 "New York Police officers arrest a protester who participated in an encampment on the Columbia University campus. AP")
These are turbulent times in the United States. A former president, still a frontrunner in this year’s presidential polls with a six-point lead over the incumbent at this stage is being criminally prosecuted in a trial widely seen as a witch hunt.
Meanwhile, campuses across the US are exploding in anger with student activism holding at ransom even Ivy League institutions over Israel’s Gaza offensive against Hamas. And yet, amid the chaos, it is instructive to watch the American state kick into high gear and come down hard on pro-Palestinian protests and the pliant American media, experts at lecturing the rest of the world, either looking the other way or siding with the state’s efforts to restore law and order with tortured justifications.
This tells us something about the nature of the American state which has a habit of issuing pious moral sermons on “freedom of expression” and “human rights”. The crushing of the protests with an iron hand, including violent arrests of elderly professors by the law enforcement or unleashing of horse-riding state troopers bearing assault rifles on “peaceful protests” by students shows that the ‘iron clad’ First Amendment rights can be bent to the iron will of the state when the need arises to do so.
The protestors, whose demands vary from “ceasefire in Gaza”, “ending America’s support to Israel”, “academic boycott of Israeli universities” or fiscal measures like American universities and schools divest their substantial endowment from companies linked to Israel or profiting from the Israel-Hamas war (‘Disclose! Divest! We will not stop, we will not rest!’ has become a unifying slogan) have been met with severe crackdown from police, arrests, disciplinary actions and even suspension by college administrations.
The protests, with students donning keffiyehs and pitching tents on college campuses across the US, have been by and large peaceful, though Jewish students have faced hostilities and there have been frequent charges of antisemitism on campus. What has been the administrative response?
Impact Shorts
More ShortsLet’s take Columbia University, the nerve centre from where the protests escalated everywhere and are now threatening to boil over. At the end of Monday’s deadline, by which time the university had demanded that pro-Palestinian demonstrators remove the hundreds of encampments, clear its central lawn, and disperse instead of marching around the place, the administrators seemed to be doing what they had threatened to.
At the end of the 2 pm deadline (local time in the US), the Ivy League institution begun suspending the students who refused to leave the pitched tents on campus after “talks” failed between the two sides, according to Columbia University president Nemat Minouche Shafik, the first chancellor to call the cops on university premises after she was subjected to a four-hour US Congressional grilling on 17 April on failure to tackle antisemitism on campus.
The University, according to a Washington Post report , stated that it “would not divest from Israel as protesters had demanded” and in a notice issued to student activists said “they were violating seven university policies, including those related to disruptive behavior and damage to property” and stated that “those remaining in the encampment or who didn’t sign a pledge to abide by university rules would be suspended and barred from campus, including academic, recreational and residence spaces.” This is hardening of stance and not much respect for “academic freedom”, “freedom of speech” or Columbia’s “history of student activism”.
In fact, Shafik’s decision to call the cops on students, when NYPD (New York Police Department) on 18 April carried out mass arrests of over 100 students from the Columbia campus, would spark a chain of events that University administrators across the US are now struggling to control.
The details of the excesses by American law enforcement, ostensibly to stifle the proliferating pro-Palestinian protests across different colleges and universities in the US, are stunning. What has been noticeably missing, however, is the media censure that is so often handed out by American outlets to the rest of the world when they grapple with the tricky issue of striking a between public demonstration and maintenance of law and order.
Heavily armed riot police in University of Texas at Austin on Monday arrested over 50 students who had encamped on campus in solidarity with residents of Gaza, zip-tying the activists’ hands behind their back and even deploying pepper spray and stun grenades to control the sloganeering crowd, according to reports, while warning the students that they could be “subject to disorderly conduct, criminal trespass, riot, and obstruction charges.”
Elsewhere, reports emerged of police using rubber bullets and teargas to break up the students’ protests at Emory University at Georgia and carrying out “multiple violent arrests” also involving tasers.
There were allegations that cops were using “chemical irritants” or “stun guns” to subdue those resisting arrests. Nearly 118 protestors were arrested in Boston with social media circulated videos showing police entering Emerson College encampment and pulling “at demonstrators’ arms, shoulders and clothing in an attempt to take them into custody” while some were “pulled to the ground”, some dragged away by cops bearing long sticks.
At Ohio and Indiana Universities, students claimed spotting snipers on campus rooftops while authorities claimed that “these were state police officers working as spotters”.
Data collated by Washington Post claims at least 900 protesters have been arrested at pro-Palestinian demonstrations on college campuses in the last 10 days though some tallies put the number of arrests even higher. Some arrests were particularly violent .
At the Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, a disturbing CNN video caught the forceful detention of Caroline Fohlin, an economics professor at Emory University, who was waylaid by two heavily armed police officers on the college campus. While the elderly female professor came across the forcible arrest of a student protestor and asked the police ‘what are you doing?’, another law enforcement agent knocked her on the ground, smashed her head against the concrete sidewalk while two officers pinned her hands behind the back and zip-tied her while another one forcibly held her down.
Fohlin, who was at the receiving end of police brutality, was later jailed for 11 hours and charged with “Battery Against Police Officer” that carries a fine of $1,000 or 1 year in prison in Georgia. This incident took place on April 25 and the video of the professor’s violent arrest went viral on social media worldwide. It is worth noting that the front page of the next day’s (April 26) edition of New York Times, the second-largest newspaper by print circulation in the United States, failed to carry even a single mention of the brutal incident.
It has been interesting to note the stance taken by American liberal media that has shelved its unmitigated support for civil disobedience abroad in favour of reasoned consensus for maintenance of law and order at home despite heavy handed stifling of protests by law enforcement along with disciplinary actions against students.
In Bloomberg, Stephen L Carter writes, “I am not a fan of arresting students, but there’s a difference between the right to express an opinion and the right to occupy a plaza or chant loud enough to interfere with studying, or classroom instruction, or, for that matter, the simple freedom to go about the campus in peace.”
In New York Times, professor John McWhorter, in a column titled: I’m a Columbia Professor. The Protests on My Campus Are Not Justice, writes, “What began as intelligent protest has become, in its uncompromising fury and its ceaselessness, a form of abuse.”
Or, take the case of David French, who writes in New York Times that “Universities should not protect students from hurtful ideas, but they must protect their ability to peacefully live and learn in a community of scholars. There is no other viable alternative.”
Suddenly, the progressive activism and rights of students are subjected to ‘reasonable restrictions’ of the kind American media are loathe to extend to countries especially from the Global South where any penal action against archaism on campus is tantamount to “democratic backsliding”.
Consider these headlines in western media outlets when it comes to campus activism in India. For New York Times , “Behind Campus Attack in India, Some See a Far-Right Agenda” and “a symbol of everything that is bad in this country.” The 2019 crackdown on protesting students at Aligarh Muslim University generated this headline in Washington Post : “Police stormed a university in India. Muslim students say the violence was an act of revenge.”
Never mind the faculty member at Emory University in Georgia, Atlanta, who was thrown to the ground, smashed against concrete, handcuffed and then charged with “battery”, for New York Times, a blow to the head of a Leftist student leader “Makes an Instant Hero in India.” Ironically, when it comes to police brutality, the US is nonpareil. American police officers shoot and kill more people than anywhere else in the world.
According to an analysis by Washington Post, “police in the United States shoot and kill more than 1,000 people every year” and “1,125 people have been shot and killed by police in the past 12 months”, according to a study in Washington Post published in April 2024. Compare that to India, the world’s most populous nation where on an average 160-170 people are killed in police encounters, less than five times the number of those killed in America.
What’s more, the brunt of the America’s police brutality is faced by its black population. Statistics show that “among Black Americans, the rate of fatal police shootings between 2015 and March 2024 stood at 6 per million of the population per year, while for White Americans, the rate stood at 2.3 fatal police shootings per million of the population per year.”
The grating sanctimony of Americans and their holier-than-thou media, that have made moral hectoring and sanctimonious indignation their standard calling card when it comes to internal affairs of other sovereign nations – especially as they fail to practice what they preach, is jarring. So India’s pushback against George Soros’s subversive activities to undermine India’s democracy is “ antisemitism ” (as the US State Department has recently alleged) whereas the same Soros becomes a villainous figure for American media when he instigates student activism. (New York Post: George Soros is paying student radicals who are fueling nationwide explosion of Israel-hating protests).
The thing to understand, however, that while America knows how to handle “protests” and “protestors” and knows how to go after sovereign states for doing much less than what it does, these are not examples of hypocrisy.
It is statecraft at play, an inevitable function of power. America uses various tools at its disposal – the discourse power of American media in setting global narratives, US State Department reports, or ‘democracy ratings’ – to maintain the status quo in a world where it is the top dog. America is the rule maker but don’t expect it to abide by the rules it makes. That’s how superpowers behave.
Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.