Biden Versus the Pro-Palestinian Protesters
On this episode of The Time of Monsters, Yousef Munayyer on a president at war with his base.
NYPD officers in riot gear march onto Columbia University campus, where pro-Palestinian students were barricaded inside a building and set up an encampment, on April 30, 2024.
(Kena Betancur / AFP via Getty Images)According to a recent CNN poll, 81 percent of voters age 18 to 35 disapprove of President Joe Biden support of Israel’s war in Gaza. This number should be a concern to Biden, because for his reelection bid to succeed he absolutely needs young voters to be as enthusiastically supportive of him as they were in 2020. The issue of Israel/Palestine is dragging Biden’s support down even as he needs to rally his base. But Biden is doubling down on his policy of offering a virtual carte blanche to Benjamin Netanyahu.
This conflict between Biden’s policy and the opinions of a supermajority of young people is now spilling into actual physical violence, as universities such as Columbia and UCLA send in cops to arrest pro-Palestine protesters.
To talk about the growing political divide and what it portends for the both the Middle East and the United States, I talked to Palestinian American writer Yousef Munayyer.
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Trump is Using Terrorist Charges to Wage Political War w/ Josh Kovensky | The Time of Monsters with Jeet Heer
Over at Talking Points Memo, Josh Kovensky has written an essay on the Trump
administration’s use of anti-terrorism law to target political groups it doesn’t like.
In that piece, Kovensky notes,
"Across the country, federal prosecutors are upgrading what would have been routine
prosecutions into terrorism cases when they involve people President Trump has cast as his
political enemies.
It represents a dramatic departure from how the Justice Department has historically used the
federal material support for terrorism statute. For decades, counterterrorism prosecutors have
largely reserved the statute — 2339A — for the kinds of audacious plots that wreak real, lasting
damage or whose ambition forms the stuff of movie screenplays."
I spoke to Kovensky about his essay and the history and politics of this dangerous legal
innovation.
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