‘US lost its standing to talk about freedom,’ US-based professor says over crackdown on pro-Palestinian protesters

By Gokhan Ergocun and Faruk Hanedar

ISTANBUL (AA) - Criticizing the crackdown on pro-Palestinian protesters in various universities in the US, a US-based professor said that Washington has “lost its standing to talk to anybody about freedom of speech or about freedom."

Since last month, the US has seen a wave of demonstrations at US university campuses calling for an end to the war on Gaza, with student protesters facing police violence and arrests.

Students have been suspended from school and have had criminal charges pressed against them in the country, Burton Lee Artz, a professor of media studies and the director of the Center for Global Studies at the US-based Purdue University, said at a conference, titled Future(s) of Communications: Promises and Predicaments, organized by the Global Communication Association (GCA).

"They have been thrown out of their dorm rooms because they have been protesting Israel's bombing of Gaza, this violates all of the requirements of free speech, the requirements of academic freedom," he underlined.

"It reminds me a lot of the anti-Vietnam War demonstrations decades ago," he said, adding that students originally were condemned or ridiculed for protesting the US war in Vietnam.

Artz said: "We're in a similar situation now where students that are asking for an immediate permanent cease-fire in Gaza are condemned for being ‘antisemitic.’

"This includes the Jewish Voice for Peace and other Jewish organizations. Somehow they are also ‘antisemitic.’ It's boggling and it should be condemned widely."

"We are talking about democracy and we can say that students are under pressure," he added.

He said as university administrations have cracked down on encampments, more encampments pop up on other campuses in the US and even in Europe.

Artz said that but not all universities cracked down on encampment protests, adding that Northwestern University agreed to talk with students about how to divest from Israel, Evergreen State College in Washington also agreed to divest from suppliers of military equipment to Israel, he stressed.

- Americans in 'favor of cease-fire'

Stressing that the American public "is in favor of a cease-fire," Artz said: "You wouldn't know that if you listened to Joe Biden and the Democratic National Committee and the Democrats in Congress."

"The American people, by and large, want an end to the bombing," he added.

He said that a different approach from the US on Palestine and Ukraine is “hypocrisy.”

"I mean, on the one hand, you say, we want to follow the rule of law, but everything that Israel has done in Gaza violates international law," the professor added.

According to him, the US is violating international law by supplying arms to Israel and also violating its own law as Washington is not supposed to give aid to anybody that misuses that aid against civilians.

- 'Exceptional job' by Anadolu

About Anadolu's coverage of the war in Gaza, Artz said Anadolu "identified the perpetrators, the Zionist state, they have identified the humanitarian disaster, the genocide."

"I think Anadolu has done an exceptional job of covering the war in Gaza," he added.

"It's even been presented in that way, which is head and shoulders way above anything the US media has done.

"So in that sense, Anadolu has provided an immense service not just to Palestine, but to Turkish viewers and on a world scale. I think they should be applauded for that," Artz said.

Currently, the world media is dominated by private industry and media is also an industry, which means that they are the ones that provide us with entertainment, he stressed.

He said that all of the superhero movies, which come out of Marvel, Disney, Sony and Warner Bros, try to present to us that "We, as human beings and as a community are incapable."

Artz stressed that the idea is that “we need police or we need a military to protect us from the evil doers”

"It is interesting that some of the larger papers like The New York Times actually have people that have worked with or for the Israeli government," the professor said.