Opinion: US campus protests: Edward Said would have treasured this moment

A spectre is haunting Columbia University and other American campuses from coast to coast: that of Edward Said.  

The powers of old and new genocidal Zionism have entered into an unholy alliance to exorcise this spectre: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, US President Joe Biden, former President Donald Trump, European governments, New York Times columnists and Fox News presenters.

They are all barking up the wrong tree.  

Which party in this global anti-Zionist uprising has not been decried as “antisemitic” by its opponents in power?  

For more than half a century, US political and public discourse has been violently dominated by pro-Israel rhetoric. It is not accidental that a university affiliated with the name of Said, who taught at Columbia for the entirety of his academic life, is now changing that hegemony and putting Zionism, the Jewish supremacist ideology of a garrison state, on the defensive.  

READ MORE: US campus protests: Edward Said would have treasured this moment, Opinion by Hamid Dabashi