Demonstrations, Protests and Riots

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      Why Al Jazeera is the Go To News Source for Student Protesters

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      Nick Wilson has closely followed news on the war in Gaza since October. But Mr. Wilson, a Cornell student, is picky when it comes to his media diet: As a pro-Palestinian activist, he doesn’t trust major American outlets’ reporting on Israel’s campaign in Gaza.Instead, he turns to publications less familiar to some American audiences, like the Arab news network Al Jazeera.“Al Jazeera is the site that I go to to get an account of events that I think will be reliable,” he said.Many student protesters said in recent interviews that they were seeking on-the-ground coverage of the war in Gaza, and often, a staunchly pro-Palestinian perspective — and they are turning to alternative media for it. There’s a range of options: Jewish Currents, The Intercept, Mondoweiss and even independent Palestinian journalists on social media, as they seek information about what is happening in Gaza.Their preferences embody a broader shift for members of Generation Z, who are increasingly seeking out news from a wider array of sources and questioning legacy outlets in a fragmented media ecosystem.Israel’s recent ban on the local operations of Al Jazeera has only elevated the network’s status among many student protesters. They prize coverage from reporters on the ground, and Al Jazeera has a more extensive operation in Gaza than any other publication. Students also noted the sacrifices it has made to tell the story there. Two Al Jazeera journalists have died since the start of the war.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      On a Day of Graduations, Berkeley’s Protests Stand Out

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      At the University of California, Berkeley, hundreds of soon-to-be graduates rose from their seats in protest, chanting and disrupting their commencement. At Virginia Commonwealth University, about 60 graduates in caps and gowns walked out during Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s speech. At the University of Wisconsin, a handful of graduates stood with their backs to their chancellor as she spoke.After weeks of tumult on college campuses over pro-Palestinian protests, many administrators prepared themselves for disruptions at graduations on Saturday. And while there were demonstrations — most noisily, perhaps, at U.C. Berkeley — ceremonies at several universities unfolded without major incident. Many students who protested did so silently.Anticipating possible disruptions, university administrators had increased their security or taken various measures, including dismantling encampments, setting aside free speech zones, canceling student speeches and issuing admission tickets.Some administrators also tried to reach agreements with encampment organizers. The University of Wisconsin said it had reached a deal with protesters to clear the encampment in return for a meeting to discuss the university’s investments.Some students, too, were on edge about their big day — many missed their high school graduations four years ago because of the pandemic and did not want to repeat the experience.In 2020, David Emuze and his mother had watched his high school graduation “ceremony,” a parade of senior photos set to music on Zoom, from their living room in Springfield, Ill. This time, he and his classmates at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign heard that other schools, like the University of Southern California and Columbia University, had canceled their main-stage commencements altogether because of campus unrest.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      The Harsh Crackdown on College Protests Is A Dangerous Mistake

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      Two police cars idled across the street from the protest rally I was attending in front of the State Capitol in Austin, Texas, their red and blue lights flashing but their sirens silent. The police seemed more bored than annoyed. It was the early 2000s, and I had recently moved from Turkey to study at the University of Texas.My fellow protesters were outraged. “This is what a police state looks like!” they started chanting.I turned around, bewildered. Turkey was still emerging from the long shadow of the 1980 coup. For years, protests were suppressed, sometimes with deadly force. Even a whiff of disruption could get Istanbul shut down, with armored vehicles blocking major roads. Trust me, I said, this is not what a police state looks like.When I told my friends back home that Americans thought it was outrageous for the police even to show up at a demonstration, it was considered yet more evidence that I had been recruited by the C.I.A.“The American police showed up to a protest and did nothing?” one of my friends scoffed. “Just watched? No arrests? No heads bashed in?” Yeah, right.In the two decades that have passed since then, American protests have changed a bit. America’s response to them has changed a great deal.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Hillary Clinton Accuses Protesters of Ignorance of Mideast History

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      In an interview on the MSNBC show “Morning Joe,” on Thursday, Ms. Clinton criticized student protesters, saying many were ignorant of the history of the Middle East, the United States and the world.Hillary Clinton on Thursday criticized campus protesters, saying young people “don’t know very much” about the history of the Middle East.“I have had many conversations, as you have had, with a lot of young people over the last many months now,” she said on the MSNBC show “Morning Joe” on Thursday. “They don’t know very much at all about the history of the Middle East, or frankly about history, in many areas of the world, including in our own country.”Ms. Clinton then went on to imply that young people “don’t know” that had Yasir Arafat, the former leader of the Palestinian Authority, accepted a deal brokered by her husband, President Bill Clinton, the Palestinians would already have a state of their own. “It’s one of the great tragedies of history that he was unable to say yes,” she said.The comments, made in response to a sprawling question about radicalization on university campuses from the host, Joe Scarborough, were criticized on social media by those who said that Ms. Clinton, a professor of international and public affairs at Columbia University, was underestimating students’ capacity.While some said they agreed with Ms. Clinton, others described her characterization of the failure of the Oslo peace process — a yearslong attempt to negotiate peace between Israel and Palestine that began in 1993 but ultimately failed — as an oversimplification.“For Clinton to say this is really disingenuous,” Osamah F. Khalil, a professor of history and Middle East expert at Syracuse University, said in an interview. He noted that in the lead-up to the summit at Camp David in 2000, where negotiations ultimately faltered, Mr. Arafat had warned former president Bill Clinton that “the two sides were not ready.” To lay blame squarely on the Palestinians was unfair, he added, noting that there had been other missed opportunities for a solution. “Diplomacy is not a one-time mattress sale,” Prof. Khalil said.Ms. Clinton’s comments about the students failed to give them, or the elite institutions at which many are protesting, due credit, he said.The comments come after students walked out of Ms. Clinton’s class in November to protest what they perceived as the school’s role in publicly shaming students who had signed a statement saying the Israeli government bore responsibility for the war. Last month, others disrupted Ms. Clinton’s visit to her alma mater, Wellesley College. More

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      Colson Whitehead Cancels His Commencement Speech at UMass Amherst

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      The Pulitzer Prize-winning author Colson Whitehead said Thursday that he would not give the commencement address at the University of Massachusetts Amherst on May 18 as planned, citing the administration’s decision to call the police on campus protesters.“I was looking forward to speaking next week at UMass Amherst,” Mr. Whitehead wrote on the social network Bluesky. “But calling the cops on peaceful protesters is a shameful act. I have to withdraw as your commencement speaker. I give all my best wishes and congratulations to the class of ’24 and pray for the safety of the Palestinian people, the return of the hostages, and an end to this terrible war.”Michael Goldsmith, a representative for Mr. Whitehead, said the author had no further comment.The school said that the ceremony would proceed without a commencement speaker.“We respect Mr. Whitehead’s position and regret that he will not be addressing the Class of 2024,” Ed Blaguszewski, a spokesman for the University of Massachusetts Amherst, said in a statement. The police arrested about 130 people at the University of Massachusetts Amherst on Tuesday night after pro-Palestinian protesters refused to remove their encampments.Mr. Whitehead, whose novels include “The Underground Railroad” and “The Nickel Boys,” is an extraordinarily decorated author. He has won the Pulitzer Prize twice, in 2020 and 2017, and was a finalist in 2002. He also won the National Book Award, a MacArthur Fellowship and a Guggenheim Fellowship.He is also something of shape-shifter, moving easily between disparate genres. His book “Sag Harbor” was a coming-of-age novel, “Zone One” was a postapocalyptic zombie story, and “The Underground Railroad” followed a young enslaved woman who escapes from a Georgia plantation.C Pam Zhang, the author of “How Much of These Hills Is Gold,” and Safiya Umoja Noble, author of “Algorithms of Oppression” and a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, have also withdrawn from commencement speeches this year, according to the website LitHub. Both were scheduled to speak at the University of Southern California’s Rossier School of Education. More

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      Police Arrest M.I.T. Protesters After Suspensions Ramp Up Tension

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      Several protesters at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology were arrested on Thursday after blocking access to a parking garage on campus, a day after some students involved in the pro-Palestinian encampment there received notices of suspension from the university.University police arrested “fewer than 10” people, according to a statement posted Thursday night on M.I.T.’s emergency management website. It was unclear what charges they would face, and a university spokesperson declined to comment further.The university had set a Monday deadline for protesters to vacate the encampment on the Cambridge campus or face suspension. Since then, the M.I.T. administration has begun sending notices of suspension to students who it says defied the deadline. Administrators would not say how many students had been suspended.“This means you will be prohibited from participating in any academic activities — including classes, exams or research — for the remainder of the semester,” said a letter received by one student and viewed by a reporter. “You will also be prohibited from participating in commencement activities or any cocurricular or extracurricular activities.”The university had detailed the consequences of suspension in a letter to student protesters before the Monday deadline, making clear that those who had previously been disciplined “related to events since Oct. 7” would also be barred from university housing and dining halls.As an additional condition of suspension, some students also lost their eligibility to be employed by the university, a penalty that cut off the income of graduate student employees who were suspended.“I don’t know what comes next,” said Prahlad Iyengar, a first-year graduate student who said he had lost his income and housing as a result of his suspension. “I have friends and a community, and I can find a place, but there are people affected who are housing- and food-insecure, some with children.”M.I.T.’s president, Sally Kornbluth, was one of three university leaders who were harshly criticized last year for their testimony in a congressional hearing about campus antisemitism. The other two, Claudine Gay of Harvard and Elizabeth Magill of the University of Pennsylvania, resigned in the fallout.Although Ms. Kornbluth did not face the same level of criticism, hundreds of M.I.T. alumni signed a letter calling for the university to take stronger actions to combat campus antisemitism.In a letter to the campus on Monday, she wrote: “This prolonged use of M.I.T. property as a venue for protest, without permission, especially on an issue with such sharp disagreement, is no longer safely sustainable.” More

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      Police Say U.C.L.A. Protesters Had Supplies Intended to Occupy Building

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      More than 40 people were arrested Monday on suspicion of conspiracy to commit a crime, according to the police department at the University of California, Los Angeles.Police officials at the University of California, Los Angeles, said on Wednesday that the dozens of pro-Palestinian protesters who were arrested in a parking garage on campus earlier this week had tools and other items that were intended to help occupy a campus building.Members of the group had several metal pipes, a pair of bolt cutters, super glue, padlocks and a long chain, according to a statement from the U.C.L.A. Police Department. They also had literature that included “The Do-It-Yourself Occupation Guide” and the “De-Arrest Primer.”Police officers initially arrested 44 people and charged most of them with conspiracy to commit a crime, according to the statement. Two local journalists were among those detained, but they were released without charges after being taken to a Los Angeles Police Department jail. The police said they did not have press credentials. A third person was also released without charges.Sean Beckner-Carmitchel, a freelance journalist who has been covering the U.C.L.A. protests, was one of the two journalists arrested. He said he stumbled across the students in the parking lot after they were detained and began filming. His arrest “came out of nowhere,” he said.“The idea that someone who quite clearly was just there to film, being guilty of a conspiracy, is absolutely cuckoo bananas,” he added.Of those arrested, 35 were U.C.L.A. students, the police said. Four of the people arrested on Monday had also been arrested on May 2 when the police shut down a pro-Palestinian encampment at the campus. The 41 who face charges were released after being booked and cited, the police said.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Man Is Charged After Hitting Protester With His Car Near Columbia

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      Two demonstrators whom the driver, Reuven Kahane, was arguing with were also arrested and charged.A man who got into an argument with pro-Palestinian demonstrators before hitting one with his car on the Upper East Side of Manhattan on Tuesday has been charged with assault, according to the police.The man, Reuven Kahane, 57, was arguing with two demonstrators around 9 a.m. when he struck a 55-year-old woman with his vehicle, the police said. In reaction, the demonstrators hit Mr. Kahane’s car.Mr. Kahane was charged with assault with intent to cause physical injury with a weapon. One of the demonstrators, Maryellen Novak, was treated at Weill Cornell Medical Center for minor injuries. She was arrested and charged with criminal mischief and unlawful assembly. The other demonstrator involved, John Rozendaal, 63, was also arrested and charged with criminal mischief.Mr. Kahane had not been arraigned as of Wednesday morning. The protesters were demonstrating outside of the home of a Columbia University trustee on the Upper East Side, according to USA Today. More