‘Part of the American spirit’: Arrested scholar denies campus Gaza protests are violent

Much has been mentioned concerning the college students whose protests have gripped America this previous week.

Their trigger has been framed in polarising methods. A violent Hamas-sympathising mob? Or peace activists striving for equality?

Within a frenzied spectrum of views and noise, one younger scholar sat down with me for a dialog.

Aidan Doyle, 21, is a philosophy and jazz double main on the University of California in Los Angeles (UCLA).

He was arrested early on Thursday morning for being a part of an encampment on the college.

He advised Sky News he was shocked that the police arrested so many scholar protesters, regardless of not intervening in an assault on the protesters by a pro-Israeli group the day earlier than.

He mentioned his arrest had not deterred him from persevering with his protest, which he likened to the Vietnam War demonstrations of the Sixties.

Mr Doyle rejected the notion, from President Biden, that the protests aren’t peaceable.

“Graffiti, putting posters up, that’s all peaceful,” he mentioned, commenting on the president’s assertion from the White House.

“I also think that President Biden needs to actually take some introspection and realise that maybe the reason so many of these protests are happening is partially due to him.”

Mr Doyle added: “Protests in general are part of the American spirit. They’re part of being an American. And if we were to just stand around in circles and sing and dance, and pretend everything was fine, then nothing would change and nobody would care at all.

“Part of a protest is inflicting disruption and inflicting at the very least a minor stage of chaos that’s, once more, not violent however that truly disrupts issues.”

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He denied any accusations of antisemitism, however conceded there’s a spectrum of opinion throughout the motion.

“If you’re going to criticise a movement, I think you have to look at the movement’s goals and their mission, not what fringe members of the group say or do.

“You have to really take a look at what we are saying, what the organisers say, and what’s within the mainstream, and what our mission and our objective is: the peace and prosperity of the Palestinian individuals.”

Asked if he believed in Israel’s right to exist as a country, he said: “I feel Jewish sovereignty is unimaginable. I feel it is an incredible factor.”

He added: “I think that if there is a country for Jewish people that protects the Jewish people, that is of utmost importance, especially with the vile and rampant antisemitism that exists across the world that I see every day and that I try and combat as much as possible.

“But doing that after which concurrently repressing one other group of individuals, dehumanising them and brutalising them, then the query of whether or not your state has the correct to exist turns into secondary.”