Salon.com > Marissa Brostoff

Mass murder vs. terrorism

Sun, 28 Apr 2013 12:00:00 +0000

For critics of American foreign policy, it’s all but axiomatic that the designation of a violent act as “terrorism” says as much about the accuser as it does about the accused. The U.S. government itself can’t decide on a single working definition of the term, but a standard one denotes unlawful politically-motivated violence designed to intimidate a government or civilian population. Put pressure on any part of this definition and it starts to buckle.

“Unlawful”? Why can’t terrorists — as per the word’s original meaning — be state actors? “Civilian population”? The category becomes meaningless if individuals can be retroactively subtracted from it for the crime of being struck by an American drone.

Austerity education kills dissent on Israel

Fri, 08 Feb 2013 17:00:00 +0000

On Feb. 6, Yale student activists hosted a panel laying out the case for the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement to pressure Israel into recognizing Palestinian rights. Critics of Israel face endemic hostility in this country but no public figures condemned the event, no prominent editorials were written against it, and legislators did not threaten to cut the school’s funding.

Yale can do what it wants.

The next day, Brooklyn College student activists hosted a similar panel—so similar, in fact, that it included one of the same speakers, along with the eminent social theorist Judith Butler. This time, Alan Dershowitz, the pugnacious lawyer, famed for his defenses of the state of Israel, began railing against the school’s sponsorship of the event. Subsequently, a battalion of New York lawmakers backed him up, threatening the City University of New York (CUNY) campus’s funding when its president refused to capitulate.

When student is an occupation

Fri, 28 Oct 2011 11:45:00 +0000

In the months leading up to the invasion of Iraq my senior year of high school, my friends and I briefly thought the outrage we shared with thousands of Americans would coalesce into something like “our Vietnam.” Instead, we marched in the streets once or twice and then went home to worry about college admissions. Far from signifying a position on the front lines of national upheaval, studenthood in the post-9/11 era meant crawling deeper into one’s individual cocoon of privilege. Or so we thought.

Eight years later, my friends and I, now college graduates possessed of varying amounts of despair and health insurance, are marching in the streets again, together with people of every age and educational background. But this time there is no getting around the fact that we have our own grievances to voice. With astonishing speed, the Occupy Wall Street movement has begun to catalyze a consciousness among students and college-educated youth that we are a class with a legitimate self-interest in agitating for change.