By Caitlin Johnstone

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Empire managers and propagandists are losing their minds about student protests against the genocide in Gaza on university campuses, so naturally we’re seeing a mad push to frame this as the result of interference by Russia, China, Iran and Hamas. These demented conspiracies of foreign influence come even as Israel’s prime minister openly calls for the US government to quash the university protests by any means necessary.

In a speech supporting the ban of TikTok this past Tuesday, Senator Pete Ricketts said the protests are an example of “the Chinese Communist Party using TikTok to skew public opinion on foreign events.”

“Look what’s happening in our college campuses right now around this country,” Ricketts said. “Pro-Hamas activists are taking over public spaces and making it impossible for campuses to operate.”

“Why is this happening?” Ricketts continued. “Well, let’s look at where young people are getting their news. Nearly a third of adults 18 to 29, these young people in the US are regularly getting their news exclusively from TikTok. Pro-Palestinian and pro-Hamas hashtags are generating 50 times the views on TikTok right now despite the fact that polling shows Americans overwhelmingly support Israel over Hamas. These videos have more reach than the top 10 news websites combined. This is not coincidence. The Chinese Communist Party is doing this on purpose. They are pushing this racist agenda with the intention of undermining our democratic values. And if you look at what’s happening at Columbia University and other campuses across the country right now, they’re winning.”

These comments from Ricketts are repugnant and deceitful in a whole host of ways, but let’s touch on the big ones.

The senator’s claim that TikTok is being manipulated to artificially amplify pro-Palestine content is false, as evidenced by the fact that TikTok’s US-based rivals Facebook and Instagram have been showing the same massive gaps between the popularity of pro-Palestine content and the popularity of pro-Israel content. His argument is as logically fallacious as claiming that flat earth content is being artificially suppressed because it’s not as popular as round earth content. Pro-Israel content is just less popular, because it sucks and people don’t like it.

Ricketts’ assertion that “polling shows Americans overwhelmingly support Israel over Hamas” is deceitful; polling shows a majority of Americans oppose Israel’s actions in Gaza, regardless of whether they “support” the Palestinian militant group Hamas.

Also noteworthy is the way Ricketts just comes right out and acknowledges that TikTok is presenting a problem because its pro-Palestine content has been going viral among young people in ways the legacy media can’t compete with. This amounts to an admission that empire managers like Pete Ricketts really just want TikTok to be banned because young people are using it to share unauthorized ideas and information with each other, and would support its elimination even if they couldn’t justify it under the pretense of fighting China.

It’s probably also worth noting that Rickets has received at least $159,000 from the Israel lobby.

Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi repeated the fartbrained opinion she’s been voicing for months that anti-genocide demonstrations can be attributed to Russia, telling RTÉ News this past Wednesday that opposition to President Biden’s backing of an active genocide has “a Russian tinge to it”.

“It’s in Putin’s interest for ‘What’s His Name’ to win, and therefore I see some encouragement on the part of the Russians,” said the longtime Democratic Party leader in reference to Donald Trump.

Anti-Defamation League president Jonathan Greenblatt says it’s actually Iran who’s tricking all these university students into thinking genocide is bad, telling MSNBC that the two main organizations behind the demonstrations — the Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace — are actually “campus proxies” of Iran.

“Iran has their military proxies like Hezbollah, and Iran has their campus proxies like these groups like SJP and JVP,” Greenblatt proclaimed on literally no basis whatsoever.

The Wall Street Journal tells us that rather than China, Russia or Iran, it’s actually Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis who are behind the university campus protests.

In an article titled “Who’s Behind the Anti-Israel Protests,” subtitled “Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis and others are grooming activists in the U.S. and across the West,” The Wall Street Journal’s Steven Stalinsky makes another one of his signature chowderheaded arguments based entirely on vague insinuations, shoulder-socket-jeopardizing reach, Gish gallop fallacy, and no real evidence of any kind.

“Six months after the attack on Israel, Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis and others aren’t merely cheering those protesting in the streets,” writes Stalinsky. “They are working with and grooming activists in the U.S. and the West, through meetings, online interviews and podcasts.”

No no, not meetings, online interviews and podcasts! No wonder they were able to hypnotize university students into opposing daily massacres against a walled-in population driven by ethnically motivated hatred.

Stalinsky runs a think tank called the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), which was literally founded by a former Israeli intelligence officer. Pro-Palestine activist and academic Norman Finkelstein has accused MEMRI of using “the same sort of propaganda techniques as the Nazis,” and even brazenly unprincipled empire propagandist Brian Whitaker has written that MEMRI “poses as a research institute when it’s basically a propaganda operation.”

All this drooling imbecility about completely fictional foreign interference being responsible for these campus protests looks even more ridiculous as the Israeli prime minister unabashedly flexes his nation’s extensive influence over US politics to call for a crackdown on campus demonstrations.

“What’s happening in America’s college campuses is horrific. Antisemitic mobs have taken over leading universities,” Benjamin Netanyahu said in a statement, addressing the American public in his perfect American English.

“It has to be stopped,” Netanyahu continued. “It has to be condemned and condemned unequivocally. But that’s not what happened. The response of several university presidents was shameful. Now, fortunately, state, local, federal officials, many of them have responded differently but there has to be more. More has to be done.”

It is a very dark kind of hilarious to see imperial spinmeisters falling all over themselves trying to spin the campus protests as a product of imaginary foreign interference even as police launch violent crackdowns on those very same protesters across the United States to advance the interests of a foreign government.

It’s also a big loogie in the eye of any self-respecting free thinker. Unless your brain has been turned into bean curd by empire propaganda, the idea that young people would need to be manipulated into opposing the incomprehensible horrors that are being inflicted upon human beings in Gaza is an appalling insult to your intelligence.

But that just shows how desperate these freaks are getting. More and more people are waking up from the lies they’ve been fed about their government, their nation and their world as western institution after western institution completely discredits itself in the eyes of the mainstream public trying to defend the most indefensible things imaginable.

They’re frantically scrambling to try to remedy this PR crisis they’ve created for themselves, but everything they’ve tried so far has been a pathetic failure that has only made things worse for them, turning an entire generation into wide awake radicals whose bright young eyes will never, ever unsee what they have seen.

Original article: caitlinjohnstone.com.au