In 2004, while President George W. Bush was running
for re-election, he developed a sinister reputation for aggressively banishing
political dissent from his events. Bush “rewrote the playbook for
organizing campaign rallies,” USA Today declared, ejecting from them people who
scrawled anti-war messages on signs and shirts. The ACLU sued and
successfully settled
with the federal government over one couple’s thwarted attempts to
wear anti-Bush t-shirts to a 2004 rally. One political science professor
even compared
Bush to Richard Nixon over the suppressive behavior at these events.
Fast forward to 2015, this past
Saturday, when Bernie Sanders, an increasingly viable contender
for the Democratic presidential nomination, held one of his biggest campaign
rallies to date, drawing more than 20,000 people to an event at
the Boston convention center. Among those visitors were a number of
young activists from Boston Students for Justice in Palestine, who were curious
about Sanders’ position on the occupied territories. They had a sign with them;
in a playful nod to one of Sanders’ campaign slogans, it simply
asked, “Will Ya Feel The Bern For Palestine?” The activists say they
were well-received by other Sanders supporters in the crowd.
But staffers working for a candidate widely
viewed as one of the most progressive members of the Senate were apparently not
happy. Security was made aware of a threat: Some students who support
Sanders were holding a sign with a question on it. A tactic right out of the Bush
campaign “playbook” went into action.
“They told us to either put the sign away or leave,”
said Sana Hashmani, one of the student activists. “We asked why, and they said
that Bernie’s campaign staff had said the sign had to go.”
There had been no signs of trouble previously. The
pro-Palestine group was doing nothing unusual — except, perhaps, for daring to
question Sanders about territories occupied by Israel, of which Sanders has
been a not-entirely-progressive supporter. “When we got there and entered the
overflow space with our sign, people were supporting us and taking pictures,
and other people had signs talking about various social issues as well,”
Hashmani said.
In a brief cell phone
video of the incident, security staff can be seen threatening to arrest the
students if they didn’t leave the premises.
Two days after the students were ejected, a day after
the group posted about the encounter on Facebook, a Sanders 2016
spokesperson acknowledged a campaign staffer was behind the
ejection and that an error had been made. “What happened was a poor
decision by a low-level staffer and doesn’t reflect campaign policy,” the
spokesperson said.
To a certain extent, the episode reflects an underlying
tension between Sanders’ base of young progressives and
his comparatively friendly posture toward Israel. A 2014 Pew Research
Center poll
found minority and millennial Democrats markedly more critical of Israeli
military actions. At a town hall event last August, Sanders lost his temper
with supporters who had interrupted him to question him about U.S. support for
Israel, telling them to “shut
up,” and attempting to change the subject to ISIS. During Israel’s
2014 military campaign against the Gaza Strip a plurality of Democrats
described the action as “unjustified,” while Sanders was part of the
unanimous Senate consent supporting Israel’s actions. He has continued to
defend the “Protective Edge” operation as a legitimate act of self-defense,
albeit one in which Israel “overreacted.”
Even Sanders’ support for a two-state solution
to the Israel/Palestine conflict, which he progressively advocated before
it became mainstream U.S. orthodoxy, now seems out of touch; a 2014 Brookings
Institute poll found
a majority of Americans favored a more radical one-state solution to the
conflict, were a two-state solution to become unfeasible.
But the ejection of pro-Palestine students from the
Sanders rally surfaced a bigger question with a potentially more
disturbing answer: Can this candidate, beloved by the left
wing, learn to cope more tolerantly with protest and dissent?
Already, Sanders has been criticized
for his handling
of Black Lives Matter protesters at his events. Boston Students for Justice in
Palestine are also worried about a tendency to marginalize, rather than engage,
critics.
“What concerns us most,” read a post about
the incident on the group’s Facebook page, “about being unwelcome in this
political space on the basis of a sign is not what is says about Bernie’s
stance on Palestine, but rather, his team’s refusal to entertain diverse
viewpoints. Is this how Bernie is going to answer those, supporters and
non-supporters alike, who ask challenging questions about his views? Just
silencing them?”
In recent months, Sanders has been transformed from
an obscure candidate into a potent challenger to Hillary Clinton. This effort
has come in large part due to a committed progressive base, who contribute
not just by attending Sanders rallies but financially, with small
individual donations that have become
a tidal wave, helping the candidate stay competitive. For
this young base, the suggestion that his campaign is unreceptive to their
views, perhaps even willing to silence them, is particularly dispiriting.
“The way they reacted to us trying to bring up this
issue was very aggressive,” said Jose Godoy, one of the students ejected from
the event. “They singled us out, and didn’t seem to want this issue to be
brought up at all.”
That view was echoed by Ibrahim Sumaira, who said,
“We look up to Bernie Sanders on a lot of issues, but we don’t want the same
thing to happen where we believed that Barack Obama would meaningfully change
foreign policy and nothing of that sort ended up occurring.”
Update: Added comment from the Sanders campaign,
responding to a prior request from The Intercept. Oct 5 11:50 pm.
Correction: A previous version of the story
identified the “shut up” incident as taking place in August 2015, whereas it
should have indicated August 2014.
Update: Sanders campaign manager Jeff Weaver has
indicated the staffer responsible for the ejections has been removed
from their position, and reiterated the decision to remove the students does
not reflect campaign policy.
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