The Kids Protesting About Gaza Must Be Wrong.

When we first started protesting the Viet Nam war, we knew we were making some kind of mark on the government’s horrendous policy in Southeast Asia when J. Edgar Hoover and some of his hirelings began to announce that anti-war protestors were being directed and paid for by Communist governments or anti-American agitators from the ‘other side.’

I recall sitting in meetings with the other twenty or so ‘agitators’ on my campus joking about how we wished that someone from Moscow or Peking would give us a few bucks so that we could buy a lunch that was more than just a slice of cold pizza from the corner pizza joint.

When I left my undergraduate campus in New York and enrolled for graduate school in Chicago, one of the first things that a bunch of us did was to announce that we were going to hold a teach-in, assuming that the University Administration would give us the needed space.

A group of us then met with the University Dean, who was scared almost to the point of being terrified when we told him that one of the speakers we intended to invite was the head of the local Black Panthers group, a kid named Fred Hampton, who would later get killed by the cops while he was fast asleep in his bed.

When we promised the Dean that we would absolutely make sure that the teach-in was a peaceful event, he…