US campus protests show Zionists failed to manipulate public opinion in West

By Wesam Bahrani

The United States has instigated a record number of wars throughout history, but the Gaza genocide saw Washington deploy different tactics in a desperate attempt to sway and manipulate public opinion. 

Americans have always resorted to the use of indiscriminate armed force in wars, albeit the outcome, especially in recent decades, has highlighted the staggering decline of the US military hegemony.

When using advanced weaponry alongside a powerful air force and navy to occupy another country’s land, airspace or natural resources proves futile, the US swiftly turns to economic warfare.

This mostly involves sanctions, tariffs, controlling the markets, and other punitive economic measures. 

The US, which masterminded the Israeli genocidal war on Gaza, has realized that the Axis of Resistance has become stronger than ever and no amount of weapons or punitive economic measures could deter these resistance movements from ending the Israeli-American genocidal aggression against Palestinians in the besieged coastal territory where almost 37,000 have been killed in the past 213 days. 

Having admitted defeat against the Axis of Resistance, Americans and Zionists have recently embarked on a large-scale domestic and global war of disinformation to try and manipulate public opinion in line with their own divisive agendas. 

A whole battalion of leaders, spokespersons from the US, the Israeli occupation and Zionist cheerleaders in Britain and elsewhere have tried to whitewash the Israeli genocide. And it has been repetitive. Every answer in every TV interview begins with the same words and ends similarly. 

All this has been part of a war against the people’s conscience – painting the oppressor as the oppressed, the victim as the terrorist, and the Israeli occupation with the blood of 15,000 murdered children (and counting) on its hands as someone acting in “self-defense”. 

Despite being well-drilled in their propaganda, videos of Zionist cheerleaders sticking to the exact same narratives during TV interviews have gone viral on social media for all the wrong reasons.

This is just the tip of the iceberg in what is a heavily invested war of the minds that is more dangerous than military or economic wars as the end goal is to purely brainwash all segments of society into blindly supporting genocide. 

What these student protests on university campuses across the US and some European countries, which have been making headlines in recent weeks, have underlined is not only a generational shift in tectonic plates, but also the fact that the US propaganda war has failed spectacularly. 

The students protesting at some of the most prestigious universities in the US, where former US leaders and Congress members once attended – calling on the institutions, among other demands, to sever ties with the Israeli military – are the same students who will be future members of the US Congress. 

American leaders and policymakers are very much aware of this and that’s why they have been rattled. 

Thousands of students protesting peacefully would not be arrested with such a level of violence or in rare but rising cases, be suspended from their universities for simply speaking out against genocide and America’s number one proxy in West Asia, the Zionist entity. 

US crackdown on students was previously witnessed during the anti-war movement against the Vietnam War but not on a scale and magnitude as we are witnessing now. This is truly unprecedented.

Despite embarking on the most dangerous type of warfare, with the Americans and the Zionists attempting to control the minds of people in society, both of these parties ultimately failed amid such a vast, record-breaking number of student movements and groups voicing support for Palestine. 

The peaceful uprising In American universities that has spread throughout the Western world is evidence that the US government and the Zionist regime have lost the war to control the minds of people in the West, especially the thoughts and conscience of the younger generation. 

If it had succeeded then public anger and awareness among students over their university links with the Israeli military waging genocide in Gaza would not be on the front pages of newspapers today.

But they are, and at some point, universities will be forced to cut their ties with the Israeli military. Evergreen State College in Olympia has become the first and more are likely to follow.

If not now, then Generation Z, which is not really limited to Palestinians, Arabs and Muslims sitting in tents on university campuses, but includes mostly Caucasians as well as Jews themselves, will eventually force that change in the not-too-distant future. 

The bottom line is that America has lost another strategic war that it deployed, not for the first time, with abysmal policies that have once again backfired badly.  

The fact that protesters unfurled a banner at Columbia University’s Hamilton Hall reading “Hind’s Hall” in honor of the six-year-old Palestinian girl killed by the Israeli military in Gaza on January 29 speaks volumes. 

Hind Rajab is just one of the nearly 15,000 Palestinian children killed by the US-backed Israeli occupation forces in Gaza. Her story is heartbreaking, and so is the story of other Palestinian children.

Tens of thousands of other children have sustained life-changing injuries and around 20,000 more have been left orphaned. Many of them have no shelter or food to survive amid the genocidal war.

All of these children have a name like Hind, and all of them also have a heartbreaking story. It is the mass slaughter of children by Israeli forces that Western leaders and universities must wake up to.

Wesam Bahrani is an Iraqi journalist and commentator.

(The views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of Press TV.)

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