University of Southern California graduation ceremony canceled due to pro-Palestinian protests

The graduation ceremony at the University of Southern California was canceled due to pro-Palestinian student protests, the BBC reports. According to Wednesday’s summaries, over the past week, student groups have organized demonstrations at more than twenty-five of the fifty largest universities in the United States, most of them at universities on the northeast coast of the country and in California.

USC’s graduation ceremony is traditionally attended by more than sixty-five thousand people. On Wednesday alone, the police arrested at least ninety-three people for illegal assembly on campus. Twenty-eight protesters were detained at Emory University in Atlanta by Thursday evening.

Participants of several protests across the country have been produced in recent days who participated in pro-Palestinian demonstrations on the campuses of major American universities: in one day at least thirty-four people were produced at the University of Texas at Austin, and at least fifty at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. The pro-Palestinian – and often anti-Israel – movements began last week at American universities, including Harvard, Columbia and the California State University of Technology, which Columbia, for example, tried to prevent by switching to distance learning. Students there called on the university to cut ties with arms manufacturers with ties to Israel.

At the University of Southern California, the institution’s security service tried to break up the demonstration and take the loudspeakers into custody. In Austin, demonstrators demanded that the university sever ties with what they believe is genocidal Israel, then formed a human chain to prevent the authorities from dispersing the gathering.

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Protesters are escorted by police at the University of Texas at Austin

Photo: SUZANNE CORDEIRO/AFP

On Wednesday, the Speaker of the United States Senate, Mike Johnson, faced the protesters on the Columbia campus: his speech caused great indignation in the crowd after he called the demonstrations a “virus of anti-Semitism” and then called for the resignation of the president of the university for, in his opinion, not protecting the Jews students by allowing the demonstrations. The Republican governor of Texas, Greg Abbott, stated that the authorities will in all cases detain students participating in the demonstrations and exclude them from publicly funded universities and colleges.

In the meantime, the excavation of the mass graves in Gaza, in which nearly three hundred Palestinian victims – including women, children and the elderly – were found wounded, naked and with their hands tied, is taking place in the area of ​​the Nasser and Al-Sifa hospitals. Al-Sifa served as a center for Hamas until recently, when it became the target of an Israeli incursion. According to the confession of the Israel Defense Forces, only two hundred Gazans were killed during the attacks on the Al-Sifa hospital, but according to the spokeswoman of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Ravina Shamdasani, the actual number of victims may be much higher.

The intentional killing of civilians and prisoners is a war crime.

The Israeli army launched a war in the Gaza Strip after Hamas massacred thousands of people and took hundreds of hostages in southern Israel on October 7. According to the Gaza Ministry of Health, more than thirty thousand people have died in the Palestinian territories since then. Since October, citing the Palestinian civilian victims, more and more European politicians and international aid organizations are questioning the justification, or at least the proportionality, of the strike in Gaza and demanding a cease-fire from Israel.

Peace could even mean the end of Netanyahu’s power.

Front page: Anti-government protesters with Netanyahu’s bloody face, on April 1, 2024 in Jerusalem (Photo: MENAHEM KAHANA/AFP)