The photo in the USA; the massacre, in Gaza

It is curious how the attention we paid in Gaza is shifted towards the university protests through a hysterical narrative about anti-Semitism and security. The fabulous acrobatics also means that we do not talk about what is important: the mass murder of Netanyahu with American weapons. After the spectacular arrests of students in Columbia, the dead in Gaza now number more than 34,000. The images from the campuses are amazing, violent fireworks to overshadow a genocide, young professor Samuel P. Catlin tells us. What is there really to fear? he asks himself. What leap has occurred in our attention? From where do we watch what happens? This is how stories are constructed in our public space, like powerful distraction maneuvers. And they hide an obvious warning: moral panic is a way of spreading hate.

Fear, chaos, insecurity, anti-Semitism. Dark words flood the social and media landscape to produce an escalation of associations, generate a state of collective panic and force us to stop looking at what we should look at: the massacre occurs in Gaza. Freedom of expression, wokism, the cultural wars and cancellation are the rosary of clichés of the incendiary agenda with which the extreme right has been attacking the University for some time, as if its real problems gave a damn. While the game continues, we all approach the student protests with the rhetoric of security and anti-Semitism. Student speeches at graduation ceremonies have been canceled in his name, but campuses are flooded with police to, they say, protect the University. About what? From reality itself, from the interference of parties or groups that could violate their elitist bubble? Remember the intervention of the Republicans in Congress so that only those who present themselves as a heavenly scourge against anti-Semitism deserve to be governors. Because the main problem is that: frivolizing and emptying that word of content. Bruce Robbins, also a professor at Columbia, puts it eloquently: Isn’t critical thinking encouraged at the University to distinguish the real threat of anti-Semitism from criticism of the killing of Palestinians? What makes us think that this criticism is directed against Jews for being Jews? Is a campus such a chaotic space that it cannot distinguish real acts of anti-Semitism from the discomfort of some Jewish students, many active participants in protests, at facing the fact that much of the world looks scandalized at Gaza?

While Biden links protests to vandalism, hate and violence, His Royal Highness, Donald Trump calls on the police to subdue the “angry lunatics” on campuses. In 2017 he called those carrying torches in Charlottesville “good people” shouting “The Jews will not replace us!” But it’s the same. The problem is the sorry state of a democracy that sacrifices rights and freedoms before our eyes while we are only concerned about the risk of contagion in our universities. How scary, students! Anti-Semitism and security are added to other narratives that we already know, which organize the world in a single sense so that we see everything in a certain way. They did it in Genoa in 2001, at the University of Kent in 1970. They frighten us all and stifle our critical sense.