Samer Badawi writes:

In June 2020, news photographer Kerem Gencer was an on-again, off-again student at Ohio State University in Columbus, the state capital. During the Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests that summer, Gencer remembers police officers in riot gear lining the streets and cutting a menacing presence in public spaces, especially around the Statehouse downtown. Some protesters were roughed up, he said. Some were arrested. Many politicians, especially on the Democratic side of the aisle, were sympathetic to the movement.

Writing in the Black-focused newspaper the Los Angeles Sentinel on June 3, 2020, then-Sen. Kamala Harris of California said she was “proud to stand with protestors” and was “heartened by how many people — from all races, ethnicities, and walks of life — joined our rallying cry that enough is enough.”

Fast forward to 2024, and Harris, now the Democrats’ presidential nominee, is sounding a different tune when it comes to the ongoing protest movement against Israel’s assault on Gaza.

Gencer should know. When I met him last week, he had just returned from Washington, D.C., where he covered the July 24 rally against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s address to Congress. He showed me images of fellow photographers struggling to open their eyes after being assaulted with pepper spray, and he remembers all too well what Harris had to say about the events. The next day in reacting to the rally, which reiterated calls for a Gaza cease-fire — a sentiment the overwhelming majority of Democrats share — Harris seized on isolated incidents in a statement that, except for one sentence on “the right to peacefully protest,” is entirely about “unpatriotic protesters” whom she accused of “associating with the brutal terrorist organization Hamas.”

“For a presidential candidate who wasn’t nominated through a democratic primary process, I’m not all that surprised that Kamala conflates the expressed voice of the American people with unpatriotic protest,” Gencer told me. [Continue reading…]