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‘Anti-Semitism should not be weaponised’: USC law professor
Jody Armour, a law professor at the University of Southern California, says anti-Semitism should not be weaponised to silence “valid protests” against what “may plausibly be genocide”.
“We have lots of Jewish and Muslim and Palestinian and Catholic, like I am, Protestants, too, intergenerational, coming together,” Armour said.
“Everybody should hate anti-Semitism and fight anti-Semitism, but being opposed to Israel’s slaughter in Gaza that the UN has said may plausibly be genocide, does not mean that you’re anti-Semitic,” he said.
“We need to stop allowing people to weaponise anti-Semitism against real, valid protests.”
Gaza solidarity camp set up at Sciences Po in Paris
Students at Sciences Po in Paris have set up an antiwar camp in solidarity with the people of Gaza.
Video clips shared on social media show tents pitched inside the university’s Saint Thomas campus and Palestinian flags hanging from buildings.
According to the French news agency AFP, the protesters are demanding that Sciences Po management cut all ties to Israeli universities and companies that are “complicit in the genocide in Gaza”, and are also calling for an end to “repression against pro-Palestinian voices on campus”.
The encampment, organised by the Palestine Committee of Sciences Po, comes as students have mobilised at universities across the US.
Texas governor says antiwar student protesters ‘belong in jail’
Governor Greg Abbott has said that students protesting against the war in Gaza “belong in jail” in a post on X.
“Arrests being made right now and will continue until the crowd disperses,” the Texas governor added, as dozens of state troopers and police surrounded students at the University of Texas at Austin.
Abbott claimed the protesters were engaging in anti-Semitism, although he did not provide evidence of his allegations in the post.
The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) described Abbott’s response to the protests as “unconstitutional”.
“The First Amendment applies to the State of Texas, whether Greg Abbott likes it or not”, CAIR said in a post on X.
Abbott issued an executive order in March requiring that Texas universities punish anti-Semitism on campus using the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of anti-Semitism, which includes claiming that the “existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavour”.
University of Texas professor witnesses police attack on pro-Palestinian student protest
Speaking from Austin, Texas, Professor Jeremi Suri said he had just finished teaching a class at the university’s history department when he saw a group of about 200 students demonstrating peacefully on a grass lawn.
“These students were shouting ‘free Palestine’, that’s all. Maybe they had one or two signs. They were saying nothing anti-Semitic. They were saying nothing that was threatening. And as they were standing and shouting, I witnessed the police – the state police, the campus police, the city police – an army of police almost the size as the student group … many were carrying guns, many were carrying rifles, and then, within a few minutes, this group of police stormed into the student crowd and started arresting students,” Suri told Al Jazeera.
The students “were loud, but they were peaceful”, he said, “and the police just started attacking them. And that led to more shouting. More students then arrived when they saw this and the situation became more violent”.
“But it became more violent because the police had attacked the students, not the other way around”.
www.aljazeera.com
