
A lot of the students, born in this Twenty-First century do not carry the baggage of guilt which the holocaust created in the mind of people from the Second half of the 20th century. That guilt in many ways made it difficult to ask very hard questions, and to demand certain conducts from Israel which has based its actions on the right of the Jewish state to survive.
But with the images coming out of Gaza; the brutal and senseless killings and occupation by Israel, and the destruction of Palestinian lives, the Netanyahu led government has made Hamas look like saints. Ironically, the government of Israel created and financed Hamas, according to Josep Borell, the European Union’s chief of Foreign policy, speaking at Spain’s university of Valladolid in January, to undermine and weaken the Palestinian authority led by Fatah. This Hamas-Israel relationship, of course vigorously denied by Netanyahu, has thrown up many questions and conspiracy theories about the real intention of the war. It so happens that governments, using their secret slush funds have often created these “special purpose” organizations to advance larger secret agendas that continue to feed the global military industrial and security complex.
The US government is allegedly for instance, said to have funded Osama Bin Laden and his Al-Qaeda. The story of the Nigerian government funding and propping up Boko Haram and the UGM (Unknown Gunmen) has made the rounds severally. Of course, these governments would dutifully, unwaveringly, deny involvement; and gut and pulverize any such claims and accusations, because they are ultimately difficult to prove. Governments keep these things at that intriguing boundary between speculation and truth. It is all mirrors and wind. But the Nation magazine of New York notes that, “Wars hide scandals.”
And the scandal for the students on American university campuses is that the Biden administration was supporting the government of Israel, and providing it with resources and other instruments of war to commit genocide against Palestinians. It made the US complicit, in the eyes of these young folk. The images are dreadful: completely razed neighborhoods; horrendous death of innocents including children killed in terrifying carpet-level bombings; hospitals filled with wounded children who no longer have parents, and who have been orphaned because their mothers and fathers had been killed; terrible hunger, with the blockade imposed by Israel, which reminds one of the blockades of Biafra, and the use of hunger as an instrument of war.
The Igbo and other Easterners should be able to understand this, and feel that thing again in their guts, when they remember their own experience of hunger, of burying their own children killed, not by bullets, but by hunger, because of man’s inhumanity to man. The South Africans – the real giants of Africa (forget about that giant colonial poop in Africa nestling somewhere in West Africa)- who survived apartheid, raised their voice, and have taken the government of Israel to the International Criminal Court on charges of Genocide. Since October 2023, students especially, on American university campuses have been protesting this deadly and unjust war.
In an attempt by the conservatives in Congress to force, and even blackmail these universities, among them America’s top universities, and goad them to forcefully and radically contain students protests against the war in Gaza, they forced the presidents of Harvard, U-Penn, and MIT to what seemed like political Inquisition before the US congress. That inquisition led to the forced resignation, first of Dr. Liz Magill of the University of Pennsylvania, and then Dr. Claudine Gay, the first Black President of Harvard who was harried and hung-out to dry, by those who threatened her, questioned her, humiliated her, and challenged her intellectual integrity. Claudine Gay is reported in the Harvard Crimson magazine to write in justification of her resignation: “It has been distressing to have doubt cast on my commitments to confronting hate and to upholding scholarly rigor — two bedrock values that are fundamental to who I am — and frightening to be subjected to personal attacks and threats fueled by racial animus.”
The fear of being hung out to dry, may have forced Columbia University President, Minouche Shafik, to take the extreme measures, to fob off and please her Congressional assailants, seeking intellectual blood. What happened was a blowback. Students at Columbia University defied her. Set up encampments on Campus, and widened their protests against the war in Gaza. Columbia University suspended students leading the protests on campus, invited the NYPD, who arrested and assaulted students. Reports of the incident in Columbia, rather than cow students, created a nation-wide Students anti-war Movement currently going on in full force on several American University campuses, from California to Florida. In spite of the beatings, the threats, the arrests, American University campuses are on fire with Students resistance and protests.
It reminds me of Nigerian university students of the 1980s, when we organized and led protests against military dictators, and stared into gun barrels. Now, I know the kind of trepidations my own parents felt in those moments, because today, my daughter at Haverford, is very active in these defiant students’ movements. I fear for her. But I also think it is her right to protest. All that these young folk are asking for is peace and justice. The protests are tapering off as students leave for their summer holidays, and concessions are made. But if this war in Gaza persists, and they return to it in August, the consequences will have political ramifications for the November Presidential elections in the US. That is for sure.
