Matthew J. Parker: The Hamas T-Shirt Fan Club

On October 17th, just ten days after Hamas massacred over 1,400 Israelis, an email on our faculty listserv announced that, on the following day, there would be a national student walkout and protest in support of the Palestinian people. 

This was at Berkeley, where I teach College Writing. Since I had classes on the 18th, I quickly put an assignment together to replace our in-person sessions in case any of my students wanted to attend the protest. The theme of my classes is Conformity Sucks and, given that protest is a key component of nonconformity, I wanted to give them the opportunity to attend. 

The protest was to take place on Sproul Plaza, Berkeley’s main drag. Sproul is where student groups, clubs, fraternities, and others, including outside special interests and the occasional obnoxious street preachers, are free to market their services, petition for a redress of grievances or, as is often the case concerning the preachers, rant. 

The email, as it turned out, was wrong. The protest was for the following week. I had canceled my in-person class for nothing. I then told my students that, if they planned on participating in the upcoming walkout, they’d have to eat the absence. None of them did.

I myself had been frequenting Sproul for another reason, to hawk Peregrine, College Writing’s new undergrad journal. I was out there a couple days after the misdated walkout and, as usual, both sides of the Plaza were filled with rows of tables stretching 200+ yards from the ornate Sather Gate to the southern border of campus on Bancroft Way. It was hot for mid-October, and I had a full two hours between classes. My plan was to spend half that handing out flyers, but I was only 10 minutes in when a pro-Palestinian/Hamas group showed up. It was a fairly large gathering, with a megaphone blaring the now familiar slogans by any means necessary, long live the intifada, and from the river to the sea; slogans that, whether tacitly or no, call for the elimination of Israel as a state and Jews as a people. Their signs and shouted rhetoric disgusted me enough that I packed up and left.   

Rhetoric is a Greek word meaning persuasive speech, and is essentially what I teach. So when Berkeley law professor Steven Davidoff Solomon published an op-ed in the “Wall Street Journal” entitled “Don’t Hire My Anti-Semitic Law Students,” the law students in question cried foul, claiming that their First Amendment rights were being violated. This accusation, however, is erroneous, and I explained why to my students with a demonstration I perform every semester: “Who has a job? I ask the class, and then randomly choose one raised hand.

“What’s your bosses name?” would be my next question. 

“Fidel,” the student might answer. 

“Ok. So suppose you go to work tomorrow wearing a ‘Fuck Fidel’ t-shirt?” 

This always elicits scattered laughter, followed by the student saying, “I’d get fired.” 

“Yes. You’d get fired, which is perfectly Constitutional because your speech is only protected against government interference. Fidel has the right to prevent his employees from acting offensively. He cannot, however, force you to take off that t-shirt, and you can stand out in front of your former job every day wearing it because that is your right.”

I perform this little show because I want my students to understand how the First Amendment applies to them. “Free speech is exceedingly permissive,” I continue. “Because of this, it can also have consequences. If you side with terrorists, others are allowed to call you on it. And they sure as shit don’t have to hire you.” 

To be clear, I have no love for Netanyahu, his policies, or his retaliatory actions in Gaza, but bombing civilians during a war is hardly a novel tactic, which I’ll return to presently. At that moment, however, I was trying to instill in my students that one can be both pro-Palestinian and anti-Hamas, and that openly supporting the latter is the equivalent of wearing a “Fuck Israel” t-shirt. 

But I also recognize that they are students, and students can easily get caught up in wrongheaded movements, as “The Messenger” points out: “A letter expressing ‘unwavering support of the resistance in Gaza and the broader occupied Palestinian lands’ was signed by 51 groups representing students at colleges around the country, according to Bears for Palestine, an organization affiliated with students at the University of California, Berkeley.”

This was misguided at the very least, but again, I thought it was just students being students, and that they’d all eventually come to their senses. But they didn’t. And haven’t. And moreover aren’t likely to, especially after faculty (and, yes, even college presidents) jumped on the Hamas war wagon sporting “Fuck Israel” t-shirts of their own. The University of California’s Ethnic Studies Faculty Council sent a letter to our Board of Regents stating flatly that “the UC and other higher education institutions’ administrative statements in the last week and a half, that irresponsibly wield charges of ‘terrorism’ and ‘unprovoked’ aggression, have contributed to a climate that has made Palestinian students and community members unsafe, even in their own homes.” This as opposed to the relative unsafety of over 1,400 Jewish men, women, and children butchered by Hamas – even in their own homes.

I don’t get how students at UC Berkeley – students who are currently occupying “the ancestral and unceded land of the Chochenyo speaking Ohlone people” – are made to feel unsafe simply by labeling terrorists as, well, terrorists. But what I really don’t get is that students and faculty who regularly cringe at terms like homeless, master class, ex-con, and field of study, suddenly find indiscriminate slaughter, torture, rape, mutilation, and hostage-taking perfectly acceptable. Apparently, not one of these barbarisms are a trifle triggering, at least among members of the Hamas T-Shirt Fan Club.  

And it is they who are choosing the nomenclature; their authority decides exactly what is abhorrent violence and what is acceptable violence. Note especially, however, how the word violence – and so too, by that token, acts of violence – have become acceptable to this particular faction. Almost overnight.

What happened to civil disobedience? Direct action? Good trouble? Where are the lessons of Gandhi? The labor and civil rights movements? MLK? Nelson Mandela? John Lennon? Need I remind these students and their overseers that African Americans have clawed their way to a modicum of equal rights without murdering a single baby? Without massacring children in front of parents or parents in front of children? Without raping and torturing and kidnapping a single grandparent?

Given these facts, support for Hamas shows not only a profound lack of knowledge, but so too empathy. In a December column entitled “Cheering Hamas on campus, too uneducated to grasp how grotesque that is,” George Will unabashedly states: “Today, the desire of Hamas to complete the Holocaust is applauded by moral cretins in academic cocoons (some Princetonians chanted ‘Globalize the intifada’), too uneducated to understand the grotesque pedigree of their enthusiasm.” 

What I can say is that the academic cocoon at UC Berkeley is tiny. Only 400+ participated in the walkout, out of a student population of approximately 45,000.  

Moreover, Hamas started this war, horrifically so, and are now using the Israeli response to garner both sympathy and support. And although I applaud the calls for a ceasefire, they are unrealistic given our history. Contrary to popular belief, there are no rules in war, a hallmark of which is that indiscriminate bombing will take place. Recall Kurt Vonnegut’s book Slaughterhouse-Five, which describes the Allies firebombing of Dresden, Germany. The book, like its predecessor Catch-22, was one of the first to satirize WW II, beginning with its title. Vonnegut explains that, in gathering material for a first draft, he visited an old war buddy, and the latter’s wife accused them of being babies: “You’ll pretend you were men instead of babies, and you’ll be played in the movies by Frank Sinatra and John Wayne or some of those other glamorous, war-loving, dirty old men. And war will look just wonderful, so we’ll have a lot more of them.” Vonnegut both agreed and promised to title the book The Children’s Crusade. And he did.

And that’s what the pro-Hamas movement reminds me of: babies wearing “Fuck Israel” t-shirts.  

The United States also firebombed Tokyo, killing over 100,000 civilians. This of course was followed by two nuclear bombs dropped on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which combined killed between 110,000 and 210,000, including at least 25 POWs, 12 of them Americans. 

So if you start a war with a country that has an air force you can count on getting bombed, and that is precisely what Hamas is counting on, not to mention the scuttling of an historic peace treaty between Israel and Saudi Arabia, and, oh yeah, we get to keep the hostages during ceasefires. 

What I find most grotesque, however, is that the civilian slaughter sirens echoing over Gaza are also echoing over a continent where they have been heedlessly echoing for decades: Africa – a large swath of which has been conquered by a multitude of invaders, including Arabs. One tiny sliver of land hugging the Mediterranean has been occupied by Jews who, for the record, have a legitimate claim to it. Meanwhile, completely surrounding them and touching the Atlantic and Indian Oceans as well as the Mediterranean, Arabian, Red, Black, and Caspian Seas are a bevy of subjugated lands, many illicitly occupied by Arab and/or Islamic states, and all dying to exterminate Jews.      

The bombing  and sexual violence has been especially brutal in the Sudan where, according to the Holocaust Museum, “ethnic Arab militia groups, known as the ‘Janjaweed,’ … attack the ethnic African groups. The government would attack from the air, and then, the Janjaweed forces would enact a scorched earth campaign, burning villages and poisoning wells. Nearly 400,000 people have been killed, women have been systematically raped and millions of people have been displaced as a result of these actions.” Black people, by the way. Black lives.  

Then there’s Yemen, where an estimated 85,000 children have starved to death as a direct result of Saudi Arabia’s intervention there, according to “The Washington Post.” Starvation, to be clear, is agonizing. It’s torture, and so a war crime in more ways than one, which is highlighted in another WAPO piece entitled “Saudi-led airstrikes in Yemen have been called war crimes. Many relied on U.S. support.” The title kind of says it all, but it also explains how “U.S. support for the Saudi war effort… began during the Obama administration and has continued in fits and starts for seven years.” While in Syria, 12,000 children were killed or injured between 2012 and 2021; “that’s one child every eight hours.” And this is not even mentioning the bombing of Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Ukraine, or that 15,000 children die every single day on our planet from starvation and preventable diseases, even on Christmas.   

Where are the protests? The walkouts? The students and professors marching in lockstep? The freedom fighters on paragliders? The language police lined up to make sure no offensive words are used when describing dead and dying children? Why are none of these arbiters of altruism divesting from purchasing devices and fucking Teslas to show their unwavering support for child slaves mining cobalt in the Congo? Where are the proxy social justice warriors of all the continents and countries of the world where war and injustice and colonialism and slavery and starvation have taken root? Inexplicably, I don’t see or hear any of them. 

Must be a frat party tonight.

---

Copyright 2024 Matthew J. Parker

Matthew J. Parker teaches writing at UC Berkley.