By Parviz Rashidi
TEHRAN - Police crackdown and arrest of students at American universities are an open violation of the right to protest and freedom of opinion.
The United States is fully manifesting a double standard approach regarding the students who are sympathizing with the grieving Palestinians who have been subjected to death, bombardment, displacement, starvation, etc. for nearly seven months.
Police in Germany have also resorted to force to clear a protest camp outside the Chancellery building in Berlin. The only sin of the protestors is that they have been demanding an end to German arms shipments to the Israeli military.
Regarding the approach of police against students and other protestors, the United States and other self-proclaimed defenders of democracy can no longer lecture other countries about the right to peaceful protest, human rights, and freedom of opinion in other countries.
The brutality of Israel in Gaza has shocked the students and other classes of society alike. However, students are showing more sensitivity and anger to this savagery. Comparatively, Israel has so far killed about 30 people in Gaza in response to every person killed in the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas.
However, the protestors are accused of “anti-Semitism” while a considerable number of the protestors are Jews. The Western decision-makers, who are subservient to Israel, are using charges of anti-Semitism against anybody who opposes Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian lands let alone those who are chanting slogans, carrying placards, and launching encampment protests at campuses condemning Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
Contrary to claims of anti-Semitism, students are calling for a ceasefire, asking their universities and colleges to stop doing business with Israel or any companies that support Israel in its ongoing war in the coastal enclave, cease funding the regime’s war machine, and avoid complicity in this genocide.
However, it is a scandal for the Western liberal democracy that such demands lead to the arrest, suspension, and threats against students.
Even some hawkish Congress persons have signed a letter calling on the administration to carry out criminal prosecutions and deportations for participants in the protests. House Speaker Mike Johnson has also accused protesters of intimidating and threatening Jewish students and suggested withholding funding to universities that allow pro-Palestinian protests.
If these lawmakers had held posts in Israel, they would have acted like Benjamin Netanyahu, Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich and made statements like Amichai Eliyahu, who proposed dropping a nuclear bomb on the Gaza Strip.
Feeling badly annoyed, disappointed, and isolated by the spreading student protests in leading universities in the West, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has likened the protests to those that preceded the Nazi Germany.
Finding no justification for his regime’s horrific crimes in Gaza, Netanyahu resorts to the slander of anti-Semitism and the Holocaust event. Such remarks are deceitful, disgusting, and at the same time laughable.
It is Netanyahu and his extreme-right cabinet that have created a Holocaust for 2.3 million citizens in the concentration camp of Gaza.
Now, the pro-Israel leaders in the West feel embarrassed and confused and the war criminals in Israel tremble in fear as student protests have spread to Sorbonne University, the Paris Institute of Political Studies, and the University of Sydney.
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