From the New York Times that came with today's papers…
Talk to student protesters across the country, and their outrage is clear: They have been galvanized by the scale of death and destruction in the Gaza Strip, and will risk arrest to fight for the Palestinian cause.
For most of them, the war is taking place in a land they've never set foot in, where those killed—34,000 so far, according to local health authorities—are known to them only through what they have read or seen online.
But for many the issues are closer to home, and at the same time, much bigger and broader. In their eyes, the Gaza conflict is a struggle for justice, linked to issues that seem far afield. They say they are motivated by policing, mistreatment of Indigenous people, discrimination toward Black Americans and the impact of global warming.
the protests at Emory University in Atlanta from online, led by the students...
Many protesters have rebuffed entreaties from university administrators, chained themselves to benches and taken over buildings. Now demonstrators have faced a harsh crackdown, with hundreds of arrests in the past twenty-four hours at many schools, including Columbia University.
With pro-Israel students ratcheting up their counterprotests on a number of campuses, the climate could grow even more strained in the coming days.
In interviews, the language of many protesters was also distinctive. Students freely salted their explanations with academic terms like intersectionality, colonialism, and imperialism, all to make their case that the plight of Palestinians is a result of global power structure that thrive on bias and oppression.
"As an environmentalist, we pride ourselves on viewing the world through intersectional lenses," said Katie Rueff, a first-year student at Cornell University. "Climate justice is an everyone issue. It affects every dimension of identity, because it's rooted in the same struggles of imperialism, capitalism—things like that. I think that's very true of this conflict, of the genocide in Palestine."
the police, detaining the protesters at Emory...photo from online
Jawuanna McAllister, a twenty-seven-year-old doctoral candidate in cell and molecular biology at Cornell, pointed to the name of the student group she is affiliated with: the Coalition for Mutual Liberation.
"It's in our name: mutual liberation," McAllister said. "That means we're anti-racist, anti-imperialist, anti-colonialist organization. We believe that none of us can be free and have the respect and dignity we deserve unless all of us are free."
So, this is the young people's cause, not just for the Palestinians, but for the global people of the world, and, this still just showed, how these younger generations are way more, sound in their following the causes. When a group of people of tried and dominated another group, the oppressed are bound to eventually, rebel against the rules, because everybody wants to be viewed and treated as equals to that next guy, and the U.S. does NOT, foster this concept of equality at all, which is what's causing this protest across all the university campuses in the U.S. right now.
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