Ohio State University uses Caterpillar Inc. machinery for construction purposes on the corner of College Road and Annie and John Glenn Avenue this summer. By investing in a company that profits off of demolishing Palestinian homes, OSU is complicit in their oppression. Caterpillar has been listed as one of the companies to boycott in order to show solidarity for the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israeli apartheid.

The BDS movement is launched and supported by 170 Palestinian-led organizations. It demands an end to the occupation of all Arab lands, dismantling the apartheid wall and the checkpoints, ending racial discrimination of Palestinians living in Israel, and promoting the right of all Palestinian refugees to return to their land. Israel profits of colonizing Palestine as it experiments with weapons of war on Palestinians and makes money off of the military industrial complex.

Some journalists in the Jewish media are starting to complain that President Donald Trump is “loving Israel” just a little too much since he keeps citing his concern for the Jewish state as the driving force behind some of his erratic behavior. It is a viewpoint that I most definitely share, though I would describe the apparent White House lovefest with the Israel as a “lot too much.” When the President of the United States calls a congresswoman an anti-Semite and demands that she apologize to him personally and also to Israel it is definitely a lot too much.

 “Send her back! Send her back!”

The chant: Is it merely a case study in collective stupidity or is it a signal of rising fascism? When I look at the viral video — the latest manifestation of Trumpism and the freeing of good old American racism from the constraints of political correctness — I can’t help but think of the 8-year-old girl I met the other day, who traveled two years with her mother to reach this country from the Democratic Republic of the Congo.