The danger of Americans remaining silent about the White House's support for Israel's crimes

"Michael Schwalbe," a professor of sociology at North Carolina State University at Chapel Hill, said in an article that continuing to deal with those who protest Israel's crimes could put Americans as a nation on a path to becoming one of the perpetrators. Part of the text of the note published by this professor includes the following statements: 35,000 Palestinians, mostly children and civilians, were killed. After the destruction of all universities in Gaza and the bombing of Gaza hospitals, while more than a million people in Gaza are facing hunger and death, how are students protesting the crimes committed in Gaza in America being arrested? Students are setting up camps to protest and how their universities are committing a genocide. They requested to talk about possible accomplices.

  By forcibly deporting and arresting protesters on campus, a clear message is being sent to other sympathizers: Shut up, accept things as they are, Don't cross the line, or you too will be among those who suffer. We know there is no need to arrest everyone. Many people fear arrest and its possible consequences, and so they are less likely to protest and even less likely to speak out, thus avoiding the important question of how universities, supposedly the institutional guardians of society's human values, can be complicit in violence. The conflict between freedom of expression and violent suppression of protests requires university administrators to provide reasons why both common sense and observable evidence conflict.

In their statement, University of North Carolina officials claimed that they had to send the police because the protesters disrupted campus activities, threatened, intimidated and vandalized students. This claim has been refuted by first-hand witnesses and journalists. A local TV news anchor stated that they had been witnessing this protest for 5 days and this was the first time they had witnessed violence. Other news anchors made similar observations about the protests.

 University of North Carolina officials also claimed in their statement that they were concerned about "increasing reports of anti-Semitic rhetoric" linked to the protests, using an important propaganda tactic that has been used for a long time. As critics of Israel's oppression of the Palestinian people, journalists and others have documented, the claim that antisemitism is widespread on US campuses is largely based on the perception of Israel's behavior as antisemitic. Of course, Israeli officials can be reckless at times, openly admitting that this is a ploy to deal with the protests.

Another tactic is to use the police to turn a peaceful protest into a riot and then claim that police brutality is necessary to maintain order. Those who do not follow the sequence of events closely may be misled into thinking that police brutality was caused by protesters.

History teaches us that genocides occur because people follow inhumane orders and are willfully blind to the greater evil to which they contribute.

This is what student protests and anti-genocide solidarity rallies are trying to break. A continuation of this trend could put us Americans, as a nation, on a path to becoming perpetrators of crimes against humanity, like Hitler's popular supporters in Nazi Germany.