Hour of Dissent
Prabhat Patnaik | 8 May 2024 | The Telegraph
We are witnessing today an amazing twin-event relating to Gaza: the fascistic Benjamin Netanyahu regime, backed by a phalanx of metropolitan powers, is slaughtering Palestinians, declaring them to be ‘no better than animals’; but common people across the world are spontaneously rising in protest, solidarizing with the Palestinians and holding demonstrations against this genocide. If the former, representing the horrendous world we live in, fills one with disgust, the latter, presaging a new world of peace and fraternity, fills one with hope.
Of special significance are the demonstrations currently sweeping across American universities demanding that these institutions should ‘divest’ funds invested in companies linked to Israel and its military complex. Many rightly see parallels between these demonstrations and the anti-Vietnam War protests that had rocked American campuses in the late Sixties. But the present movement is even more significant than the earlier one; first, because there is no draft involved now and, hence, not even a whiff of self-interest behind students’ actions; and second, because it comes in the wake of a long period of Islamophobia, of demonising Muslims as the ‘Other’, and is undeterred by such manufactured antipathy…