Photo Credit: OHCHR
Washington/Tel Aviv/Geneva: As anti-Israel protests spread from California to New York in the United States of America, Washington sounds dismissive about them. Many college students accuse the Joe Biden administration of being complicit in genocide in Gaza. However, what the US State Department had to offer to such protests was that “every American has every right to express their points of view, to exercise their First Amendment right”. (The First Amendment to the American Constitution protects freedom of speech, the press, assembly, and the right to petition the Government for a redress of grievances).
In recent weeks, as thousands of US university students have been protesting against the war in Gaza, at many locations, protests have been dispersed or dismantled by security forces. Hundreds of students have been arrested, and many of them face charges or academic sanctions.
United Nations Human Rights High Commissioner Volker Türk said in Geneva that he was troubled by a series of “heavy-handed” steps taken to disperse and dismantle protests across university campuses in the United States of America.
The Biden administration, however, claimed the demonstrations, “when they are paired with or coupled with rhetoric, language that is antisemitic, Islamophobic, essentially insults or targets someone for just who they are, that’s deeply problematic”.
With Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowing in Tel Aviv to destroy Hamas’s military and governing capabilities in Gaza, release all hostages, and ensure that Gaza never poses a threat to Israel again, the USA is standing firmly behind him.
Today in the course of his meeting with Netanyahu in the Israeli capital, the US Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken emphasized that it was Hamas that was standing in the way of a ceasefire in Gaza, and reaffirmed the US commitment to Israel’s security. To the demonstrators in Tel Aviv, Blinken said, “Bringing your loved ones home is at the heart of everything we’re trying to do, and we will not rest until everyone – man, woman, soldier, civilian, young, old – is back home. There is a very strong proposal on the table right now. Hamas needs to say yes and needs to get this done. That is our determination, and we will not rest, we will not stop until you’re reunited with your loved ones”.
In Washington, the US State Department’s Principal Deputy Spokesperson Vedant Patel justified the law enforcement agencies’ crackdown on protestors in the US. “…we, of course, support anybody to be able to express themselves and to exercise their First Amendment rights. They should not and cannot become violent… And in those particular circumstances, we believe it is the right of the appropriate law enforcement and security officials to take appropriate actions consistent with the policies of that jurisdiction,” he said.
On the question that the arrests of these protestors projected a bad image of the United States, all that Patel had to offer was that “if laws are being broken on certain college campuses, in certain municipalities, in certain towns, in certain cities, in certain counties, it is well within the right for the officials of those jurisdictions to enforce whatever laws that are so appropriate as it relates to that region”.
What sounds interesting is that China and Iran criticized the Biden administration’s policy response to these protests. China went on to say that the way the US Government was responding “is violating these students’ rights”. Patel said, ” I don’t think anybody in this administration is interested in taking a human rights lesson from the Iranian regime, or the People’s Republic of China for that matter. And both of those regimes’ crackdowns on self-expression, on the free and fair press, on basic human rights, are clear”.
Türk too, incidentally, expressed his concerns over some law enforcement actions across a series of universities, which he said appeared “disproportionate in their impacts”. The High Commissioner stressed that any restrictions to freedom of expression and the right to peaceful assembly must be strictly guided by the principles of legality, necessity and proportionality. These standards must also be applied without discrimination, he added. He stressed that actions taken by university authorities and law enforcement officials “to restrict such expression need to be carefully scrutinised, to ensure such measures go no further than what is demonstrably necessary to protect the rights and freedoms of others, or for another legitimate aim such as maintenance of public health or order”.
Significantly, in a statement yesterday, Netanyahu declared that branding Israel’s leaders and soldiers as war criminals “will pour jet fuel on the fires of anti-Semitism, those fires that are already raging on the campuses of America and across capitals around the world”. He was responding to news reports that the International Criminal Court (ICC) in the Hague was contemplating issuing arrest warrants against senior Israeli government and military officials as war criminals. “This would be an outrage of historic proportions,” he warned.
“Israel is not even subject to the court’s jurisdiction and it has an independent legal system that rigorously investigates all violations of the law,” Netanyahu said and declared that no ICC action will impact Israel’s “ironclad determination” to achieve the goals of its war with “Hamas terrorists”.
While the US acknowledged that the ICC has no jurisdiction over the issue of Israel’s war in Gaza, Israel’s President Isaac Herzog, told Blinken that “trying to use the International Criminal Court against Israel, which is fighting terror, is a clear and present danger to democracies and to free and peace-loving nations who pursue the norms of international law, and I call upon all our allies and friends to object and reject any such efforts”.
I have to say about Israel and the US. Their claim that they have an independent legal system, which takes stock of breaches of laws, do they know, they can’t be a judge in their own dispute? Apart from that , they contend, ICJ does not have jurisdiction to adjudicate this dispute. Be it known to them, an individual, isolated sovereign, can’t dictate to an international institution, as to how to conduct its affairs. They have to fall in line, with decision taken by the U.N. Their conduct of dominance, in itself manifest jingoism, chauvinism and hegemony. Vedant Patel, and people of his ilk, whether Christian, Hindu, Muslim or otherwise, whether Asian, African, European or otherwise, have sold their souls, to the so called American Nation , and to aggravate issues, they use such prosaic, poetic, flowery, but confusing language, when required to reply, which shrouds the truth, and camouflages lies. They need be told to suck eggs, nobody is scared of Israel and U.S. If one goes through the Torah, Bible and Quran, all through one finds, the shamelessly, and fraudulently encroaching on others properties, and trying to justify or rationalize, by saying, “God has given this land to us”.