Student Protests and Clueless Followers

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Student protesters can be divided into two: those that believe in the issue at hand and those that do it because it is the in-thing to do. The latter also involves the personal.

You are clueless about the whole Israel and Gaza conflict but your boyfriend or girlfriend is passionate about it. You don’t want to lose him or her, so you forget the sacrifices your parents made to send you to college and join him/her in the tent you plant on campus grounds to force the administration to divest from Israel. You even put the tent on the credit card mummy and daddy gave you. It’s worth it because the camping tent is rather cozy, especially at night.

The first group believes in the nature of the conflict, which means they weighed both sides and decided on protesting for Side A, not Side B. This group understands the academic and future consequences of bringing the university or college to a standstill. They understand that college administrators are also future employers. Students understand that the placards they hold up high, might bring them down when it’s time to face the ‘real’ world. The world is digital. Two years down the road, students will go for job interviews and employers will click on a slide presentation and ask: “Is that you?”

African Americans are particularly vulnerable because race is a factor. They are called derogatory names in both Islam and Judaism. If they don’t understand that they are the last hired and first fired in corporate America, then they don’t have common sense.

If all Pro-Palestine student protesters don’t understand that Arabs, whatever their complexion don’t care about anything else except Islam, it means they should not be in college. It means they don’t understand what 9/11 was all about. Arab students never forget their history and definitely don’t care about faraway tragedies like George Floyd and Black Lives Matter. The whole world mounted protests for George Floyd. How many were in the Middle East?

Nonqaba waka Msimang

Blogger Without Borders

 

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