In a way, the black-and-white Palestinian scarf draped over Hannah Sattler’s shoulders this week and the tie-dyed T-shirts of 1968 are woven from a common thread. Like so many college students across the country protesting the Israel-Hamas war, Sattler feels the historic weight of the anti-Vietnam war demonstrations of the 1960s and 70s. “They always talked about the ’68 protest as sort of a North Star,” Sattler, 27, a graduate student of international human rights policy at Columbia University, said of the campus organizers there.
And yet the police reaction has been out of control. These images are from Indiana University (my alma mater, so I’ve been taking a special interest):
Meanwhile, this is the exact same location in 1991 when students protested the Gulf War. I was only in middle school, but I was still there, cooking and doing other things around the camp. The camp was there for 45 days. No one took it down.
The difference between the two eras is how local law enforcement interpreted trespassing laws.
Not to mention the sociopolitical climate and the skin color of the protesters.
I don’t know about skin color. It’s Indiana. It was mostly white students both times.
I love that the pictures I keep seeing come out of these protests are just young nerdy kids. I’d prefer they weren’t being manhandled by fucking commandoes, but the imagery really conveys the reality vs. the “outside agitators” narrative.
Calling obese poorly trained uneducated cops “commandos” is very generous of you.
Commandoughs