There’s a Sniper on the Roof of the School Where I Studied Authoritarianism

On student protests and principled defiance.

There are snipers on the roof of the school where I got my MA.

There are police beating students at the school where I got my PhD.

At each school, I studied authoritarian regimes and how they brainwash people into believing that state brutality is not only expected, but deserved.

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At Indiana University, I wrote my master’s thesis on how the government of Uzbekistan invented a terrorist group, “Akromiya,” in order to justify their killing of over seven hundred protesters in the city of Andijon in May 2005.

I wrote parts of my thesis in the Indiana Memorial Union: a student center where I would drink coffee and work. A student center where there are now snipers on the roof, their weapons aimed at students on the ground.

Indiana University calls the IMU “the lifeblood of IU Bloomington”. I wonder how much lifeblood will be spilled. Matt Pierce, an Indiana state representative, warns that IU could become the next Kent State.

IU students are protesting Israel’s massacre of Palestinians. Since October 2023, the Israeli military has killed over 34,000 Palestinian civilians, about half of whom were children. Some Palestinian children died in bombings. Others were shot in the head by Israeli snipers.

Doctors in Gaza have noted the wildly disproportionate death toll, saying Israel’s focus on children is unlike anything they have seen.

“This is not a normal war,” says Canadian doctor Fozia Alvi. “The war in Ukraine has killed 500 kids in two years and the war in Gaza has killed over 10,000 in less than five months. We have seen wars before but this is something that is a dark stain on our shared humanity.”

When Israel is not murdering Palestinian children, it is torturing them. Israel has created the biggest cohort of pediatric amputees in history. It has denied food and water to a population of nearly two million people, causing a mass starvation crisis. It has wiped out entire Palestinian family lines.

In response, the United States government gave them billions in unconditional aid.

A typical week in the life of a Palestinian family these days is that of Sabreen al-Rouh Jouda. Sabreen was named after her mother, Sabreen al-Sakani, whom the Israeli military murdered when she was 30 weeks pregnant. They murdered baby Sabreen’s father and four-year-old sister too. The family was living in Rafah, the border city where Palestinians flee to escape Israel’s bombs. A Palestinian doctor attempted to save baby Sabreen, delivering her via C-section as her mother died. The baby lived for a few days in an incubator, and then she died too.

The Israeli government said they were “targeting Hamas fighters and infrastructure” when they killed baby Sabreen. They claimed it was self-defense.

Self-defense, from an unborn baby. A week in the life is one week of life.

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I spent my time at IU studying liars. Most of the liars worked for the authoritarian government of Uzbekistan, but some worked for American think tanks.

These Western scholars, afraid of losing their access to Uzbekistan, went along with the Uzbek government’s lies. When I wrote about Uzbekistan’s crimes, I wrote about those scholars too.

I was at Indiana University from 2004-2006, at the height of the “war on terror.” The Bush years were a boom time for liars. US officials labeled innocent Muslims as terrorists as a pretext for kidnapping or torturing them. They bombed civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan and called the corpses “collateral damage.”

It was self-defense, they assured us. Every morning, as civilians died from our bombs and in our torture chambers, we Americans were informed of our level of peril via a color-coded chart that never veered from “high.” We were told that we were the ones who should be afraid.

And we should have been — of losing our conscience, surrendering our souls.

One would think that it would be the older generations — those who lived through the exploitation of genuine 9/11 trauma to justify war crimes against innocent Iraqis — who would see most clearly how the government of Israel is using the genuine trauma of 10/7 to attack innocent Palestinians.

But that is not the case.

It is young people who are leading the protests against Israeli war crimes and US complicity. Their demands are straightforward. The US government is funding Israel’s slaughter of Palestinian civilians. Student protesters want them to stop. They want their schools to reveal their finances and divest from companies producing weapons and providing aid for Israel’s war crimes and apartheid policies.

These are reasonable requests. They are prompted by the horror and sympathy created when one watches videos of Palestinian children being murdered for seven months while IDF soldiers brag about killing them.

Pundits often present the motivations of the student protesters as a great mystery, despite the protesters writing out lists of demands. This is because many see the protests through selective video clips, which make for better TV and social media.

Many protest clips are devoid of context. Some show people harassing students for being Jewish or Muslim: bigotry that should never be excused. Some show violent attacks by police: professors being tackled, tear gas, rubber bullets. Some show pro-Israel counter-protesters screaming that the kids deserve it for having the audacity to sit in tents with signs.

The concrete demands of the students have been drowned out by smears from powerful officials — like Benjamin Netanyahu, who compares the students to German Nazis; or fanatical Zionist Senators like John Fetterman, who compares the students, many of whom are Jewish, to the neo-Nazis of Charlottesville who chanted “Jews will not replace us.”

The campus war is a propaganda war.

I wrote about propaganda wars. I researched them at Indiana University. After the Uzbek government framed its massacre of protesters as a response to terrorism, a poet, Yusuf Jumaev, wrote a sarcastic poem denouncing the president’s portrayal.

“The padshah’s family are the people, taqsir.
The rest are terrorists of Hizb-ut Tahrir.”

Jumaev was responding to the president’s claims that he embodied “the people” and that anyone who opposed him was a dangerous terrorist in wait — even though the Andijon protesters were ordinary Uzbeks who wanted a fairer, freer Uzbekistan.

I remember when I translated that poem, with a dictionary at a desk, before the advent of Google Translate. I was in the Indiana Memorial Union, grateful to be in a place where I had freedom of speech. I naively thought that if I helped bring awareness to the plight of others, it might change things.

It didn’t change much, but it is always worth translating the poem of a dissident. The Palestinians understand that too.

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After I got my MA from IU, I went to Wash U for my PhD. I still live near Washington University, where police beat and arrested protesters last weekend.

I covered the Ferguson protests ten years ago. I am used to seeing innocent people beaten and arrested in St. Louis. I am not used to seeing it happen at Wash U.

But if there is a definitive story of the past decade, it is how the net of oppression has widened. Whether through covid, climate change, or the loss of hard-won rights: we are all targets, we are all disposable.

The Occupy mantra simmering in the once apolitical Wash U campus when I left it in 2012 — “We Are the 99%” — was accurate. The greatest strength of the protests lies in their numbers: that is why officials fear them.

My greatest fear for the protesters is that the US political establishment is so bloodthirsty and fanatical in its fealty to Israel that even numbers won’t sway them. The Israeli and American governments have a long tradition of seeing numbers instead of people and reducing them by elimination.

When I drive by the student protesters, I keep thinking of how close they are in age to so many of the Palestinian victims. They know that there were Palestinian versions of themselves, teenagers with dreams of their own, whose lives were snuffed out by Israel. They know that Israel destroyed all the universities in Gaza and assassinated its professors and philosophers and poets.

They know the stolen future, and they refuse to forget what was lost. They are not alone in that.

The biggest dividing line in this struggle is not age or ethnic background. It’s whether when you see a Palestinian child in pain, you feel like you are looking at your own child, or any child you’ve loved and protected. And your heart breaks.

Or whether you see Palestinian children in pain and feel nothing, or excuse their murder as “collateral damage,” or even label them potential terrorists.

If you cannot recognize the humanity of a child, you have lost your own. If you cannot respect the fundamental innocence of a child, then you are the guilty one.

*          *          *

I am not precious about my time in university. I skipped graduation because I don’t like waiting in line.

I usually forget to tell people I have a PhD, because while my research meant a great deal to me, credentials do not. The university was just the place that gave me money and resources to write.

At Wash U, I wrote a dissertation on dictatorships and dissent in the digital age. I finished it thirteen years ago, but it feels much longer than that because of technological change. I wrote about dissidents from the pre-smart phone era, when bloggers painstakingly cited their sources and video was rare. When the world moved slower, for better and for worse, and the topics I studied were (often wrongly) considered things that happened only “over there” — not in America.

In contrast, the student protesters are natives to a digital dystopia. They know how technology can render you captive. They have found new ways to escape.

Their digital dystopia is an extension of their physical reality, a hall of mirrors they have been navigating since birth. When you grow up in a hall of mirrors, you have no choice but to take a long look at yourself — and then decide which version of yourself you want to be.

There are some things people can never take from you, no matter how much power they have. Your conscience, your compassion. These cannot be stolen, only surrendered.

When I watch the protests, I see students refusing to surrender their morality, even if it means risking their safety. I see administrations so frightened by the prospect of principled defiance that they overreact and resort to violence.

As an alumnus, it is disappointing. But it’s far more alarming to me as a fellow American. It should not be controversial to protest US funding of the killing of civilians — especially children, especially on behalf of a foreign state.

*          *          *

It is not easy to be in Gen Z. Older people either rapturously proclaim that Gen Z will save America or demonize them as entitled. They are portrayed as saints or sinners, but rarely as human beings with a diverse array of opinions.

Every young generation faces this sneering dismissal. It happened to the Boomers, Gen X, and the Millennials too.

But there’s something cruel about ascribing great responsibility or great blame to a generation that has, in their short lives, endured a global plague, rising autocracy, the loss of civil rights, school shootings, catastrophic climate change, multiple economic crashes, and other atrocities often prefaced with the word “unprecedented”.

They have no reason to trust authority, and plenty of reason to fear it. They are aware that our society runs on purchased merit, and they are willing to sacrifice their own for people they do not know.

They were born into a fraying system, the torn seams of which reveal a gaping hole where morality should be. They can either join the dark pantomime or try to make something new.

You don’t need to know everything about America to know you don’t want to grow up in this version.

Gen Z did not create their plight, and they should not be castigated for trying to remedy preexisting disasters older generations caused. Perhaps that contributes to their understanding that ordinary Palestinian civilians did not create, and do not deserve, their current plight either.

And with that comes understanding that university investment in companies abetting war crimes is where that rarest of American youth commodities — leverage — lies.

If the administrations have nothing to hide, if they feel they have done no wrong, then they should not be offended by student demands for transparency and divestment.

Palestinians are thanking American student protesters for their efforts. They know it comes with risk: not the constant threat of death that Palestinians experience, but risk to their physical safety, to their careers, and to their freedom. Seven hundred campus protesters have been arrested since April 18.

They know the protesters are battling a powerful current. They know that this current flows from a pool of drained humanity that we call the military-industrial complex.

But they also know that these widespread protests would have been impossible decades ago. When something this impossible happens, maybe a greater tide is turning — one that will beat back that current once and for all.

There are protesters on the lawns of my old schools. There is action where apathy used to be, and I am grateful.

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A sniper at the top of the Indiana Memorial Union (photo from IUonStrike)

A flyer advertising a Wash U class I designed and taught long ago. This was the first anthropology course the school had on the internet and politics. I initially had trouble getting this course approved because the internet, in academia, was considered a trivial phenomenon that would have little impact on global politics…