Our response to students protesting in real time against what we see as genocide speaks volumes about who we are.
“Fat,” “ugly” and “bitch” are just some of the epithets hurled at female anti-war demonstrators by “counter-protesters.” This is the name the media has given to pro-Israel demonstrators, angry mobs, and wandering boys. They also jeer and do the monkey dance. Counter-protesters regularly shout that they hope female protesters expressing support for the Palestinians in Gaza will be raped. Critics despise anti-war protesters as spoiled, stupid, ahistorical and misguided.
Women professors such as Anneliese Orech, former chair of Dartmouth College's Jewish Studies Department, and Noel McAfee, chair of Emory University's philosophy department, and Caroline Fallin, professor of economics, are leading the charge for pro-Palestinian students. An attempt to intervene in the male officer's “duty” to violently clear the encampment was ultimately unsuccessful. I encountered humiliation and brutality. “Get on the ground,” an enraged male police officer breathlessly yelled at Florin. When she was not immediately placed at his feet, her officers forced her there and smashed her head against the concrete. The jeers of the excited compatriots attacking the UCLA camp summed up the words, “Old ladies don't stand a chance.”
This is more than just good old sexism in the heat of the moment. Female anti-war demonstrators broke the unwritten rules of being a woman in the United States. They're not looking for men or acting like men. Antifa tactics, which are hyper-masculine, are minimal, if not non-existent. The peaceful camp, which is even “culturally feminist,” features meditation, lectures, singing and dancing, and yoga.
These performances are not for men. Schoolgirls are using social media to send out political messages, wearing masks and keffiyehs, and using makeup-free, Kardashian-filtered looks to garner likes. There is. Why do women choose the former over the latter? Megyn Kelly has the answer. They are “homely,” she declared, adding that “attractive” women would not protest.
One viral video shows Los Angeles police officers ripping off the head covering of a handcuffed young Asian woman to face the glare of news cameras after entering the UCLA encampment at night. It is reminiscent of the public stripping of heretical women. In the dark ages. The grotesque display of arrests by the Los Angeles Police Department is nothing compared to the New York Police Department's propaganda video after it stormed Columbia University's Hamilton Hall in military style and arrested several students.
These women aren't there to please the media either. They are wary of mainstream reporters portraying them as pro-Hamas terrorists. They know to avoid opportunists seeking viral soundbites to prove that protesters are stupid and stupid or deadly serious and dangerous. They are keeping tight-lipped and letting their presence and the mass of posters do the talking.
One social media “influencer” solicited clicks by “checking out” UCLA's camp. She strode in, her blonde hair flowing behind her, and she said, “I just want to talk to them.” After she was introduced to media personnel saying, “She doesn't want to talk to people who try to push us away,” she returned to the group of women and still demanded an impromptu interrogation. As they stared at her in silence, she called them “intimidating” and began crying. The archetype of the crying, frightened woman has a long history in this country, and anti-protest propaganda frequently features young women who feel “dangerous” and frightened.
Illustrating the utter discomfort with female demonstrators' unwillingness to play a crowd-pleasing role is Wall Street Journal reporter Peggy Noonan's hit article on Colombian demonstrators. . At best, she says, these children are ignorant. “I'm not good at critical thinking, I'm good at feeling.” When have women ever heard that? But Noonan believes something more sinister is going on, as evidenced by the way her protesters hide her face and refuse to speak to her despite the risks she poses. She claims there is. “Friends, come say hello and tell us what you think,” Noonan asked the women's group. Only the “beautiful girl” made eye contact and laughed at Noonan's joke, but her stern “friends gave her looks and she followed suit.”
Counter-protesters have accused the female demonstrators of siding with Palestinians, arguing that Palestinian culture does not allow women to engage in activities such as protests. ing. The debate culminated with a celebrity calling LGBTQ protesters “idiots”, saying Hamas cuts off their heads and plays with their heads “like soccer balls.” These features of Gazan society are Islamophobic and exaggerated in their sexism, but in any case calling for an end to the massacre of civilians does not mean that a person is undermining the social customs of its population. I'm not a supporter of that. There is certainly some noble hubris in bringing up the argument that Hamas disallows women's voices in order to silence female protesters.
Our response to students protesting in real time against what we see as genocide has been remarkable. From celebrating militarized and degrading policing to condoning extreme misogyny as long as it's directed at the right women, this moment speaks volumes about who we are. I'm talking.
The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect the editorial stance of Al Jazeera.
