TEHRAN - Students at US universities and colleges are continuing their campus demonstrations to vent their anger at Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza as American police intensify violent crackdowns.

Such demonstrations began to spread across college campuses in the United States after New York police removed a pro-Palestinian protest encampment at Columbia University on April 18 and arrested more than 100 people. 

Since then, police have made hundreds of arrests to break up peaceful protests and clear encampments.

Police brutality 

On Thursday, police with shields and batons shoved into protesters at Indiana University Bloomington after students established an encampment. Police officers also tore down tents at the University of Connecticut. At Ohio State University and Emerson College in Boston, police also attacked protesters. 

Police officers further clashed with students at the campus of Emory University in Atlanta. A large number of people were detained during attacks on these universities.  
Demonstrators at Emory accused police officers of using pepper spray and tear gas to break up the encampment they had set up a few hours earlier.

The Atlanta Police Department acknowledged that its officers had “used chemical irritants during the incident.” The Georgia State Patrol also confirmed its troopers used pepper balls for crowd control. 

Separately, The New York Times has reviewed video footage that shows a trooper using a stun device on a protester who was on the ground.

Authorities in Georgia State accused the demonstrator of resisting arrest.

Students at Harvard, Georgetown, MIT and George Washington University, in the heart of the US capital city, have also pressed ahead with rallies to express solidarity with Palestinian people in Gaza. 

University professors detained 

In addition to perpetrating violence against university students, police have launched a clampdown on faculty members. 

Police arrested Noelle McAfee, chair of Emory's philosophy department, as they tried to disperse peaceful protesters. 

"It went from a peaceful protest to mayhem in the matter of a minute," McAfee said. The professor said she had frozen and been quickly detained.

Emory University economics professor Caroline Fohlin was also taken into custody.  

During her interaction with police, Fohlin could be heard expressing concern about the violent arrests and use of force by police against students, according to CNN. 

Demands of protesters

Demonstrators at US universities have called for an end to Israel’s brutal onslaught on Gaza. They have denounced the complicity of their educational institutions in Israel’s human rights abuses. The protesters have demanded that universities divest from the Israeli genocide in Gaza and stop investing large school endowments in companies involved in weapons manufacturing and other industries supporting the regime’s war.

Israel currently stands accused of committing genocide in a case brought by South Africa at the International Court of Justice. Israel has turned a blind eye to an ICJ ruling which demanded in late January that the regime take all possible measures to prevent genocidal acts.

Condoning violence 

The police crackdown against students and faculty members comes as some US politicians have demanded a stronger response. They have accused protesters of antisemitism. 
House Speaker Mike Johnson has accused protesters of intimidating and threatening Jewish students and suggested withholding funding to universities that allow pro-Palestinian protests.

But the protesters, many of whom are Jewish, have rejected such accusations. 

“When you’re accusing anyone who’s against genocide in Gaza of being anti-Semitic, you’re losing the actual meaning of the movement against anti-Semitism,” Donia, a

protester at George Washington University, who chose to be identified by her first name only out of fear of reprisal, told Al Jazeera.

Donia added that pro-Israel advocates were “freaking out” and trying to repress the student movement with anti-Semitism allegations because they know it is effective.

“A lot of the future generation of politicians in this country are at these universities, and they’re not buying their lies any more. That’s what’s really scaring them,” Donia told the Qatari news network. 

No to genocide 

A number of US politicians, however, have different opinions including Democratic Congresswoman Ilhan Omar, who visited the pro-Palestine protest camp at New York’s Columbia University on Thursday. 

“Young people have always pushed our government to do better, whether it was through the civil rights movement, whether it was to end the Vietnam war.” 
She added, “I think they are on the right side of history in pushing our country not to stay complicit in the genocide that is taking place in Gaza.”

Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, one of America’s highest-profile Jewish lawmakers, also lashed out at Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu who had accused US college students of being antisemitic.

“No, Mr Netanyahu. It is not antisemitic or pro-Hamas to point out that in a little over six months your extremist government has killed 34,000 Palestinians and wounded more than 77,000 – seventy percent of whom are women and children. It is not antisemitic to point out that your bombing has completely destroyed more than 221,000 housing units in Gaza, leaving more than one million people homeless – almost half the population,” Sanders said.

Opposition to Gaza war 

Israel’s brutal war on the Gaza Strip has also sparked street protests in the US over the past months. Protesters have called for ending Israel’s onslaught and an immediate ceasefire. They have denounced Washington’s unwavering military and political support for Israel.

Polls indicate that a majority of Americans disapprove of Israel’s military actions in Gaza. 
The shift in public opinion in the United States has raised deep concerns among American politicians pushing them to design schemes to tackle growing support for Palestinians.

Bombshell revelations 

Former veteran US politician Dennis Ross has played a key role in drawing up schemes in the face of growing opposition to Israel’s war on Gaza and the atrocities that the regime has committed there. 

After Israel declared war on Gaza on October 7, Ross has routinely visited US universities and held meetings to rally support for Israel’s war machine. He has left no stone unturned to demonize Palestinian resistance groups. Besides, he has tried to wage smear campaigns against Palestinian people who are only calling for the liberation of their land from the Israeli occupation and ending the regime’s war of genocide. 

Nonetheless, the expansion of antiwar protests throughout US universities indicates that his plans have backfired. 

According to a recording of a private meeting exclusively obtained by the Tehran Times, Ross has acknowledged a growing dissidence movement in US educational institutions. 

“There is a kind of dissidence now, among a lot of the younger Jewish students and who were attracted to the progressives before October 7th, created a kind of real dissidence for them, and I’ve seen a kind of, there is a question in their minds now who they were previously associated with,” stated Ross, who held important positions in the administrations of Jimmy Carter to Barack Obama. 

He also admits that university students skip classes that he attends. 

 "There is also a kind of interesting opportunity because I’m being requested now to do more campuses to go to more places and with interesting enough, with more faculty inviting me to come, so there are, when we think about the tools that are available to us, let’s think about that as well, how would do a different kind of outreach, the faculty does, the faculty allows you, brings you into classes, there is a lot of things you, I can go to a university wide event and kids who are in classes they won’t come out there, you know they won’t come to a next curricular activity,” Ross, who has taught classes at Brandeis University, Georgetown University, and the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, pointed out. 

In November last year, the Tehran Times also published the script of a recording it had obtained exclusively from a private meeting attended by Jonathan Greenblatt, the director of the so-called Anti-Defamation League.

In the meeting with a group of Zionist propagandists, Greenblatt raised the alarm about diminishing support for Israel among the young generation and Iran’s backing for the Palestinian cause. 

 “We think that there is something more to this that’s below the water line, it’s the young generations that we need to focus our energy on, there is something happening with Iran, and how it’s now their propaganda, in their language in their tactics, seem to be bleeding into the American kind of activists face, in ways that is very different than NIAC and very very problematic,” Greenblatt said. 

Comments made by Greenblatt and other Israeli officials against Iran are in line with the regime’s blame game. 

Iran has only provided spiritual support for Palestinians who have been subjected to decades of occupation and atrocious crimes by the Zionist regime. 

Israel has been perpetrating heinous crimes against Palestinians since its creation in 1948. But, the genocidal campaign in Gaza has clearly exposed the regime’s barbaric nature.