The Ziofascist Israeli Network Reacts to US Students Protesting the 2023 to 2024 Genocide of Palestinians
An article in three sections: 1. Too Big to Fail?; 2. The Ziofascist ‘USraeli’ Crackdown on US Student Protests and Encampments; 3. Conclusion.
Part 2 of a mini-series. For related work, see my articles “US Censorship and Suppression of Ziofascist Israel’s 2023 Genocide of Palestinians”, “Global Protests Against Ziofascist Israel’s 2023 to 2024 Genocide of Palestinians” and “The Ziofascist Israeli Network in the USA and Its Nefarios Activities at US Universities” (part 1) and “Students Against Ziofascist Israel’s 2023 to 2024 Genocide of Palestinians — The US East Coast” (part 3).
1. Too Big To Fail?
Since April 2024 and starting at Columbia University, US student protests and encampments for Palestinian rights and against the Ziofascist Israeli 2023 to 2024 genocide of Israel have been blossoming across the entire USA:
April 26
- Campus protests against Gaza genocide spread globally despite police repression
- International students in New York City denounce attacks on anti-genocide protesters, “The struggle for Palestine and the struggle by workers everywhere are the same”
- Los Angeles police blockade University of Southern California campus from public, press after arresting 93 protesters
- Anti-war encampment grows at University of Pittsburgh: “Biden, Trump, Bush and Obama, all of them are committed to continuing war”
- Hundreds arrested and assaulted by US police as protests against Gaza genocide expand on college campuses
- “The right to protest is at stake,” Columbia student tells WSWS
- Hundreds of students rally against genocide in Washington, D.C.
- Boston police forcibly remove tent encampment at Emerson College
- Socialist Equality Party vice presidential candidate Jerry White denounces police rampage in Austin, Texas
- “I think that the real antisemitism is conflating the Israeli state with Jews,” Columbia faculty member tells WSWS
- Student protests against Gaza genocide, police repression, expand to Italy, France
May 1
2. The Ziofascist ‘USraeli’ Crackdown on US Student Protests
April 23
April 24
April 25
April 26
A pro-Israel House Democrat and Republican plan to introduce legislation creating federally sanctioned “antisemitism monitors” for select college campuses.
Why it matters: It’s the first bill introduced in Congress as a direct response to the pro-Palestinian protests that have rocked Columbia University and other colleges in recent days.
Driving the news: Reps. Ritchie Torres (D-N.Y.) and Mike Lawler (R-N.Y.) are introducing the College Oversight and Legal Updates Mandating Bias Investigations and Accountability Act — or COLUMBIA Act.
+ The bill would allow the Department of Education to send a “third-party antisemitism monitor” to any college that receives federal funding — and to revoke that funding for colleges that don’t comply.
+ The monitor, paid for by the school, would be charged with releasing a public, quarterly report evaluating “the progress that a college or university has made toward combating antisemitism.”
+ The bill was first reported by Jewish Insider.
What they’re saying: “My office and I have spoken with countless Jewish students from campuses across America who feel deeply unsafe, purely as a result of their religious and ethnic identity,” Torres said in a statement.
Elon Musk shilling for Ziofascist Israel in the responses:
April 27
April 28
April 29
April 30
Another article on the Ziofascist network in the US:
May 1
Replies:
May 2
Genocide Joe Biden: “Violent protest is not protected. Peaceful protest is. It’s against the law when violence occurs. Destroying property is not a peaceful protest. It’s against the law. Violence, tresspassing, breaking windows, shutting down campuses, forcing the cancellation of classes and graduations. None of this is a peaceful protest. Threatening people, intimidating people, instilling fear in people [i.e. things that the Ziofascist counterprotestors and police did] is not a peaceful protest. It’s against the law. Dissent is essential for democracy, but dissent must never lead to disorder or to denying the rights of others [which is again what the Ziofascists did], so students can finish the semester and their college education. Look, it’s basically a matter of fairness[!]. It’s a matter of what’s right[!]. There’s the right to protest, but not the right to cause chaos. [which is again what the Ziofascists did]”
From the JINSA-affiliate, Israel-firster and US traitor Tom Cotton:
Israel-owned Ziofascist Tom Cotton: “We’re here to discuss the Little Gazas that have risen up on campuses across America, and the liberal college administrators and politicians who refuse to restore law and order and to protect other students. These little Gaza’s are disgusting cesspools of antisemetic hate, full of pro-Hamas sympathizers, fanatics and freaks. The terrorist sympathizers in these little Gazas aren’t ‘peacefully protesting’ Israel’s conduct of the war. They’re violently and illegally demanding death for Israel just like their ideological twins, the Ayatollah’s in Iran.”
May 3
About the New York City mayor:
Journalism, a trade where the need to maintain access often requires euphemism, is rich in evasive language to describe people like Eric Adams: dissimulator, equivocator, teller of tall tales, prevaricator, fabulist, among many others. But to be perfectly frank — something that Adams is incapable of — the New York mayor is a bald-faced liar. He is willing to say anything to advance his immediate interest, with little or no regard for the truth. Adams doesn’t just tell the occasional fib. He lies on a legendary scale, comparable to Baron Munchausen, the Wizard of Oz, or Pinocchio. Adams is second only to Donald Trump in his wanton mendacity. In a very entertaining 2023 profile of Adams for The New Yorker, Ian Parker made clear just how essential lying is to Adams’s persona, to the point that Adams will tell lies denying the lies he had previously told.
Adams regularly called himself a vegan. When Politico reported in 2022 that he ate fish, Adams, according to Parker, “initially denied this” and then “he denied to me, untruthfully, that he’d ever claimed to be a vegan.” Later, Adams said, “If I see a piece of chicken, I’m going to nibble on it.”
In 2021, Adams said he had never boxed before. Two years later, he boasted that he often boxed when younger, doing well in the gym but quickly getting knocked out in the ring. Adams has claimed he was born in Alabama (which is where his mom was born, he himself entering the world in a Park Slope hospital). He claimed his father sometimes took him to see Malcolm X speak — virtually impossible, since the civil rights leader was assassinated when Adams was 4. Adams has boasted, “When I played football for Bayside High School, we used to win championships all the time.” He also denied to Parker ever playing football for Bayside.
Adams’s deceptions have even required the fabrication of evidence — as Parker relates:
Last year, after the murder of two police officers in Harlem, Adams made a speech in which he described having long carried, in his wallet, a small photograph of a police-officer friend who was murdered in 1987. A week later, Adams showed this crumpled keepsake to journalists. The Times recently reported that, in the days following the speech, City Hall aides had manufactured the wallet photograph by downloading an image from the Internet, then staining a print with coffee, to make it look old.
One thing that Adams does not lie about, it seems, is his love of Israel. Of course, it’s not unknown for New York politicians to work up an expedient enthusiasm for the Jewish state. But Adams seemed genuine when he said he planned to retire in Israel. Asked where, he said “the Golan Heights” (which, to be sure, is actually Syrian territory occupied by Israel). […]
May 4
During a call hosted by the centrist political group No Labels, Reps. Josh Gottheimer, D-N.J., and Mike Lawler, R-N.Y., spoke with close to 300 attendees, including trustees from several universities, about how Congress could help crack down further on student protesters — and how the FBI could get more involved.
No Labels promoted the Wednesday event as a “special Zoom call” with “the leading voices in their parties” opposing student protests against the war in Gaza, which spread to more than 150 campuses in the last two weeks.
The bipartisan pair praised the responses of universities that have called on police to violently quell protests and promised that Congress would be doing more to investigate the student movements, according to a recording of the meeting obtained by The Intercept. The lawmakers and university board of trustee members repeatedly claimed that nefarious outside actors are funding and organizing the encampments on university campuses.
Gottheimer said that he had been in touch with officials from the Federal Bureau of Investigation about campus protests. “Based on my conversations with the FBI — there’s activity I can’t get into, you know, given my committee responsibilities, I can’t get into more specifics — but I can just say that I think people are well aware this is an issue,“ said Gottheimer, who is on the House Intelligence Committee.
“I can’t speak for the local FBI field offices, but it’s got to be all hands on deck,” he added. “I believe following the money is the key. Gotta follow the money[!!]. A lot of these universities are not transparent at all, remotely, about where the money comes from, you know, they just, they want it — and that has to be a big part of this.”
This week, House Republicans said they would investigate federal funding for universities that held campus protests. House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., announced the plans on Tuesday alongside the chairs of six congressional committees.
Gottheimer and Lawler have been at the forefront of congressional efforts to defend Israel amid its brutal war on Gaza. They led bipartisan efforts to silence criticism of Israel and to protect Israel from being held accountable for using the billions of dollars it receives from the United States in violation of international law.
Gottheimer, Lawler, and No Labels did not respond to requests for comment.
Speaking of “follow the money”:
Harvard Ziofascist Alan Dershowitz: “We are going to be engaging in massive defensive and offensive lawfare against bigots, anti-Semites, and potential[!] violent terrorists. We’re gonna take many, many kinds of legal actions. We’re starting a group ‘Hurt a Jew [i.e. a Ziofascist], we sue you’[!] in which, if you send us the name of a Jewish kid — it could be a Christian Zionist[!!!] too — who was hurt by one of these bigots, we will sue them and we will get their dorm rooms taken away. We will take their cars and their boom boxes and we’ll bankrupt them. We will do whatever is necessary under the law in order to bring these lawsuits, bring them successfully, and deter October 7th[wtf?!]. Remember, there are people out there [i.e. Ziofascist black propagandists] who have promised 10.000 October sevens. That’s genocide.[!] 10.000 October sevens is the end of the Jewish people. That’s genocide, that’s Hitler.[!]”
Ziofascist propagandist Gilad Erdan: “We always knew that Hamas hides in schools. We just didn’t realize that it’s not only schools in Gaza. It’s also Harvard, Columbia [both heavily Ziofascist-infiltrated and -undermined], and many ‘elite’ universities. This is what we hear at academic institutions across the world, and they directly represent the Palestinians’ goal. The only solution for them is a single Palestinian state that is judenrein, Jew-free, from the river to the sea.”
May 5
May 7
May 8
Palantir CEO Alex Karp: “An often overlooked part of this battle is: We kind of just think these things that are happening across college campuses especially are like a sideshow. No, they are the show. If we lose the intellectual battle, we will not be able to deploy any army in the West, ever.”
May 10
In January, the University of California system — one of the largest public-university systems in the world and where I teach — made a $4 billion investment in the Blackstone Real Estate Income Trust fund, one of the world’s largest real-estate funds. The massive investment came just weeks after the fund, known as BREIT, came under fire for limiting how much investors could pull out of it. But these liquidity concerns didn’t scare off UC, which committed to keep its investment with BREIT for at least six years.
And the University of California system isn’t alone in its ambitions — universities across the country have invested in or bought up real estate. And some large public universities such as Georgia Tech, the University of Washington, and the University of Texas at Austin have even teamed up with private developers to build “innovation districts,” hubs of office buildings and retail shops that are leased to private companies instead of being used for classes or student housing, on university property.
While the money flowing from higher education to real estate has intensified in recent years, universities have been looking to private equity and real-estate investments since the 1980s to fund their operations. And increasingly, this financialization of higher education has warped the purpose and mission of universities. Billionaire donors and money managers have shifted the focus of these institutions from providing students an effective education to sustaining a profit-generating, investor-enriching machine.
[…]
The decline of public funding paralleled the growth of endowments, but confoundingly, the profits made from these investments weren’t used to bridge the gap and keep soaring tuition costs down. In a 2022 working paper for the National Bureau of Economic Research, the economist George Bulman found that for a large sample of private colleges and universities, endowment income is not used to expand enrollment or significantly increase aid to students in financial need. In fact, Bulman found that endowment gains were mostly spent on operating expenditures that increased the selectivity and national ranking of the school. Despite claims from some endowment managers that endowments help fund financial aid, Bulman found that spending on student aid was “statistically insignificant.”
And given that endowment gifts siphon off taxable income, the sudden growth of these funds has diverted money the government could use to support schools. Contributions to endowments are tax write-offs, and capital gains on these piles of money are also free from taxation since the universities attached to them are not for profit. Eaton estimated in 2017 that tax breaks for university endowments cost federal coffers up to $19 billion a year. On top of that, in 2017 the New York Times reported that a number of schools were using overseas tax shelters to avoid taxation on income streams unrelated to their academic missions. Under Trump, Congress passed a 1.4% tax on the largest university endowments as part of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, but revenue from this tax is a drop in the Federal budget — just $200 million a year — and it is not earmarked to fund education.
The impact of financialization
Rather than help ease student’s cost burdens, the growing hedge-fund-like nature of endowments has actually made affordability worse. According to a 2018 case study on the financialization of higher education from the Roosevelt Institute, a progressive think tank, complex financial investments called interest-rate swaps had cost a sample of 19 schools $2.7 billion — enough to cover the total cost of college for 108,000 students. “The money Wall Street extracts from college budgets and endowments is a transfer of wealth from students to banks and investors, and interferes with the ability of schools to complete their core functions: educating students and preparing them for a life of learning,” the report said.
Here again, the University of California provides a useful example. Starting in 2003, university leaders began consulting with Wall Street bankers, including some from Lehman Brothers — the infamous Wall Street investment firm that would eventually fold in 2008 because of its involvement in the subprime mortgage crisis and collapse of the housing market. At the advice of the bankers and advisors like Richard Blum, a hedge-fund manager and the late husband of Senator Dianne Feinstein, UC leaders decided to take on a huge amount of new debt to fund new expansions, mostly of nonacademic projects like medical centers and sports facilities. In order to issue the $11 billion of debt, UC started to use more exotic investment strategies like using tuition fees as collateral for loans and the aforementioned interest-rate swaps. But instead of helping fund a bright new future for the system, these financial sleights of hand ended up costing UC massive amounts of money: Even though administrators defended the moves, reports found that the system stood to lose hundreds of millions of dollars from the swaps. And in order to offset the increasing debt load, UC raised tuition prices and began admitting more out-of-state and international students who had to pay higher fees. As a result, Californians had a harder time gaining admission. As evidence that the equation wasn’t working, California mandated last year that top campuses had to put a cap on out-of-state students, promising to increase state allocations to supplement the more than $1.3 billion in tuition revenue that would be lost by the caps.
And this focus on profit-making over strengthening its core mission continues today. Just a few months before UC made its $4 billion investment in BREIT, 48,000 UC graduate assistants, postdoctoral fellows, and researchers went on strike over wages that barely cover rent and food in one of the most expensive parts of the country. The union that represents these workers found that 40% of its members were severely rent burdened — meaning they were spending more than half their income on rent. The financialization of the system has corroded its commitment to its ultimate mission: providing effective higher education for California’s students.
[…]
other than the billionaire donors and money managers, this new paradigm is failing everyone: students, professors, and future generations.
May 13
May 16
May 17
We don’t know yet how many of these chat participants gave to the Adams campaign in this period, or how much, because the campaign finance reporting won’t come out for months and most of the participants declined to tell the Post what they gave, though Blavatnik confirmed to the Post that he did indeed donate $2,100 to Adams to “endorse Mayor Adams’ stalwart support of Israel and firm stand against antisemitism.”.
Meanwhile, the chat participants were working on another front, recognizing that, not unlike a vampire, the NYPD could only enter the Columbia campus if they were invited in. “In touch with the board,” former Congressmember Ted Deutch, now head of the American Jewish Committee, reportedly wrote to the chat group. “So NYPD can return.”
And then, on April 26, four days before hundreds of helmeted police officers swarmed onto campus in a raid that injured students, members of the chat got a 45-minute Zoom meeting with the mayor to press their case, the Post reports. The full list of participants is unknown, but according to the Post it included at least Blavatnik, Sitt, Loeb and Lubetzky.
“He’s open to any ideas we have,” Sitt wrote of Adams, a day after the call. “As you saw he’s ok if we hire private investigators to then have his police force intel team work with them.”
Later the same afternoon, Adams went on Republican billionaire John Catsamatidis’s radio show, saying that he was urging college administrations to take a hard line on protests “Soon as one tent comes up, take that tent down,” he said. “Don’t allow it to spread, because what you will find is that it will continue to multiply and spread and bring a level of disorder.”
May 18
Back up! Back up!:
An out of control policeman throws a young man to the ground for no particular reason:
While they handcuff him, other police latch on to a couple other protesters standing on the sidewalk:
A woman approaches and shouts repeatedly “He’s press! He’s press!”:
“He’s credentially press, he’s lifestreaming this right now, you stupid assholes!”
The arrested reporter is accredited with Reuters or Al Jazeera and his Twitter/X account name is @thizzl_:
3. Conclusion
And in the USA, Genocide Joe miraculously managed to briefly unite both pro-Palestine and pro-Israel protesters:
