Thinking Carefully About How Protests Are Viewed

Whatever one thinks of their tactics, the Black Justice League made me realize for the first time that Woodrow Wilson’s racism was not merely typical of his day, when he reversed the civil service protections of Black federal employees that were previously in place.

Yes, the actions of pro-Palestinian demonstrators during the last two years have led to widespread accusations of antisemitism on college campuses. But why do we hear so little about Islamophobia? A Google Ngram search reveals that the former type of bigotry is mentioned roughly 100 times as often as the latter in recent books. Protesters calling for an end to the killings of Palestinians in Gaza were sometimes falsely labeled as “pro-Hamas.” Cognitive psychologists tell us that one of our most frequent errors is succumbing to the “binary bias,” leading us to think that there are only two sides — one good and the other evil. Not true.

Now that Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and others have condemned Israel’s crimes against humanity in Gaza and much of the world has recognized Palestinians’ right to statehood, we need to revisit how protests against Israel’s war were so often mischaracterized. There has been far too much attention to the methods of the protesters, and too little focus on the justice of their cause. They were courageous in being ahead of most Americans in drawing attention to the unspeakable suffering of the Palestinians in Gaza.