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eearlier this week I sat down to write a piece about a campus safety officer at a New York state college who told pro-Palestinian protesters that he supported genocide. “Yes, I support genocide,” the officer said after a protester accused him of it at a graduation event at the College of Staten Island, part of the public City University of New York (CUNY) system. last thursday. “I support killing all of you, how about that?”
You may not have heard of this incident: Although it was covered by several outlets, including the Associated Press, it did not receive a large amount of press. It certainly wasn’t splashed all over the front page of the New York Post, as it would have been if that watchman had made the same comment about the Israelis. The New York Times, who wrote a a lot about safety on college campuses – and published an article about anti-Israel speeches at CUNY just a few days before this incident – I didn’t seem to think it was newsworthy. And the White House didn’t chime in with a horrified statement about anti-Palestinian bias at universities. It wasn’t a big deal after all, was it? Just a security guard said he supports genocide. Which, it should be clear by now, is essentially the same position as the US government.
So yeah, that’s what I was going to write about. But after a few paragraphs I stopped writing. I had had a quick look at Twitter/X, you see, and it was full of the horrors of tent slaughter in Rafah, where an Israeli airstrike killed at least 45 people in an area where displaced Palestinians were hiding. This, of course, is already old news: More killings followed Sunday night’s massacre — and Israel said it was planning many more months of it.
The images from Gaza are mercilessly traumatic, but the Rafah massacre was simple unbearably upsetting. Reports of decapitated babies. Charred children. People burned alive. All just days after the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ordered Israel halts its military offensive in Rafah. All the while, the US government has issued apology after apology for Israel’s gross violations of international law, which Israel has said was simply a “tragic mistake.”
After these pictures I could no longer function. I definitely couldn’t sit down and try to write. The hopelessness, the terror, and the rage seemed too overwhelming to me. My complicity felt too overwhelming—the knowledge that this mass slaughter was being facilitated and funded by the American taxpayer, the knowledge that a small fraction of my writing income was going toward this suffering. While the public school around the corner from me in Philly is failing because there is never enough money for education and the library near me closes on Sundays because there is never enough money for public services and there are people bankrupting the US from medical bills because there is never enough money to invest in public health. But there’s always money for bombs.
What’s the point? I keep asking myself. What is the point of writing when it is already abundantly clear that there are no red lines, that absolutely nothing will stop the carnage? Not the UN Human Rights Council defining it as genocidenot international courts telling Israel to stop, and certainly not my little opinions.
The point I have to remind myself is that all genocides begin with this dehumanizationand we must all do what we can to repel this. This genocide was built on decades of demonizing and dehumanizing Palestinians – and public consent for this assault on Gaza was manufactured using dehumanizing narratives designed to ensure that no one could think of a Palestinian as an innocent civilian or even a human being .
One of the most incendiary examples was lying rumor that 40 decapitated babies were found in Kibbutz Kfar Azza after the Hamas attack. Hamas, of course, committed atrocities on October 7, including the murder of 38 Israeli children. But the fake news of 40 beheaded babies, which the Israeli government’s press office confirmed to Le Monde, was not true – was powerful and emotional and spread absolutely everywhere, including to and from the White House.
Joe Biden repeated these unverified reports even as his staff urged him not to. He even lied about being seen pictures of these babies. It was Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction again. It was Kuwait incubator fraud at first. He set the stage for genocide; for politicians to look at pictures of Palestinian children beheaded by US-made rockets and just shrug.
We see the same dehumanization come into play when it comes to politics on the American campus. Pro-Palestinian protesters are painted as hateful and dangerous, while violence by pro-Israel voices is minimized. When a pro-Israel crowd attacked Palestinian protesters at UCLA, for example, the police (usually eager to crack down on protesters) allowed the attack to happen. The American press used the passive voice and characterized the violence – which by most accounts was extremely one-sided – as “clashes”.
As for the CUNY officer supporting genocide? His words were also downplayed by the mainstream media. Hill, for example, who is a centrist, chose the following title: New York college suspends employee after alleged threats to campus protesters. Note the use of perceived: language minimizes the incident. Also, there is a clear choice not to put the words “kill you all” in the title. And while there is video of the officer making the remarks, Hill made sure to say in the piece that it “looked” like he was making the remarks.
Now compare that to a similar incident where a pro-Palestinian protester said something violent. In April, the Hill published material with the title: Columbia bans student protest leader who said ‘Zionists don’t deserve to live,’ university says. In this case, they put the inflammatory quote in the title. There were also no words of clarification about the video; because it was a pro-Palestinian protester who said something violent, it was taken at face value. All of these small reporting choices add up to a larger narrative about who is a bully and who isn’t. They help produce consent.
So while it feels pointless to write this, the point is to make it clear that many of us do not consent to what is being done with our taxpayer money and the encouragement of our elected officials. The point is to make sure it’s all recorded. Because decades into the future when Israeli apartments line the ethnically cleansed beaches of Gaza and people look back on this genocide, there will be many who say that I did not know. There will be people who will try to rewrite history to make it appear that the genocide currently unfolding is too complex to analyze. The point is to remind everyone too afraid to speak up that your silence is complicity.
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