All Episodes
Previous Next
April 26, 2024 - System Update - Glenn Greenwald
01:06:47
Campus Crackdown on Protests. PLUS: Interview with Columbia Student Protesters

TIMESTAMPS: Intro (0:00) Nationwide Campus Crackdown (6:50) Interview with Columbia Student Protestors (45:04) Outro (1:04:59) - - - Watch full episodes on Rumble, streamed LIVE 7pm ET. Become part of our Locals community - - -  Follow Glenn: Twitter Instagram Follow System Update:  Twitter Instagram TikTok Facebook LinkedIn Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Good evening, it's Thursday, April 25th.
Welcome to a new episode of System Update, our live nightly show that airs every Monday through Friday at 7 p.m.
Eastern, exclusively here on Rumble, the free speech alternative to YouTube.
As many of you undoubtedly noticed, we have not had a new show since last Thursday, a full week.
That is because last week I contracted a lovely and chic and glamorous mosquito-borne virus called dengue that is really quite debilitating.
Only yesterday, Did I begin feeling vaguely human again?
It's been killing me not to be able to report on and analyze the numerous significant events over the last week, so I am thrilled to be back, even if not yet fully 100%, in order to delve into as much of it as we can, beginning with Tonight, the last seven months in the United States, from October 7th until now, ranks among the greatest and most successful periods for the pro-censorship movement of any era in the United States in years.
Between the bipartisan ban or forced sale of TikTok, a topic we will cover, Another night in the massive nationwide and long-planned crackdown on campus political speech and protest in the name of protecting Israel, it is almost impossible to overstate how sustained and damaging this coordinated attack on core free speech rights has become.
Supporters of Israel decided years ago that they must focus on American college campuses, one of the few prominent sectors of American life where Israel criticism and pro-Palestinian activism have been permitted to thrive.
It also, by the way, thrives on TikTok, which is, by all accounts, a major reason that this ban, which has been lingering in Washington for years, suddenly picked up so much bipartisan support and has now been signed into law by President Biden.
The reason that this country's most fanatical Israel supporters, the Ben Shapiros and Barry Weisses of the world, have been so obsessed for years with college students and college campuses is not because they are impassioned and genuine free speech activists.
That's just the branding and any lingering doubt about that should have been permanently dispelled since October 7th.
Instead, their obsessive focus on colleges is because the pro-Israel movement has understood that the greatest threat to pro-Israel consensus in the United States Eminates from college campuses.
In particular, their grave fear that the call to boycott and divest from Israel or to sanction it will have the same type of success as enjoyed by the movement of the 1980s on which it was based.
Activism to force divestment from South Africa as a means of weakening that apartheid regime.
The desire to gain control of the range of permissible speech in American academia, and particularly the effort to ban Israel criticisms as anti-Semitic racism, has long been brewing.
October 7th was merely the much-awaited accelerant.
As a result, one now sees Israel supporters of all types—neocons, Republicans, conservatives, pro-Israel Democrats—foaming at the mouth to weaponize racism accusations and police powers to silence Israel's critics.
All of the most tawdry neocon tactics are on full display, including the equating of war critics with being, quote, pro-Hamas, and claiming that all of this has been fused with the embrace by much of the pro-Israel right of all the classic leperable theories of censorship over the last decade, namely claiming that protests against Israel's wars have veered into racist hate speech.
That words and slogans are themselves violence, and that they make Jewish students feel unsafe and thus must be forcibly silenced and punished.
Never mind that Jewish students themselves compose a non-trivial, often significant segment of these pro-Palestinian protests on virtually every major American campus where they are found.
At bottom, this is not a complex question.
If the First Amendment's free speech guarantees anything, it protects the right to protest and denounce the American government's decision to finance a foreign country's military and then arm and finance its highly destructive war.
And it is precisely that right that is now under sustained and serious assault.
Then, there has been much that has been said about the protests taking place at campuses all across the country, particularly this week at Columbia University in New York.
Tonight, we will speak to two of the students who have been actively participating in and helping to organize these protests.
John Ben-Menachem, a Jewish PhD student, and an undergraduate student, Mohamed Hamaida, both of whom have been among the early leaders and organizers of the protests.
Before we get to all that, a few quick programming notes.
First of all, we are encouraging our viewers to download the Rumble app.
It works both on your smart TV and telephone, and if you do so, you can activate notifications, which we hope you will, because if you do, it means that the minute any of those shows that you follow begin broadcasting live on the platform, you'll be immediately notified by text, email, however you wish.
You can simply click on that link and begin immediately watching the shows when they begin broadcasting live.
It really helps the live viewing audience of each show.
and of Rumble itself.
As another reminder, a system update is also available in podcast form.
You can listen to every episode 12 hours after the first broadcast live here on Rumble on Spotify, Apple, and all other major podcasting platforms.
If you rate, review, and follow the program on those platforms, it really helps spread the visibility of the show.
Finally, every Tuesday and Thursday night, once we're done with our live show here on Locals, we will, rather on Rumble, we will move to Locals, which is part of the Rumble platform, where we will have our live interactive after show to take your questions and comment on your feedback and critique, hear your suggestions for future shows.
That after show is available only for members of our Locals community, and if you wanna join, which gives you access not only to those after shows, but also to the multiple interactive features that we have there.
It's the place we first publish our written original journalism, we publish daily transcripts of every program we broadcast here, we publish there, and it's the community on which we most rely to support the independent journalism.
that we're trying to do here every night.
Simply click the join button right below the video player on the Rumble page and it will take you directly to that community.
As a note, simply in the spirit of not trying to rush myself in coming back, we will not have our local show this evening, but next week we certainly intend to have the full range of regularly scheduled after shows for you.
For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now.
Our audience on this program, just like my audience, my journalism, generally has always been quite diverse.
Lots of people have very different views on very specific issues.
But there are unifying values, unifying causes around which most of my readership and audience have always been able to galvanize.
And obviously one of them is the utmost urgency of protecting free speech in the United States, the ability for individuals to be able to express whatever political views they have without being punished by the state, without being forcibly silenced, without being sanctioned in any way, without having without being sanctioned in any way, without having state officials or police forces intervene to try and silence them.
And we have covered over the last several years all kinds of attacks on the free speech rights of American citizens, including, I think, most seriously, things like the Biden administration's systemic effort to pressure big tech to remove dissent by threatening and coercing big tech companies, things like the Biden administration's systemic effort to pressure big tech to remove dissent by threatening and coercing big tech companies, a policy that has been declared twice now by two separate We'll see what the Supreme Court does when it rules shortly.
But of all of those efforts over the last, say, decade, I don't think there has been anything graver, more dangerous, or more effective in assaulting free speech rights than the very systematic and nationwide attempt since October 7th to silence and suppress
Criticism of Israel, activism against the Israeli war in Gaza, criticism in the United States for funding and financing and arming that war, and support for the Palestinian cause in general.
This has long been one of the most frequent causes of censorship on American college campuses.
Pro-Palestinian activists and Israel critics have long been the people who suffer the most at the hands of the censorship regime, whether it be professors who are fired or denied tenure, Or student groups that end up getting banned, or whose recognition is rejected from the very beginning, or students who end up suspended because of the views that they've expressed.
But even all of that pales in comparison.
To what we've been seeing over the last several weeks as the war in Gaza, the Israeli war in Gaza, becomes more and more horrific, as the United States government's role in it becomes more and more extensive.
We just passed a new bill that will send billions and billions more to fuel the Israeli war.
The Biden administration again twice isolated the United States from the rest of the world in order to shield Israel diplomatically at the UN.
And the United States has made very clear that the Israeli war is an American war.
And if there's anything more guaranteed by the First Amendment free speech right than being able to protest, robustly protest, not meekly protest, but robustly protest, Your own government's war policies, then I can't think of anything that it is.
If you don't have the right to gather with like-minded citizens and engage in protests every time your country, your government decides that it wants to get involved in a new foreign war, Then the First Amendment and free speech really is utterly illusory.
I mean, it doesn't include that right.
It doesn't really include much at all.
And yet there is a clear attempt, as the protest movements have grown specifically on American college campuses, to increasingly use what had long been standard left liberal theories of censorship to justify censorship on American campuses.
Insisting that the language of the protesters have gone from legitimate political speech and veered into racist hate speech that according to many on the right many pro-israel supporters on the right and in the center and in the neocon movement and parts of the democratic party according to them that hate speech that racist hate speech is not protected speech
We have been hearing classic safetyism theories that Jewish students, by having to hear pro-Palestinian chants, don't feel safe on American college campuses and they have the right to feel safe by not being subjected to political activism that makes them uncomfortable.
We have heard all kinds of wildly exaggerated And even outright fabricated attempts to classify this protest movement as something deeply anti-Semitic, a protest against Jews, something that has become systemically violent, even though no Jewish students since October 7th, or virtually none, have been injured, let alone killed, as a result of any of these protests.
These are not violent protests.
These are robust and energetic protests, as protests tend to be.
And while occasionally people engage in violence, as is true of any political movement, to say that the protests themselves are inherently violent and therefore can be banned or should be banned based on that is an absolute fabrication.
And yet all of those theories are being invoked to increasingly place limits on the right of college students in the United States, to express political criticism of Israel and to protest and organize on the basis of that.
Here, according to the Associated Press from today, quote, "A look at the Gaza war protests that have emerged on U.S. college campuses." Quote, "Student protests over the Israel-Hamas war," you'll notice these are not protests against American Jews, they are protests over the Israeli-Hamas war, "have popped up on an increasing number of college campuses following last week's arrest of more than 100 demonstrators at Columbia University." The
The students are calling for universities to separate themselves from any companies that are advancing Israel's military efforts in Gaza, and in some cases from Israel itself.
You're allowed to be an American citizen and act and argue for the separation or divestment from companies supporting Israel's war machine or even for the United States to no longer support Israel itself.
You don't have to agree with that view, but it's so clearly within the realm of protected political speech that it's barely merit to argument.
The article goes on, quote, Dozens of police officers and state troopers, including some on horseback and holding batons, forcibly arrested more than two dozen student protesters and a local news photographer at the University of Texas in Austin on Wednesday after university officials and the governor called authorities.
Fifty-seven people were jailed and charged with criminal trespass Wednesday following the protest, according to a spokeswoman for the Travis County Sheriff's Office.
The Los Angeles Police Department said more than 90 people arrested Wednesday night during a protest at the University of Southern California for alleged trespassing.
There is nothing remotely illegal about any of the behavior in which these students are engaging, certainly except in the most isolated cases, and yet There's the kind of police force being deployed that if it were being deployed anywhere else in order to quell political protests, we would instantly condemn as tyrannical.
And that the American right would be screaming about if done to students gathering for a conservative cause.
Now one of the facts that gives the immediate eye to the idea that these are anti-Jewish or anti-Semitic protests, that they're aimed at scaring or intimidating or harassing or beating or attacking Jewish students, Just an absolute lie that has been continuously repeated over and over is the presence of large numbers of Jewish students who have long been very active in the pro-Palestinian cause.
There are entire student groups like the Jewish Voices for Peace that are composed of Jewish students who, or American Jews, who are critical of Israel's mistreatment of the Palestinians in support of the pro-Palestinian cause.
That is just a reality that you can't wish away, and it's not a tiny number of trivial, a trivial number of people.
I'm not suggesting that they're representative of the majority of Jews, but they represent a very non-trivial percentage
The presence of Jewish students in the middle of these protests helping to organize it locking arms side by side with their fellow protesters obviously gives the lie to the claim that these are hate marches aimed at Jewish students since Jewish students are a central part of these protests on almost every campus.
The focus of the most recent Uproar and moral panic over free speech rights has focused on Columbia University, which we're told is a protest movement that is one of the most vicious and violent and anti-Semitic in the country.
They just dragged the president of Columbia University before Congress again to pressure her to do more to stifle free speech and free discourse in one of our most prestigious universities in Columbia.
And yet here's part of what happened At one of the biggest protests at the encampment in the middle of Columbia University's campus just last week.
It was a Shabbat dinner where Jewish protesters who are part of this organization, part of this protest movement, decided to hold a Shabbat dinner where they sang Jewish prayers and everybody gathered around them and joined them in the expression of their Jewish faith.
A very odd thing to happen in the middle of what we're being told is essentially a pogrom, a program, some sort of reenactment of 1938 Nazi Germany.
Take a look at the intense Jew-hating animus and vitriol that has been shaping and driving this movement.
Amen.
So just for people listening to the show on
podcast, but also for those of you who are looking at this video, these are a wide range of students, a very diverse group of students, but led by Jewish students who have been participating but led by Jewish students who have been participating in these protests from the start, who are singing Jewish prayer songs, who prepared a traditional Jewish Shabbat dinner,
and who are not only teaching but joining in with their fellow protesters in celebration of and who are not only teaching but joining in with their fellow protesters in celebration of their Jewish Now, if this were a protest movement that was driven by hatred for Jewish people in an attempt to intimidate and attack and beat and kill and commit genocide against American Jews, this is,
to put it mildly, not the kind of scene that you to put it mildly, not the kind of scene that you would expect to find right smack down in the middle of Let's just look a little more at this.
All right, you get the idea.
And this is not some cherry-pick scene This was not some contrived moment for the cameras.
This is the kind of thing that has been shaping and driving these protests from the start.
It is a very multiracial and diverse group of people who have in common one thing and one thing only.
The desire to protest against and to denounce and hopefully to stop The US funded war that is being carried out by Israel in Gaza that has killed 33,000 people at least that has destroyed much of civilian life and civilian infrastructure in Gaza that has caused famine among huge numbers of women and children.
And to say that people have the constitutional right to protest that in not just 10, 15, 30 minute harmless protests, but in sustained protest movement of the kind that we have seen at college campuses for decades in the United States as a form of traditional student protest against our government and its war policies, to say that is to state the obvious.
It permits no disagreement.
There's no question that this kind of expression is squarely within The realm of First Amendment free speech clause that so many people who support the crackdown on this have been pretending for the last seven or eight years to believe in so passionately.
Speaking of somebody who has been pretending to believe passionately in civil liberties and free speech, but who has been leading the crackdown against many of these students is Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson.
You may remember that when he was first elevated to the position of House Speaker, he ascended up the tribune to deliver his first address to the House that he was about to lead, where he gave a traditional speech to define the priorities of his speakership.
And he said the first thing we're going to do under my speakership is not help Americans in their quest for better job conditions or to fight inflation or to secure the border or to combat alcoholism and addiction and fentanyl in their communities.
It was none of that.
He said the very first bill we're going to enact is one that is overdue to help our good friend Israel.
That was the priority that he assigned to himself and his speakership upon being elected.
Now he appeared on CNN with Erin Burnett last night and she, to her credit, asked some reasonably difficult questions.
This is the kind of thing that would have been unheard of.
In fact, she referenced an article published this week by one of the two Columbia students who we will interview in just a bit and we'll show you that article.
in gaza becomes more manifest and here is one of the questions she asked him in fact she referenced an article published this week by one of the two columbia students who we will interview in just a bit and we'll show you that article but here is what she asked him it's been horrific too and And there's a student here, a PhD student at Columbia.
I wanted to quote him.
He is Jewish.
He has written a testimonial about what's going on here right now, his experience on campus.
And he says, I'll read it to you, the most pressing threats to our safety as Jewish students do not come from tents on campus.
We should be focusing on the material reality of war, the munitions our government is sending to Israel, which killed Palestinians by the thousands, and the Americans participating in the violence.
Do you think that protesting the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza, protesting the tens of thousands of innocent people who have died there, is anti-semitic in and of itself?
All right, now the reason she asked him that perfectly reasonable question is because Mike Johnson has been running around like the obedient puppet that he has so quickly become and went to Colombia and denounced the protesters there
Even though many of them are Jewish and he is not, as pro-Hamas protesters, he has described them as being engaged in hate speech, as being racist, as being anti-Semitic.
And yet, as Erin Burnett notes, the cause of these protests and these protesters is to denounce the war, the Israeli war in Gaza.
And so she wanted to know from him, do you think that protesting Israel's war in Gaza is in and of itself an anti-Semitic act?
Are people who are opposed to this war, in your view, racist?
And even though he's been running around with security, calling all these students and everybody who sees things differently, as he does, as being a racist, people who don't deserve free speech rights, he's too much of a coward to answer this direct question.
Listen to him babble, rather than simply address what she asked him.
I think there's always a place for debate in the free exchange of ideas, but let's not equivocate on what's happening in Hamas, with Hamas and in Gaza.
This is a battle, as Netanyahu said, Prime Minister Netanyahu said, between good versus evil, light versus darkness, civilization versus barbarism.
This isn't a close call.
We have terrorists who preyed upon and attacked viciously and killed many innocent Israelis.
And the idea that they would be out here in support of that.
Hamas is using civilians as shields for themselves.
They put their operations.
So it just goes on like that, invoking every pro-Israel cliche, absolving Israel of every iota of guilt for what it's been doing in Gaza, spouting the human shield line.
He did everything except address the questions he asked, which is you've been defaming these students and calling them to be forcibly silenced by accusing them of anti-Semitism, even though their cause, as they describe it and have been making clear for many weeks, months, is... as they describe it and have been making clear for Is nothing more than protesting the Israeli indiscriminate use of violence against civilians in Gaza.
Is that anti-semitic?
Of course it's not, which is why he was too much of a coward to answer it.
But you can't answer that question because the only way you can justify the censorship of this speech and of these protests is if you claim that they veered into racist hate speech.
Even then, even if that were true, Hate speech is part of the First Amendment's guarantee of free speech.
This is something people have been pointing out to American liberals who want censorship based on hate speech, with things that we've been explaining to them for more than a decade.
But now what you're hearing from the Mike Johnsons of the world is, oh, hate speech can't be tolerated.
It needs to be censored.
Words are violence.
There's no incidence of Jewish students being physically attacked and brutalized and beaten and killed by any of these protests over the last seven months.
There is now constantly the claim that was being made, and I pointed this out before it was being made many months ago too, that it's somehow commonplace on campus for people to walk around chanting, kill the Jews, kill all Jews.
It was a complete lie from the start.
There's not a single example.
Of where protesters are chanting, kill the Jews, or anything remotely close to it.
And so Mike Johnson, in order to justify the censorship that he wants, and that so many of his fellow Republicans want, and Democrats, have to simply lie in order to justify why this speech can't be permitted.
Now speaking of liars who are massive censorship advocates, Texas Governor Greg Abbott, Who we have documented many times before is one of the most egregious and aggressive censors when it comes to trying to silence Israel critics in the United States.
He was someone who sponsored one of those bills that made it a prerequisite to having a contract with Texas to certify that you vow never to support a boycott of Israel.
Otherwise, you will lose your job as a contractor in Texas.
You're free to boycott any other country in the world.
You're even free to boycott other American states.
You can boycott North Carolina or Indiana if you don't like their trans bill.
You can boycott New York if you don't like their abortion bill.
You're free to boycott anybody, just not Israel.
And multiple red states adopted a direct attack on free speech of that kind, only for it to be ruled repeatedly unconstitutional by the federal courts.
And now Greg Abbott is back.
And before we get to what Greg Abbott is doing, let's look at Senator Tom Cotton.
He went on Fox News, which has been a celebratory frenzy for months about the virtues of campus censorship in order to protect Israel.
And here's what he said about the students who are walking out in protest.
You see them peacefully assembled there.
This is what Tom Cotton, self-proclaimed free speech champion, had to say.
If Eric Adams won't send the NYPD to protect these Jewish students, if Kathy Hochul won't send the National Guard, Joe Biden has a duty to protect these Jewish students from what is a nascent pogrom on these campuses.
These are scenes like you've seen out of the 1930s in Germany.
They should never be witnessed or tolerated here in America in 2024.
To equate what is going on in American campuses Where people of every different background, including Jewish students, are linking arms to protest an American-backed war, to compare that to the pogroms of Nazi Germany and to the Holocaust, and is so sick and deeply offensive.
But that shows you the desperation, the masters who they serve, That they are willing to say anything and do anything in order to abridge the free speech rights of Americans.
Notice, they don't care at all if Americans say the most vicious things about the United States government and its leaders.
You can say Joe Biden is a corrupt communist and his brain is melting.
And the United States government is just an oligarchy that is in bed with the CCP.
You can say whatever you want about American leaders, about the United States government, and nobody's going to care.
What you cannot do, unless you want to, if you don't want to be targeted with censorship demands by the Tom Cotton's and Greg Abbott's and Mike Johnson's of the world, is you can't criticize Israel, the foreign country of Israel and its leaders and its government.
Otherwise they'll immediately start screaming racist, like they've been doing.
Demanding that the administrators, the school administrators, and the deans come in and stop these students.
And failing that, they will call the police on them.
Now, here is Greg Abbott.
There was a protest at the University of Texas, Austin, which is a public school.
Where it's even more difficult to restrict the range of free speech that can be tolerated.
And this is what Governor Abbott said after the police were called and the National Guard was deployed against these peacefully organized protesters.
He said the following, quote, arrests are being made right now and will continue until the crowd disperses.
These protesters belong in jail.
Anti-Semitism will not be tolerated in Texas, period.
Students joining in hate-filled anti-Semitic protests at any public college or university in Texas should be expelled.
Isn't this what the Republican Party and the American Right have been viciously mocking for the last decade?
The idea that if you express a view about trans people or black people or Muslims or immigrants, Or women on college campuses that some functionary or official somewhere deems to be hateful, sufficiently hateful, or likely to incite violence against that group, that you should be punished and arrested?
This is exactly what has been denounced and mocked, this idea.
He's saying that what these protesters are guilty of is anti-Semitism, expressing hateful views.
That is protected political speech in the United States.
This is such an obvious assault on First Amendment free speech rights every bit as much as that law that I referenced earlier that he championed for so long until a court struck it down.
Here, by the way, on June 9th, 2019, is the same Governor Abbott who frequently visits Israel.
He worships Israel for his own religious and cultural reasons.
And here is what he said about that law that he championed.
Some colleges are banning free speech on college campuses.
Well, no more.
Because I'm about to sign a law that protects free speech on college campuses in Texas.
Look at this free speech champion.
He's signing a free speech law.
Shouldn't have to do it.
First Amendment guarantees it.
Now, it's law in Texas.
Hypocrisy this nauseating and glaring and sickening is rarely seen.
He has been pitching himself as a free speech champion.
He said, I'm going to sign in my office right now a law that bars censorship on American college campuses.
And then he turned around this week and said, people who protest against the Israeli war in Gaza and who are guilty of hate speech should be arrested.
And he called the National Guard on them.
Now, the University of Texas itself, pursuant to this free speech movement in Texas, at least this very selective free speech movement, announced a policy in October of 2023 where they made very clear that because they are a public school, the public has every right to come onto their campus and to protest and to march, not just students, but
Everyone from the outside as well because it's public space.
It's a publicly financed academic institution.
The University of Texas is not a private school like Columbia or Harvard.
Here is what the University of Texas announced as part of what it called quote free speech week.
Why can members of the public come to campus at any time and engage in demonstrations and speeches?
So state law in Texas actually allows members of the public, just like our university community, to come onto campus and use our common outdoor areas for speech activity.
I think that surprises a lot of students.
They show up here and they think, who is this random stranger setting up a table talking about a thing I find upsetting?
But it's protected by state law and members of the public, just like university community, can use our common outdoor areas.
Now, it isn't a free-for-all.
So when you say they can come at any time, there's some nuance there.
It's subject to our university rules that are permitted under the law.
So we can put in place time, place, and manner restrictions that are really all about making sure those are content neutral.
So we can't have rules that say, well, you can't come to campus and talk about this or that subject or express this or that view.
But we can have rules about where you can set up tables, for example.
I mean, this was just six months ago, but officials of the University of Texas, as part of Greg Abbott's steadfast, stalwart, principled, ruggedly individualistic defense of constitutional freedoms, raised the banner of free speech and said, everybody is welcome at the University raised the banner of free speech and said, everybody is welcome at the University of Texas, student and citizen alike, in order to protest and express That's the nature of the United States.
But like so many Republicans, so many conservatives, He has a gigantic Israel exception to every professed view that he has.
Now I've been reporting on the amazing enactment of these laws that condition employment with states on what basically is a loyalty oath to Israel for years.
Back in 2018, I wrote this article.
It was an extraordinary story where a woman who had worked for the Austin, Texas school district for years As a celebrated speech pathologist, she had an expertise in working with young students who had speech deficiencies and speech impediments, especially ones whose families come from certain countries.
And she would be contracted every year by the school district to work with those students.
And she had amazing success, nothing but rave reviews.
And every year she got a new contract and she signed it.
Until 2018 when, pursuant to Texas law, her contract had an addendum that it never previously had that she was required to sign which contained a vow that she would never support and does not support a boycott of Israel.
The problem for her is that she does support a boycott of Israel.
Her household chooses not to purchase.
Goods from Israel as a way of supporting the effort to end the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, which is perfectly within her rights as an American citizen to do.
And as a result, she lost her job.
And this was a bill that was enacted in multiple red states to ban criticism of a foreign country by American citizens in the United States to the point where they would lose their job if they refused.
And here is Greg Abbott, the year before in 2017, when he first signed this flagrantly unconstitutional law into effect.
And here's what he said as he stood, as he sat rather, with a bunch of Republican sponsors of this Israel protecting free speech abridgment behind him.
"Between Israel, between the United States, as well as the state of Texas.
Israel is one of Texas's largest trading partners.
And then of course there is the issue about the essential international ally that Israel plays for both the United States and the state of Texas.
As a result, any anti-Israel policy is an anti-Texas policy." An anti-Israel policy is an anti-Texan policy, pronounced the Republican governor and free speech champion.
You can criticize any other country you want.
You can attack your own fellow citizens and their states and boycott them all you want.
But somehow to be a good Texan, one eligible for jobs in Texas, that requires full-scale support for Israel and its foreign government.
This is the kind of insane extremism that has permeated Republican politics for a long time.
The Democrats are equally enthralled to Israel for different reasons.
Obviously, The very powerful pro-Israel lobby is a major part for each.
And there are a lot of Democrats who have all kinds of loyalties to Israel for their own religious and cultural reasons, but a big reason why it's so predominant in the Republican Party is because of Greg Abbott.
People like him have a very strong religious belief that not just Israel, but the Jewish people are chosen by God, and they speak of this openly.
And they have every right to that religious view.
What they don't have is the right to impose that view on others through this series of censorship laws designed to abridge the free speech rights of Americans in the name of shielding from criticism this foreign country that they worship.
As I said at the top, the attempt to target college campuses to ban any Israel criticism or pro-Palestinian activism did not just happen since October 7th.
It's a long time in the making.
Here from the Jewish Forward in October of 2017, so seven years ago, you see the headline, Shadowy Blacklist of Student Activists Wins Endorsement of Mainstream Pro-Israel Group.
For more than two years, a shadowy website called Canary Mission has posted political dossiers on students active in pro-Palestinian groups saying it hopes to keep them from finding work after college.
In an annual report, the Israel On Campus Coalition cited Canary Mission as an effective model for deterring support for the boycott, divestment, and sanctions movement, hailing the website for causing students to drop their support for pro-Palestinian groups out of fear of, quote, repercussions.
American students and Americans on college campuses are not supposed to refrain from expressing their political views or engaging in political activism for fear of repercussions.
But the pro-Israel activist lobby in the United States has long recognized that one of the very few places where anti-Israel or pro-Palestinian activism is permitted and where it thrives is on college campuses.
And they decided that a long-term project, a well-coordinated, highly funded project, Was to begin to put a stranglehold on the ability of American academic institutions to tolerate Israel criticism and pro-Palestinian speech and activism on American political campuses has been going on for a long time.
We have gone over many examples of professors who have been fired for criticizing Israel, of student groups that have been closed or refused recognition in the first place.
The free speech group FIRE has spent a decade litigating on behalf of Palestinian scholars and pro-Palestinian students, many of whom are Jewish, many of whom are not, because of these relentless attacks on free speech.
But since October 7th, it has gone to a much different level.
And the issue here is not Israel.
It's not the war in Gaza, at least insofar as these issues are concerned.
The issue is what are the fundamental free speech rights of American citizens going to be?
And how much are we going to accept their attack and assault and abridgment in the name of this foreign country?
One of the things that Americans learned as a result of the COVID pandemic is how vulnerable the American supply chain is to immediate and unexpected disruptions.
So much of our industrial base has been moved offshore.
If you have a product that you consume or a medication that is crucial to your health, it's almost certainly the case that it has to go through many countries.
Before it can reach the United States for sale, it depends upon a supply chain that is now very fragmented and international and vulnerable and subject to disruption by all sorts of unanticipated events.
even an epidemic like COVID, made medications and all kinds of other products in questionable supply, very much in doubt in the United States.
As a result, the wellness company, which has been a long-term sponsor of our show, has a product that is designed to give your family some sort of security and peace of mind in the event, and in the not very unlikely event, that there could be major disruptions to the international supply chain.
Namely, they provide to you an emergency kit of core life-saving medications that you might need Things like ivermectin and amoxicillin and long-time vital life-saving illnesses for things like the flu and COVID-19 and other respiratory illnesses.
There are things like Z-Pak as well and some of these medications require a prescription and so they help you with an online examination that can enable you to get a prescription and then you're able to give your family the peace of mind by purchasing a kit of all the medications that you would need for your children, for yourself, for your parents, for your family and friends in the event that they had some sort of treatable disease and yet the supply chain was disrupted.
It just gives you the kind of peace of mind that people seek when they store other kinds of goods in the event of an emergency and this will give you peace of mind with regard to medications.
You can go to www.twc.health.glen And if you use the code Glenn, you will get 10% off your first purchase as well as free shipping.
10% off in free shipping if you use the code GLEN at www.twc.health.
We are very delighted to be joined tonight by two Columbia students who have been very active in helping organize the campus protest against Israel's war in Gaza.
First is John Ben-Menachem, a student in the PhD program of Sociology.
He is with the group CUAD, Columbia University Apartheid Divest, which describes itself as, quote, a coalition of student organizations that see Palestine as the vanguard for our collective liberation.
On Tuesday, he published a much-discussed article in Zotero News that was headlined, quote, I am a Jewish student at Columbia.
Don't believe what you're being told about campus anti-Semitism.
We are also joined by Mohamed Hameda, who is a student in the undergraduate school who has been working as one of the principal media organizers and spokespeople for the student protesters.
Gentlemen, it's great to see both of you.
Thanks so much for taking the time to talk to us.
Thanks for having us.
Absolutely.
Thanks for having us.
Yeah, sure.
So as you guys know, there has been a lot said about campus protesters in general when it comes to the Israeli war in Gaza, but your campus in particular has received the bulk of the attention over the last couple of weeks and all sorts of motivations have been attributed to the protesters generally, to but your campus in particular has received the bulk of the attention over the All sorts of motivations have been attributed to the protesters, generally to each of you individually.
So just let me ask you to speak for yourself in just your own words.
What are your motives for having decided to participate in these protests?
And what are your motives for continuing to do so?
Let's go ahead and start with you, Mohamed.
Yeah, so I think since October, all of us on this campus, students, faculty, staff, have been seeing Israel's genocide in Gaza.
We've been seeing almost 40,000 Palestinians, innocent people, women and children, getting murdered in the thousands, brutally massacred.
We don't want our tuition dollars going towards companies that fund and invest in Israeli genocide.
And so I think we've all come together for months now to protest.
We've all come together to speak to the administration, but they won't listen to us.
And I think the encampment that's going on right now is the culmination of months of the administration completely ignoring the student body and the university community at large.
And John, what about your motives?
Yeah, just to echo what he's just said, you know, I think especially after our chapter of students for justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace were targeted unfairly by the university last fall, there's been a huge mobilization on I think especially after our chapter of students for justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace were targeted unfairly So.
American protests, protests by American students against American-backed wars or US foreign policy have a very long and noble tradition in the United States.
This is not the first time we've had outbreaks of sustained protests.
We've had them in the 1960s against the Vietnam War we had it against the invasion of Iraq in the 1980s, a very lengthy and ultimately successful student-led movement against the apartheid regime of South Africa and demands that the universities divest from anything having to do with the South African regime.
Typically these protests are accompanied by formal demands often aimed at the government or the university administration.
So John, in the case of the protest movement at Columbia, do you have formal demands that you're insisting upon?
And if so, what are those?
Yeah, so the demands of the encampment right now are disclosure, divestment, and amnesty.
So to walk you through those a little bit, disclosure refers to the fact that all of, you know, Columbia's endowment, the financial investments that Columbia has are not fully transparent.
And then that relates to the divestment demand in the sense that, you know, the full extent to which Columbia's endowment is related to companies profiting from, you know, You know, Israeli apartheid is not clear, but we would like to sever all of those ties.
And amnesty refers to the disciplinary measures that were taken against at least 100 students.
Last week, students are still suspended and many were arrested as well.
And it also includes actions taken against faculty members who have spoken out in defense of Palestine or in support of Palestine over the last six months.
So Mohammed, assuming those are your understanding of these demands as well, does that mean that if those particular demands were met, the protest movement would dissipate and cease even if the war in Gaza and Biden's support for it were ongoing?
I think it's not a surprise at all that the protesters who are gathered here, the students, the faculty, all of us are concerned about the war.
We're calling for a ceasefire.
We're calling to an end to the occupation, an end to Israeli apartheid.
The demands of the encampment itself, as I understand it, is for our university specifically to divest from the war.
So we want our university to not put our tuition dollars towards genocide.
I think that's the immediate demand of the student movement.
As for calling for a ceasefire, obviously I think that's something that all of us are going to continue to So let me just ask you, one of the ways that there are a lot of people defending you is not just on the merits of the protest itself, we've certainly done that many times, but as you may have heard while you were waiting tonight, also on free speech grounds, that you have the absolute right to exercise your First Amendment rights by having your views be heard, organizing in defense of them.
I'm wondering though whether part of the formal position of the protest movement at the encampment, and maybe different protesters have different views on that, this is also to urge the administration to ban other students or outside voices from appearing on campus and speaking if they have a different view of the Israeli war in Gaza than you do?
Is that part of what you're seeking, is to have supporters of the Israeli war or the Israeli government banned from speaking?
Go ahead and answer that, John.
You can answer that first.
I mean, no.
And I also would like to say I kind of dismayed by the way that this whole, you know, inspiring sequence of campus protests across the country have been turned into a sort of like free speech or like campus intellectual freedom discussion when really like the attention should be on Palestine and on Gaza and on the violence that's happening there.
Well, let me ask you about that, Mohammed, Mohammed, because obviously part of what has happened is that the police forces of cities and states and college campuses have been increasingly deployed to come and break up these protests, to arrest the participants in them.
We've seen that on your campus with the NYPD, We've seen it just yesterday at the University of Texas.
Do you think it's important to Given the assault on your right to have these protests, in addition to the focus that you want to maintain on the war in Gaza, also to defend your constitutional right to have these protests without being shut down or silenced or arrested or disciplined by your school as a result of the views that you're expressing.
So I think it's a good question.
And I think to tackle that question, the most important thing that you should look at is why there's so much repression coming from universities, not just at Columbia, but across the country.
And I think it's related to Israel.
It's related to the specific subject matter that the protests are about.
We had apartheid protests in 1985 in Columbia.
There was a sit-in.
The repression wasn't nearly to the level that we're seeing now.
We had anti-war protests in 1968.
That involved the military-industrial complex.
And that was the worst repression that Colombia has seen in its history.
It's being repeated now.
And I think that has everything to do with the subject itself.
So ultimately, the repression is coming because this concerns Palestine, because we're calling for Palestinian liberation specifically.
And so you can't really separate or you can't divorce Palestinian liberation and calls for it from academic speech on campus.
They're not two separate issues.
The reason that we're prioritizing Gaza is because that's the center of all our demands.
The fact that there are academic speech issues involved and intellectual freedom issues involved Let me just stick with you for a second, Mohammed.
And I wish I didn't even have to ask these kind of questions because I wish we could spend the bulk of our time on the policies that you're protesting itself.
- Let me just stick with you for a second, Mohammed.
And I wish I didn't even have to ask these kind of questions because I wish we could spend the bulk of our time on the policies that you're protesting itself.
But as you know, these protests have become very controversial on a national political level.
The protest movement of which you're a part has been bombarded with all kinds of very serious accusations that just from the naked eye seem not just untrue, but not even really worthy of debate.
Nonetheless, there are all kinds of people, Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson and various Republican senators and all kinds of media figures who have claimed that one of the purposes of your protest movement or at least one of the animating
Sentiments behind it is animosity towards Jewish students in particular and a kind of accompanying desire to make them feel intimidated or threatened on campus.
Can you talk about that?
Sure, what I will say is this, I have never felt closer to my peers, to the rest of the Columbia community, Jewish, Christian, Muslim, Arab, otherwise, than I have now.
I think the encampment is a show of solidarity.
If reporters or politicians wanted to take a look at it, they can, they can see what's happening there.
We're singing cultural songs.
We're watching dance performances by different groups on campus.
We're having seminars, teach-ins.
We're having interfaith gatherings.
I mean, I'm Muslim.
We're praying all five prayers in the camp.
We had a Jummah prayer followed by a Shabbat service.
We had Seder for Passover.
So, really, we've had so many Jewish students in the camp.
Jewish students, several of them were the first to be arrested in the initial encampment on Thursday last week.
So I've never felt closer to the community than I have now and it's a call for liberation that united us all and I think it's incredibly shameful and regrettable that many politicians and many in the media have chosen to misrepresent it and portray it as something that it isn't.
So John, you wrote this article that I referenced in Zotero News, the headline of which is, I am a Jewish student at Columbia, don't believe what you're being told about campus anti-Semitism.
And you, I think, very compellingly made the case that what the media is saying, what pro-Zionist media figures and the like are saying, is basically just fabrications about what is taking place on the encampment.
Earlier today, the Student Senate of the Columbia Law School sent out an email where they were expressing what they called their grave dismay at various reports of what they view as evidence of anti-Semitism.
They said there have been chants such as, yes Hamas, we love you, we support your rockets too.
Somebody, and I saw the video, it seemed like it was one stray person on the street, who said go back to Poland.
They also listed stop killing children.
I'm not really sure why that's an anti-semitic phrase.
It seems sort of fundamental to any anti-war protest.
But anyway, you know, it seems like you could take any protest movement and demean it by focusing on one or two isolated cases that was done when the Iraq war protests were taking place.
There were hundreds of thousands of people protesting all around the world.
And they would find some communist sign at, you know, one of 10,000 signs and then focus on it and try and claim that it was a communist movement.
Have you heard things like this that have been said either by participants in the college protest or people on the street nearby?
And if so, what is the posture of the encampment towards statements like those?
I cannot emphasize strongly enough that the Encampment and the CUAD coalition more broadly are, you know, extremely against bigotry and hate.
There has been no antisemitism that I have witnessed or heard about coming from the Encampment or CUAD people.
You know, New York City is a big city and the fact that, you know, These protests are happening at Columbia has brought a lot of sort of fringe actors uptown.
And, you know, like yesterday, the founder of the Proud Boys was on campus.
Like, I saw him there.
I actually, as soon as I walked onto campus, I heard undergrads panicking that he was there.
We aren't sure how he got in.
Theoretically, campus is closed to anyone without a Columbia ID or without a New York City press pass that's been approved by Columbia.
So, but he was there at the same time as Speaker Johnson, which I found very concerning because, you know, Theoretically, these Republicans are parachuting in out of a concern for our safety, but, like, the Proud Boy founder was there at the same time.
And, you know, I really want to stress that Jewish students on campus have probably felt, you know, some type of discomfort at the pro-Palestine protests, but discomfort is quite different from safety concerns.
Yeah, the irony of course is that the American right has been mocking for a decade the idea that students have the right to feel comfortable and safe and free from ideas that make them uncomfortable and now suddenly there's this effort to deploy that exact rationale to demand that the police come and shut you down.
Let me ask you, one of the claims that has been made is that your encampment and the protesters who are part of them have made it impossible for other students to attend classes to the point that Columbia had to announce that school would be remote through the end of the semester.
Is there any basis at all for the claim that the encampment has in some way impeded professors or students from attending classes?
Mohamed, you can go ahead and take that one if you want.
Not at all.
Again, I think it's shameful that a lot of people misrepresent the encampment.
The Columbia administration's actions are entirely motivated by the Columbia administration itself.
They think that by turning classes virtual, that could make basically like reduce the foot traffic on campus.
They think that that makes it more The Columbia administration does a lot of things that make students feel unsafe.
The foremost, of course, being the threat of bringing NYPD or the National Guard on campus.
I think that might be the number one reason why any student might be afraid of going to classes on any random day, because what if they're walking near the encampment and suddenly a bunch of cops descend and arrest everybody in it, everybody near it?
So I think from what I've heard from my own friends, from what I've heard from people in the encampment, that's the number one threat to our safety and as for virtual classes, no.
The encampment is restricted to a lawn.
They're not stopping anyone whatsoever from going to class.
Professors are still holding classes in person and professors walk by the encampment, students walk by the encampment.
It's not disrupting campus life whatsoever.
The concern is just We want to gather in a place that makes the Columbia administration listen to our demands in a way that they haven't been for the last seven months or so.
John, I think one of the things that has been forgotten, because it's now six or seven months ago, is that immediately after October 7th, there was this consortium of billionaires who are highly supportive of Israel and have been for a long time.
people like Bill Ackman, a bunch of head fund managers who made a very public campaign that called on any student who is caught, quote unquote, supporting the Palestinian cause or opposing the Israeli word Gaza to be basically blacklisted and supporting the Palestinian cause or opposing the Israeli word Gaza to be basically blacklisted and never hired in a permanent way as I knew a lot of Columbia students when I went to law school.
I went to NYU and like a lot of schools like that.
Students go there with the intention of having career options.
People think about their careers.
You're in a PhD program, so I assume that's more around the corner for you than, say, the average grad student.
Have you yourself experienced or have you heard other people experiencing kinds of fear about what this political protesting and political activism might do to your future career prospects?
Yeah, I mean, I think, as you've been saying, over the past several decades, there has been a pretty concerted campaign to punish anyone who speaks out in defense of Palestine or criticizes Israel in any way.
So as a Jewish person, I mean, I've received a lot of hate mail this week for saying anything at all in public.
And if you're curious as to why more Jewish students won't put their name and face out there in support, I mean, that's why, right?
I'm 29, so I'm actually a great deal older than many of the people in the encampment, so I'm a little bit more comfortable taking risks because I've already gone out into the professional world and, you know, made connections of my own.
But yeah, it's definitely a difficult thing.
I do want to stress that many of the people who have been targeted most viciously are, you know, not white Jewish people, but, you know, black and brown people in America.
Mohamed, what have you heard from school administrators recently over the last week or so about your rights to continue to participate in the encampment and your rights in general to continue to engage in this kind of activism?
Yeah, I think our emails are flooded with threats.
There was threats about continuing to engage in protests since October, peaceful protests.
And as protests escalated, and as we started the encampment, there have been more emails about disciplinary action.
You'll be subject to suspension, you may be subject to arrest.
Obviously, after the 108 students were arrested on Thursday, that made it very, very clear to us just the extent To which the university was willing to go to, to stop us from peacefully demonstrating.
So I think we're aware that the university is constantly threatening us.
But I think also in some emails they will slip in messaging about how much they care about free speech, how much they care about freedom of expression.
I just wish that their actions would follow that sort of language.
Look, there's a lot of different ways to spend your time when you're on a college campus and I can't think of any things that are more worthwhile to do than the kind of protesting and activism in which you're engaged.
I know that's not an easy thing to do in the United States where the elite class has been the most pro-Israel elite class of any country anywhere in the democratic world by a very good distance.
So I want to congratulate both of you.
I hope you'll keep up the good work and I really appreciate you coming on to talk to us tonight.
Thank you.
Yep, have a great evening.
Thank you so much.
Okay.
You too.
So that concludes our show for this evening.
As a reminder, System Update is also available in podcast form.
You can listen to every episode 12 hours after the first broadcast live here at Rumble on Spotify, Apple, and all the major podcasting platforms.
If you rate, review, and follow the program, it really helps spread the visibility Of the show.
As a final reminder, every Tuesday and Thursday night, once we're done with our live show here on Rumble, we move to Locals, which is part of the Rumble platform where we have our live interactive aftershow designed to take your questions, respond to your feedback and critiques, and hear your suggestions for future shows.
That aftershow is available solely for members of our Locals community if you want to join, which gives you access not only to those twice-a-week aftershows, but to the multiple interactive features that we have that let us engage with you throughout the week.
It's the place we publish transcripts of every program we broadcast here.
We publish them there.
It's where we publish our original written journalism first.
And most of all, it's the community on which we rely to support the independent journalism that we're doing here every night.
Simply click the join button.
Write below the video player on the Rumble page, and it will take you directly to that platform.
Although tonight is Thursday, for reasons I said at the top of the show, I'm just coming back from and recovering from a virus.
I'm trying not to push myself too much, as is my want.
So we won't have our after show tonight, but we'll be back next week with the full complement of regularly scheduled after shows.
For those of you who've been watching this show, we are, as always, very appreciative.
We're very happy to be back, and we hope to see you tomorrow night and every night at 7 p.m.
Eastern Live exclusively here on Rumble.
▲
Export Selection