Coverage of college protests against the Israel-Hamas war has dominated news cycles in recent weeks even as thousands of people continue to die in the actual war, something that Chris Hayes described as “a bit decadent.”
In a searing segment of “All In with Chris Hayes,” the MSNBC host said that the media attention could be due to the fact that “it’s hard” to think of the tens of thousands of people who have been killed in Gaza, and it’s difficult to “contend with them as actual real human beings who lived lives before you took them.” Instead, it is “much easier to get angry at the spoiled brats on college campuses.”
The focus on student protestors is “an evasion” he said. “It avoids the difficult task of being universally empathetic to our fellow human beings, and truly reckoning with the scale of devastation that is wrought by our country, in our names, with our support.”
On Tuesday several of those protests tipped past boiling, particularly at Columbia University (where SWAT teams entered the occupied Hamilton Hall in riot gear) and UCLA (where the LAPD faced off against non-student agitators).
Hayes argued that these kinds of crackdowns are basically meant to distract from the more important issue. “What seems most worth debating isn’t campus speech, but whether the U.S. government should continue to fund and support an Israeli war in Gaza that has pushed more than a million people to the brink of famine,” Hayes said earlier in the segment.
“A war that has damaged half of the buildings in Gaza, a war that has failed to bring home most of the hostages held by Hamas—that has in fact led to the death of some of those hostages, as well as the deaths of an estimated 34,000 Palestinians, including roughly 10,000 women and 13,000 children,” Hayes added.
(As of April 24, 2024, ReliefWeb reported an estimated 42,510 Palestinians have been killed over 200 days of warfare. Of those, the aid organization has said 38,621 were civilians. This number includes 10,091 women and 15,780 children, and the bodies of thousands of people are still buried under the destruction.)
“Is that ongoing effort morally defensible?” he asked. “Is it strategically wise are we as a nation doing the right or wrong thing and continuing to support it?”
Hayes added that the protests called to mind similar actions leading up to the Iraq War in early 2003. Those events, which were “both widely attended and widely attacked,” were also surrounded by conversations that had nothing to do with “whether the war in Iraq was moral and prudent.”
“The war in Iraq demonstrably was neither,” Hayes continued. “On that, the protesters were right. Which brings us back to Columbia University, where 56 years ago, almost to the day, student protesters took over the same building, Hamilton Hall, that was occupied earlier this week … They believed the war was a moral catastrophe and the U.S. should stop waging it. They were right.”
A heightened focus on protests in the United States “avoids the difficult task of being universally empathetic to our fellow human beings,” Hayes also said, “and truly reckoning with the scale of devastation that is wrought by our country in our names with our support.”
As he illustrated, the U.S. spent two decades waging the Global War on Terror after the events of Sept. 11, 2001, which resulted in the deaths of an estimated 430,000 people—”children, women, elderly, innocents.” The Vietnam War killed an estimated 1 million people—”civilians, women, children, male-noun combatants, old people, and the like.”
Like the tens of thousands killed in Gaza, “It’s hard to think of them, to contend with them as actual real human beings who lived lives before you took them, who were people like you and I, who were loved by the people in their lives,” Hayes continued.
“It is much easier to get angry at the spoiled brats on college campuses.”
The university protests began on April 17 when students at Columbia set up an encampment on the school’s lawn and demanded the school divest from Israel. Since then protests have sprung up and students have been arrested at over 40 colleges and universities, including Ohio State University, Tulane University, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Watch the segment of “All In with Chris Hayes” in the video above.
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