To manufacture consent and justify their violent dismantlement of the Gaza Solidarity Encampment, UC San Diego senior administration employs coded language and racist, anti- Muslim bigoted tropes which parallel the rhetoric that has long legitimated violence against Palestinians and Black People in the U.S. As scholar Julie Peteet 169 has shown, these “linguistic practices, along with a generalized politics of nonrecognition, [have] long cast Palestinians as irrational aggressors and blamed them for compelling the violence inflicted upon them” — in the name of security and peace, these practices have authorized violence, surveillance, harassment, bigotry on the Palestinian (Muslim, Arab) as Other. 170, 171 Similar language has enabled violence against Black folks and a panoply of minoritized groups across the U.S. — defensive actions are cast as active resistance that forces violent response, criminalization, and banishment. 172, 173, 174
In reading the communications of UCSD senior administration, we show how this linguistic repertoire deflects institutional culpability while rendering the Encampment as illegitimate and thus disposable. We identify the following rhetorical tricks:
1. Portraying those imperiled by and protesting injustice as simultaneously ruthless and helpless; 175
2. Othering, dehumanizing, and criminalizing the targets of power as inherently irrational aggressors, thus deserving of and responsible for the violence inflicted upon them; 176
3. Constructing the innocence of privileged groups, minimizing their acts of violence as if, paradoxically, it was their safety and security under threat; 177
4. Presenting the institution’s goal as merely ‘keeping the peace’, eliding their own responsibility in creating the conditions in which peace was impossible (e.g., genocide, police action); 178
5. Using passive voice and the appeal to ‘fact’ to minimize racial bias, complicity, and violent decisions made by institutional actors 179
These rhetorical tricks guide the messaging of senior administration. In the ‘fact sheet’ 180, they appear as a series of decontextualized facts, misrepresentations, and outright lies about the Encampment and the senior administration’s response. Encampment participants are cast as irrational actors without clear goals and with whom dialogue was impossible (Trick 1) — despite the fact that the Encampment organizers had sought a meeting with the Chancellor through the Academic Senate Chair on the basis of clearly stated goals. The ‘fact sheet’ portrays Encampment participants strictly as the source of violence — a potential source of fire, potential attackers of the Student Health Center, potential aggressors against counter- protesters, potential disrupters of instruction. Through this they are blamed for the violence on May 6, despite the lack of evidence that any of these possibilities occurred or were remotely likely (Trick 2). The Encampment is held responsible for ‘escalating’ a counter-protest — as if it was the counter-protestors threatened, and not themselves the threat (Trick 3). The need to ‘restore’ peace to the campus was used as an excuse to ignore history — the history of protest, the history of repression of speech about Palestine, the history of UCSD's complicity in Israel's crimes, the history of Palestine itself — to assert that May 1 was the beginning, as the 'fact sheet' does, in much the same way that Israel falsely asserts that October 7, 2023 was the beginning to justify genocide (Trick 4). The 'fact sheet' portrays senior administration decision-making as seemingly logical and reasonable, in order to conceal their animus against anti-genocide Palestinian, Arab, BIPOC, Trans, Queer, Muslim, Jewish and Christian organizers. In passive voice, it renders the violent dismantlement of the Encampment as an objective, measured process that erases the agent of the action — rather than the unhinged result of an orchestrated plan to repress speech protesting the genocide and UCSD's complicity in it (Trick 5).
UCSD senior administration borrows from a well-worn playbook to justify racist, anti-Muslim conduct. Below, we provide a detailed accounting of how these linguistic tricks operate within the senior administration's 'fact sheet'.
The ‘Illegality’ of the Encampment
‘Fact sheet’ – “Within minutes, university representatives from the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Student Affairs and Campus Life hand-delivered notecards to participants explaining free expression rights and rules for campus and relevant state laws, including those for non-affiliates. Student Affairs staff members talked with participants individually, stating that the camp was illegal, and encouraging them to leave the site immediately.”
The ‘fact sheet’ asserts that, from Day 1, university representatives determined the encampment to be illegal, and that this had been communicated to participants "within minutes" of its formation. This claim is demonstrably false. Official, campus-wide email communications from the Chancellor do not mention any determination of illegality, only that the Encampment was in violation of campus policy — a common designation for protests throughout UCSD's history that did not result in sanction or arrests. It is not until Day 5 that these communications indicate the senior administration’s updated assertion that the Encampment was unlawful.
This assertion portrays the senior administration as the rational, communicative party, clearly communicating the risks of participation; by contrast, it insinuates that those participating were adventurist activists, acting in willful defiance of the law (Trick 2). Elsewhere, the 'fact sheet' records that "SAMs were told by one individual supportive of the encampment that the goal would be for arrests to take place" (but by who?). It identifies the Encampment in toto to be a form of 'civil disobedience' — that is, an action deliberately staged for the symbolic purpose of arrest (e.g., Rosa Parks). Nothing could be further from the truth. To anyone visiting, it was apparent that the Encampment was not a purely symbolic act; protesters were not sitting around waiting to be arrested. In light of the violent responses wrought upon encampments by other universities, it was a contingency that had to be planned for; but arrest was hardly the goal. Rather, the Encampment was a space of community-building and shared action: students speaking, teaching, and organizing towards what the senior administration would not. It was this deep, intellectual, collective discussion of the genocide — and UCSD’s complicity in it — that the senior administration set its repressive apparatus (disciplinary procedures, arrest) to destroy.
Further, this assertion implies the senior administration's tolerance in allowing the Encampment to remain standing for as long as it did, in spite of its purportedly 'illegal' status. This is a deflection of the enmity consistently displayed by the senior administration towards the Encampment, shown in their repeated efforts over the course of its existence to fabricate grounds for its illegality and thereby justify its dismantlement (Trick 4). The substantive activities of the Encampment were not illegal (consider, for instance, that the San Diego City Attorney declined to file criminal charges brought against students).
Perhaps aware of the weakness of its case, the 'fact sheet' is anxious to supplement 'illegality' by drawing expansive suspicion over other participants. In red-baiting fashion, for instance, it notes that “non-affiliates including members of the Black Panthers, Antifa, and the Communist Revolutionary Group arrived at the camp site” — a scare-tactic effort, devoid of evidence, to conjure some imagined threat in the mere naming of these groups, and notably racialized in its figuring of the Black Panthers (Trick 5). What it betrays is the consistent posture of senior administration: to maintain the unlawfulness of the encampment, at any cost, in order to silence it.
Encampment Liaisons
‘Fact Sheet’ – “Discussions with the encampment were increasingly difficult; there was no consistent person to communicate with, no one claimed to have any authority, and shifting representatives deflected responsibility and accountability for communications, actions, or follow-up.”
Communication with encampment liaisons is portrayed as “increasingly difficult” in order to elide the reality that, from its very outset, the four demands of the Encampment were utterly clear (see Section 2). The ‘fact sheet’ plays confused: it pretends not to know the stated goals of the Encampment, or their stated willingness to negotiate in a face-to-face meeting with Chancellor Khosla (as occurred, for instance, at UC Riverside and UC Berkeley). Encampment organizers were frustrated with the lack of engagement from senior administration. As noted above, a media liaison for the Encampment was quoted on May 4 by Fox 5 San Diego as lamenting "They haven't responded at all. We're hoping that they can come out and try to talk to the students, but for the past four days, we have heard nothing. It's really disappointing to see that they are out here trying to bring in people to try to close down the Encampment but they're not out here trying to listen to their students." 120
Encampment student organizers asked for a meeting with Khosla and he refused. It was senior administration that declined to take this route of negotiation. Unwilling to admit this, the 'fact sheet' instead focuses on portraying Encampment liaisons as confused and irrational (Trick 2), bemoaning for instance that “one camp participant emailed a demand list to university officials” but “later stated that they were not a decision-maker” — it blames this lack of a 'consistent' liaison for the senior administration's inability to engage the Encampment and its demands (Trick 4). But with no sign of good faith engagement, what was there to liaise over? What decisions were on the table? Similar to its false portrayal of the Encampment as civil disobedience, discussed above, the 'fact sheet' cherry picks select instances that deflect from the senior administration's own basic culpability in refusing to recognize or engage the Encampment (Trick 5).
Beyond this fabricated 'issue' of negotiation, the disingenuous construction of liaising is used to portray the Encampment as an imminent risk to safety and campus operations — that, for instance, it meant the Encampment was unable to coordinate accountably with senior administration over a 'safety plan'. But the safety and disruption concerns raised are ones imputed to the Encampment by the senior administration itself, in its effort to police the Encampment — namely, that the Encampment might block Library Walk, or access to the Student Health Center. Neither of these occurred; evidence, again, that Encampment participants were not seeking 'disruption' for its own sake. Imminent threat is constructed to justify the disproportionate response of the senior administration (Trick 4); consider that access to the Student Health Center was in fact blocked, on May 6, by the Chancellor's massive police action.
Safety
‘Fact sheet’ – “University leaders determined that waiting for something more dangerous to happen (e.g. fire in the camp, attack by outsiders seen at other campuses including UCLA just the week prior, etc.) was unconscionable. The safety of the entire campus — including the individuals in the encampment — required dismantling the illegal camp.”
‘Fact sheet’ – “On Sunday May 5 at 3pm, a scheduled and advertised counterprotest was planned at Library Walk... If a fight had broken out, it is likely that the campus’ security resources would have been overwhelmed.”
The ‘fact sheet’ culminates in May 4 as the dramatic ‘turning point’, after which the senior administration apparently had no choice but to act. Reviewing these claims, however, shows this temporal framing to be disingenuous — it constructs a threatening atmosphere that simply did not exist. For instance, the sheet points to the Encampment’s expansion “from approximately 11,000 sqf to 33,000 sqf” as one especially acute trigger, warranting response. The Encampment did expand, but this was a gradual and reasoned process, driven by students who joined in the Encampment’s cultural and educational events over its course, and in order to provide a safe space for Arab and Muslim students on campus that "encountered harassment, threats, and privacy invasion" (see May 4 timeline, Section 3). Note, as well, that the encampment had expanded into the open grove to its north — not onto Library Walk, or far down towards the Student Health Center. The Encampment simply was not the conspiratorial, disruption-focused group that the senior administration made them out to be.
Likewise, the ‘entry table’ — in place from the beginning — functioned as a (voluntary) opportunity to provide information for potential legal support (see above), and as a means to review and discuss the publicly stated community guidelines of the Encampment, which sought to ensure the safety of everyone in the Encampment and outside it. These guidelines were a measured response to the lack of protection from campus security, in light of the violence recently inflicted on encampments at other campuses. It was not an exclusionary check-point or sign of willful escalation, as the ‘fact sheet’ insinuates.
The Encampment is not responsible for the violence raised by counter-protestors. Nor can it be reasonably expected that the Encampment would simply allow counter-protestors to destroy it, as it happened at UCLA just prior, on April 30. In that case, security and police sat back for four hours; similarly, the ‘fact sheet’ itself admits that, on May 5, “if a fight had broken out, it is likely that the campus’ security resources would have been overwhelmed”. UC San Diego was legally obligated to provide protection for the Encampment from counter- protesters; the threat of violence from counter-protesters is not sufficient grounds to shut down a protest: the Heckler's veto 181. Given the lack of protection from campus, the actions taken by the Encampment to defend itself were reasoned and justified; materials like ‘plywood’, construed by the ‘fact sheet’ as a threat, are clearly legible as a matter of self- defense. The ‘fact sheet’ is quick to emphasize the resources drained by the 24/7 ‘emergency staffing’ of police for the Encampment — but, by the senior administration's own admission, this was not sufficient to handle the predictable counter-protesting. As Students for Justice in Palestine at UC San Diego put it at the time, "It is notable that Chancellor Khosla acknowledges the threat of violence from outside the Encampment, yet all of the senior administration's threats and denouncements have been directed at us rather than the outside instigators" (Trick 3).
In framing this 'issue' of safety, Encampment participants are portrayed as both ruthless and helpless (Trick 1). The 'fact sheet' claims Encampment participants "escalate[d]" and "provoke[d]" counter-protestors, falsely narrating them as malicious; in the next paragraph, it adopts a paternal tone, stating concern for campus safety "including the individuals in the encampment" to justify their violent deployment of UCPD, CHP, and Sheriffs officers to brutally dismantle the Encampment.
The senior administration’s failure to address this crucial issue of safety can help us understand why, for instance, the Encampment did not allow “entry to [fire] safety inspectors and two SAMs” — accompanied by police officers. In light of the senior administration's evident unwillingness to respect and protect the Encampment, Encampment organizers reasonably suspected this as an effort to provoke and fabricate justification for its dismantlement.
The antagonism imputed by the senior administration to the Encampment, we stress, in fact sits with the senior administration — shown in the inadequate protections provided, unwillingness to negotiate, and consistent efforts to fabricate justification for the Encampment's dismantlement.
Return to Timeline ||| Advance to Citation List
- 169
Julie Peteet (2016) Language Matters: Talking about Palestine, Journal of Palestine Studies, 45(2), 24-40. https://doi.org/10.1525/jps.2016.45.2.24
- 170
Edward Said (1978) Orientalism, Pantheon Books.
- 171
Karen Stollznow (2020) Terrorists, Fanatics and Extremists: The Language of Anti-Muslim Prejudice, Globe, 11, 1-25. https://doi.org/10.5278/ojs.globe.v11i.6281
- 172
Akwasi Owusu-Bempah (2017) “Race and Policing in Historical Context: Dehumanization and the Policing of Black People in the 21st Century” https://doi.org/10.1177/1362480616677493
- 173
Omavi Shukur (2023) The Criminalization of Black Resistance to Capture and Policing, Theoretical Criminology, 21(1), 23-34. https://www.bu.edu/bulawreview/files/2023/04/SHUKUR.pdf
- 174
Harsha Walia (2021) Border and Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism, Haymarket Books.
- 175
Leo Löwenthal and Norbert Guterman (1949) Prophets of Deceit: A Study of the Techniques of the American Agitator, Harper and Brothers.
- 176
Lisa Marie Cacho (2012) Social Death: Racialized Rightlessness and the Criminalization of the Unprotected, NYU Press.
- 177
Dylan Rodríguez (2020) White Reconstruction: Domestic Warfare and the Logics of Genocide, Fordham University Press.
- 178
Stuart Hall, Chas Critcher, Tony Jefferson, John Clarke, Brian Roberts (1979) Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Law and Order, Bloomsbury Publishing.
- 179
Jonathan Moreno-Medina, Aurélie Ouss, Patrick Bayer and Bocar A. Ba (2025) Officer- Involved: The Media Language of Police Killings, The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 140(2), 1525-1580. https://doi.org/10.1093/qje/qjaf004
- 180
UC San Diego Senior Administration (2024) Encampment Fact Sheet, May 9. https://keyissues.ucsd.edu/israel-hamas-war/encampment-fact-sheet.html
- 120
Fox 5 San Diego (2024) Tensions rise on Day 4 of San Diego Protests, Youtube video, May 4. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dz3RkzKkcaQ
- 181
Former Prisoner (2025) The Return of the Hecker's Veto, Inside Time, December 1. https://insidetime.org/mailbag/the-return-of-the-hecklers-veto/