Comments
ACCORDING TO LIZ - The violence that is shaking parts of the Middle East has now migrated back up the supply chain of Israel’s weaponry to campuses and public places in the United States.
For too long the mainstream news has attempted to shape the discourse by blindly “balancing” the voices of Americans calling for humanitarian priorities and justice for the people of Gaza and the West Bank against Biden’s egregious support for the despotic Netanyahu’s terrorist activities.
And a despot Netanyahu is.
This is a leader that, facing constant threats of criminal charges from cooking the books to corruption, tried to eviscerate the power of the entire Israeli judicial system.
This is a leader who again and again has tried to stifle voices of his own countrymen when they opposed his violent interventions in surrounding countries and his oppression of Gaza and the West Bank.
This is a leader who supports the illegal settlement of lands belonging to Palestinians, and turns a blind eye to the murder and detention of civilians without due process, encouraging further disregard for international law.
This is a leader who condones torture, who has access to a nuclear arsenal and other highly sophisticated technology necessary for furthering his havoc-wreaking aims, and an intelligence agency operating extrajudicially both within and beyond his country’s borders.
This is a leader who has continues to count on the goodwill of governments around the world to cement his power by playing the tattered poor-me card drawn from the deck of Nazi extermination camps and Russian pogroms.
This is a leader who has appropriated the worst lessons of Hitler, and has egregiously stacked the new deck in his favor by courting wealthy factions in foreign countries to lean on their governments and media to strengthen his hand or, at a minimum, look the other way.
What has happened for decades in the occupied territories of Israel has now sloshed back across the Atlantic and onto the streets of American cities and campuses around the country.
The voices for the oppressed, both here and there, may be Johnny-come-latelies, poorly funded, and somewhat disorganized. They may not have the sheen of a professional organization, but they speak their truth from the heart and are standing up against an oppression as severe if not more so than what the Founding Fathers faced.
We live on a globe that has shrunk over the past century from one of unimaginable isolation between continents to one where atrocities in Vietnam are viewed within days in our living rooms to where what happens right now is shared over the world wide web in real time.
What happens in Gaza has the same impact on our future as a tax on tea two hundred and fifty years ago.
And saying what people see and hear “ain’t so, Joe” doesn’t cut it anymore.
Americans are calling out Shoeless Joe Biden as he continues to support the dictator of another democracy-in-name-only.
And all the media spin in the world can no longer hide the truth.
The problem we face today is that so many in Washington – and Sacramento and Austin and Albany – are in on the take. Swapping out Joe would only lead to another AIPAC-sponsored politician stepping into the breach.
One who might capitalize on the protests and let leash the dogs of war on our own people.
Following the criticism of policing that escalated in the wake of the murder of George Floyd and the rise of Black Lives Matter, many cities have started clamping down on the use of overt force against civilians and have attempted to walk the line between protecting public safety and exacerbating violence.
The Poor People’s Campaign which evolved from the economic and social tenets of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., calls on all Americans to demand greater moral leadership in America today. We are in a “...crisis moment for our democracy.”
No voices should be stifled. No-one should be denied the right to express their views so long as they do not denigrate others.
Yes, many Palestinian supporters have crossed that line with acts of violence and conflating all Jews with the Netanyahu government and some of the more troubling tenets of Zionism.
Yes, their comments and slogans can be overtly anti-Semitic.
But they didn’t deserve the violence of pro-Israeli counter-protesters on Tuesday night. And they certainly didn’t deserve that neither campus security nor the LAPD was called to their aid.
All too often the American nightly news overlooks decades of subordination of Arab-American rights to those of Jewish Americans, overlooks the fact that Jewish Americans are protesting alongside Americans of all persuasions against Biden’s use of our tax dollars to enable genocide.
And the media will continue to amplify their messages. Or at least some of them.
Democracy is raising our voices, all our voices, and having our leaders listen.
When students on campuses put their futures on the line to call out their government for supporting the wrong side and demand it act to protect the innocents, the women and children, the teachers and artisans, from pogroms by the current Israeli government, we must listen.
Censorship of what they say, and the removal of the protest camps will not wipe away the stain of the tone-deafness of Biden and his minions.
Arrests and video of violence both by and against the protesters won’t stem the tide of truth.
Holding different opinions is one thing, insisting everyone conform to Big Brother Biden’s view marks the death of the American experiment with democracy.
Here in Los Angeles, the LAPD has been relatively circumspect in their actions against the USC and UCLA protests. So far.
Let’s hope our city can continue to maintain a balance between freedom of expression and overt oppression.
(Liz Amsden is a contributor to CityWatch and an activist from Northeast Los Angeles with opinions on much of what goes on in our lives. She has written extensively on the City's budget and services as well as her many other interests and passions. In her real life she works on budgets for film and television where fiction can rarely be as strange as the truth of living in today's world.)
