Criticizing the crackdown on pro-Palestinian protesters in various universities in the US, a US-based professor said that Washington has "lost its standing to talk to anybody about freedom of speech or about freedom."
Since last month, the US has seen a wave of demonstrations at US university campuses calling for an end to the war on Gaza, with student protesters facing police violence and arrests.
Students have been suspended from school and have had criminal charges pressed against them in the country, Burton Lee Artz, a professor of media studies and the director of the Center for Global Studies at the US-based Purdue University, said at a conference, titled Future(s) of Communications: Promises and Predicaments, organized by the Global Communication Association (GCA).
"They have been thrown out of their dorm rooms because they have been protesting Israel's bombing of Gaza, this violates all of the requirements of free speech, the requirements of academic freedom," he underlined.
"It reminds me a lot of the anti-Vietnam War demonstrations decades ago," he said, adding that students originally were condemned or ridiculed for protesting the US war in Vietnam.
Artz said: "We're in a similar situation now where students that are asking for an immediate permanent cease-fire in Gaza are condemned for being 'antisemitic.'
"This includes the Jewish Voice for Peace and other Jewish organizations. Somehow they are also 'antisemitic.' It's boggling and it should be condemned widely."
"We are talking about democracy and we can say that students are under pressure," he added.
He said as university administrations have cracked down on encampments, more encampments pop up on other campuses in the US and even in Europe.
Artz said that but not all universities cracked down on encampment protests, adding that Northwestern University agreed to talk with students about how to divest from Israel, Evergreen State College in Washington also agreed to divest from suppliers of military equipment to Israel, he stressed.
Stressing that the American public "is in favor of a cease-fire," Artz said: "You wouldn't know that if you listened to Joe Biden and the Democratic National Committee and the Democrats in Congress."
"The American people, by and large, want an end to the bombing," he added.
He said that a different approach from the US on Palestine and Ukraine is "hypocrisy."
"I mean, on the one hand, you say, we want to follow the rule of law, but everything that Israel has done in Gaza violates international law," the professor added.
According to him, the US is violating international law by supplying arms to Israel and also violating its own law as Washington is not supposed to give aid to anybody that misuses that aid against civilians.
