SE Hoya Containment Thread (aka Politics)

Americans who get their news primarily from cable are the only people who believe that Israel is not committing a genocide in Gaza, according to according to a new survey that examined the relationship between attitudes toward the war and news consumption habits.

The survey puts numbers on trends that have become increasingly apparent: Cable news viewers are more supportive of Israel’s war effort, less likely to think Israel is committing war crimes, and less interested in the war in general. People who get their news primarily from social media, YouTube, or podcasts, by contrast, generally side with the Palestinians, believe Israel is committing war crimes and genocide, and consider the issue of significant importance.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spent the last week attacking the International Criminal Court for what he said was a looming plan of theirs to charge him with war crimes. The U.S. dutifully came to his defense, preposterously claiming that because Israel is not a party to the ICC, the court has no jurisdiction. The same is true for Russia, but we applauded the ICC’s charges against Vladimir Putin. With U.S. support in hand, Netanyahu announced he’d go forward with a Rafah invasion regardless of whether Hamas accepts a hostage deal.

Despite President Joe Biden and much of the media attempting to cast the campus protests as antisemitic, the crackdown and the smear campaign has only fueled the movement’s growth, because young people, as the survey shows, don’t rely on the mainstream media for their news, and there is plenty of footage of the peaceful, respectful protests on social media to counter the false narrative.

Just 8 percent of people said they got most of their news from print journalism, which was less than the portion of people who said they don’t watch or read the news at all at 13 percent.

Asked if Israel is committing a genocide in Gaza, social media users agree with the statement by a 44 to 19 percent margin.

while those over 65 say by a 47 to 21 percent plurality that Israel isn’t committing genocide.

Just 15 percent of cable news viewers said they’d be more likely to support a candidate who supported Palestinians, even though 31 percent of cable viewers agreed that Israel was committing genocide against Palestinians.

Following the example set by Columbia students, students have launched hundreds of Gaza solidarity encampments on college campuses across the country. Following the example of the cops in New York, a bunch of agitators from outside of UCLA showed up on Tuesday to brutalize student protestors.

While the NYPD has earned most of the national attention for the severity of its crackdown, conducting another wave of violent arrests at Columbia and City College New York on Tuesday night, students and professors have been subject to all manner of harassment, intimidation, and violence wherever they have voiced their opposition to Israel's genocidal campaign of destruction in Gaza and, where applicable, their institutions' investments in companies facilitating the campaign. Hours after the NYPD cracked skulls in Manhattan, the LAPD let a frothing crowd of Zionist counter-protestors do their dirty work for them.

USC students set up an encampment on April 24, one week after Columbia students launched theirs and days after USC administrators barred valedictorian Asna Tabassum from making a commencement speech. Within hours of the first tents going up at USC, the LAPD responded by sending in hundreds of riot cops, reportedly using tear gas and rubber bullets on the students, and arresting 93 people.

The next day, students at UCLA followed suit, occupying Dickson Plaza. The cops showed up quickly, and though they did not escalate as they had at USC, groups of counter-protestors began organizing. Over the next few days, the group of non-students instigated a few fights around the encampment, gleefully told protestors "I hope they rape you," mocked warnings that a student in the encampment had a fatal banana allergy, breached barricades to push a woman to the ground, and released cockroaches and mice. They also began raising money: A GoFundMe launched two days after the encampment's establishment has raised over $90,000, $5,000 of which came from Jerry Seinfeld's wife. They used that money to erect a massive stage right across from the encampment.

UCLA security has mostly tried to keep the groups separate (broadly speaking, the UCs have tried to minimize police response to the encampments), though counter-protestors continued to escalate. Late Monday night, campus security repeatedly deterred groups of counter-protestors who tried to assault the encampment and threatened to fight UCPD. The administration then escalated things further on Tuesday when they declared the encampments unlawful and threatened students with suspension and expulsion if they didn't clear out. It didn't work, though the threats deftly set the stage for the counter-protestors, who attacked the encampment with the clear intent to hurt people. Just before midnight, they began setting off fireworks, throwing them into or aiming them at the encampment.

A reporter on the scene said students were attacked with skunk spray and bear mace. While private security barred themselves in a nearby building, and with the LAPD content to stand back, the 150-to-200–strong group of Zionists were allowed to do whatever they wanted. That included spraying students, breaking down barricades, and pulling students out of the encampment to beat them with pipes and other weapons.

Students held the line, and even after the riot cops showed up following a few hours of fighting, at around 1:40 a.m., they reportedly stood by until 3 a.m. before asking counter-protestors to leave. Over 100 people were treated for injuries, including some severe ones that required them to be carried out of the camp, though UCPD reportedly blocked emergency medical services from getting in and helping out injured students. The cops didn't try to separate the counter-protestors from the protestors until after 3 a.m., and when they did, they didn't conduct any arrests, merely clearing the area around the encampment and making sure the two sides were separated. The Daily Bruin, the UCLA student paper, reported that four of their reporters were followed and assaulted on their way back home from the violence.

"The life-threatening assault we face tonight is nothing less than a horrifying, despicable act of terror," the UCLA Palestine Solidarity Encampment said in a statement. "For over seven hours, Zionist aggressors hurled gas canisters, sprayed pepper spray, and threw fireworks and bricks into our encampment. They broke our barriers repeatedly, clearly in an attempt to kill our community. Campus safety left within minutes, external security the university hired for 'backup' watched, filmed, and laughed on the side as the immediate danger inflicted upon us escalated." The university, they said, "would rather see us dead than divest."

ROLLING ITS TANKS this week into Rafah, in the Gaza Strip, the Israeli military moved swiftly to take control of the Palestinian side of the border crossing with Egypt. The takeover severed the only corridor connecting Palestinians in Gaza to land not controlled by Israel. In a gratuitous symbolic act, an Israeli tank bulldozed the “I love Gaza” monument greeting visitors as they cross into the territory from Egypt.

The attack — and the looming full-scale invasion of Rafah being threatened by Israel despite heavily qualified White House objections — leaves Palestinian civilians bearing the brunt of the relentless assault. Israel quickly closed the Rafah border crossing. The closing leaves the trickling spigots of aid to Gaza virtually shut off.

Residents of Gaza are once again being forced into a dystopian game show where they must scramble to comprehend maps the Israelis created, marking which squared-off area they must move to in order to avoid certain death. Images relayed on social media by the Israeli military’s Arabic language spokesperson instructed civilians in Rafah to move back toward central Gaza to Khan Younis, a territory left in ruins after sustained Israeli air and ground attacks.

The United Nations Children’s Fund, or UNICEF, is pleading with the Israeli government and its backers to ceasefire and reverse course on plans for a full-scale Rafah invasion.

“There’s 600,000 children that are seeking shelter in Rafah and that many of them have been displaced multiple times already,” UNICEF’s Tess Ingram, who recently returned from Gaza, told The Intercept. “They’re exhausted, traumatized, sick, hungry, and their ability to safely evacuate is limited.”

“The area that they’re being directed to evacuate to is not safe. It’s not safe because there aren’t the services there to meet their basic needs, water, toilets, shelter,” she said in an interview. “But it’s also not safe because we know that that area has been subject to strikes despite being a so-called safe zone. So we’re really concerned about that impact of a ground offensive on one of the most densely populated areas in the world.”

Prior to the onset of Israel’s scorched-earth war on Gaza, Rafah was a city of approximately 250,000 people. As a result of Palestinians fleeing Israeli attacks, the population is currently estimated at 1.4 million.

[...] The Biden administration has spent weeks pushing a narrative in the media that Rafah represents a red line for the administration. Yet when President Joe Biden spoke to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ahead of the operation, a senior Israeli official said, “Biden didn’t pull the hand [brake] on the capture of the Rafah crossing.”

[...] UNICEF estimates that people in Rafah have approximately 3 liters of safe water per day and must use that for drinking, cooking, cleaning, and bathing. The agency says that a minimum of 15 liters per person, per day is recommended for populations in an emergency. There is currently one toilet per 850 people. Diarrhea is rampant, women and girls do not have consistent access to sanitary products, and diapers for babies are scarce.

“People can’t wait hours to use a bathroom or they don’t feel safe doing so. And so people have to resort to other methods, like open defecation,” said Ingram, the UNICEF official. “When you walk through Rafah, you often see and smell and have to move around leaking sewage because the sanitation systems are not working properly, people don’t have other options.”

If Israel expands its operations in Rafah, causing a mass exodus of people, the areas they are being directed to flee to do not have even the fragile, inadequate infrastructure.

“It’s hard to fathom that a situation that is already so bad can become worse, but it can become worse for these people if they are forced to evacuate to an area that is unsafe, that has no basic services that they need to survive. And Rafah was already lacking both of those things,” Ingram said.

“When we’re talking about vulnerable children who have survived seven months of war and who are bearing the scars of that war, either physically or psychologically, their ability to move to these sorts of areas and survive there is impacted because they’re exhausted and they’re traumatized, and they need greater support, not less.”