LONDON - On the morning of 12 October, a crowd of about 100 members of the Brooklyn College chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine and neighborhood residents gathered outside the school’s campus for a rally in support of the Palestinian people, writes Johana Bhutan in the London-based Guardian.
The atmosphere was tense, with a heavy police presence on the ground, police helicopters hovering overhead and campus security turning out in large numbers. Inna Vernikov, an avid Israel supporter who represents southern Brooklyn on the New York City council, flashed a gun in the waistband of her pants.
Tweeting from the sidelines, she called the students “Hamas supporters” and accused them of wanting to “bring the terror here to rid the world of the Jewish people”.
The confrontation embodied the tensions at the New York campus following the Hamas-led attack on southern Israel on 7 October and Israel’s subsequent invasion of Gaza – tensions that emerged at educational institutions across the US. Earlier this month, the president of the University of Pennsylvania resigned amid the fallout of her response to the conflicts.
For Muslim and Arab students at the City University of New York, which Brooklyn College is part of, and especially students who have organized to protest the suffering and mass killing of Palestinians, the tensions have led to renewed fears that their speech is being intensely policed and that they are witnessing the start of a campaign of targeted campus surveillance.
They worry that online attacks by often-anonymous private actors; efforts by their schools and local leaders they say amount to censorship of their speech and events; and conflation of their pro-Palestinian activism with antisemitism will create a climate akin to that on campuses following 9/11, when Muslim students were closely surveilled.
While fears of surveillance and mass targeting are remnants of the post-9/11 era, the tools often leveraged by law enforcement and individuals have become vastly more sophisticated and potentially much more invasive in the years since then.
Their institution’s failure to reckon with that history, they say, contributes to their lack of faith in the administration to safeguard their safety now.
