University administrators, as I see, couldn’t have handled the student protests any worse. Talk about heavy handed and tin ears. They would do better listening to the students than bending to the demands of some alumni and the threats of MAGA Republicans in Washington. At Columbia, the student demands are “divestment, financial transparency, and amnesty.” Why shouldn’t the administration agree with them. Or, at least, sit down and talk with and listen to the protesting students.
I have never been a 76er fan going back many decades. I remember the great clashes of Russell and the Celtics and Wilt and the 76ers, beginning in 1959. So many great Sixers players during this long era. Doc, of course, but many others as well — Hal Greer and Wally Jones, Billy Cunningham and Bobby Jones, Maurice Cheeks, World B Free and Andrew Toney, and, unforgettable, Barkley, Moses Malone, and Allan Iverson. Still, I’m sitting on my couch today rooting for the Knicks. My loyal sidekick is a nice bottle of red. Go Knicks!
Some protesters embrace the slogan “Free Palestine from the River to the Sea.” Others envision a binational state, grounded in the equality of both peoples. Still others advocate a two state solution. Netanyahu and his extremist coalition partners, in contrast, with the use of force, destruction, expropriation and plunder, are bloodily embedding a single unitary Jewish apartheid state from the River Jordan to the Mediterranean Sea. In other words while the protesters advocate one or another solution to the current crisis, Netanyahu and his criminal coalition are establishing, via bloody facts on the ground, their vision of an unequal, racist, land grabbing, anti-democratic state in a land long occupied by two peoples.
The MAGA movement and its Republican representatives in Congress are attempting – working overtime in fact – and in plain sight to weaponize antisemitism to discredit opposition to Israel’s occupation and policy of genocide in Gaza as well as to divide the anti-MAGA movement ahead of the elections. That should be resisted. So should the spike in incidents and expressions of antisemitism that date back, at least, to Trump’s election in 2016.
