April 25, 2024 (EIRNS)—Campus protests in solidarity with Palestine and against the Israeli government’s genocidal war continue to spread across the U.S., despite the increasingly repressive police-state efforts to shut them down. Encampments supporting Palestine and demanding university divestment from companies involved in the genocide in Gaza have been set up on at least 30 U.S. campuses, NBC News reported, and the number keeps growing. Police deployments at many locations have resulted in multiple arrests of students who were protesting peacefully. They were charged with “trespassing” on their own campuses.
NBC News reported that 57 were arrested at the University of Texas at Austin yesterday; 108 at Boston’s Emerson College, and 93 at University of Southern California, whose main graduation ceremony, scheduled for May 10, was canceled today, allegedly due to “security concerns.” There were many more confrontations and arrests at Brown University, Princeton, University of Minnesota, and others. According to the New York Times today, protests are also taking place at universities outside the U.S., in Cairo, Paris and Sydney, Australia.
Yesterday’s events at the University of Texas at Austin, the first protest in a Southern, Republican-governed state, caught national and international attention because of the brutal response ordered by Gov. Greg Abbott. Abbott charged that demonstrations were “hate-filled, anti-Semitic protests” and that students participating in them should be expelled. “These protesters belong in jail,” Abbott wrote on X, the Washington Post reported today.
