Student activism is never perfect. You’ll always find some protestors who are ignorant or overzealous or narcissistic. They’re like 19 years old. But you also can’t wait for the perfect protest. It will never come.
I really do empathize with the difficult position of leftwing Jews who support the ceasefire but are also wounded by protestors saying ignorant or antisemitic shit like “Israelis go back to Europe.” The average US college student is probably not aware that most Israeli Jews are Mizrahi or Sephardi and not in any sense from Europe. They’re probably not aware of a lot of things, and sometimes their rhetoric is tonedeaf or worse. Those protestors should be educated and corrected.
But the central purpose of the protests is to address an urgent humanitarian crisis. Many students are bravely risking police violence to speak out. So obsessing over the occasional broken window or offensive slogan seems to me like a warped sense of priorities.
“The children are always ours, every single one of them, all over the globe; and I am beginning to suspect that whoever is incapable of recognizing this may be incapable of morality.”
-James Baldwin
Fahrenheit 451 was never my favorite Bradbury/dystopian fiction because it felt a little too blunt, too far-fetched in its metaphor— the state deploying high-tech 'firemen' to burn books to maintain its censorship regime? A bit on the nose.
Currently reevaluating that assessment