Essay: Why Trump is Scared of Students

I was standing between a line of riot police and students who wanted to march from Cairo University to the nearby Israeli embassy, the first time I tasted tear gas.

The students were preparing to protest the massacre at Hebron’s Ibrahimi Mosque, which had happened earlier that day, February 24th 1994. Settler Baruch Goldstein, who belonged to the racist and far-right Kach movement, murdered at least 29 Palestinians and injured about 150 others as they prayed at the mosque.

I was a Reuters News Agency correspondent. Students called our Cairo bureau to tell us they were planning to march off campus. Back then, as now, protests in Egypt were banned.

As the gas welled up, I extricated myself from the middle ground between students and riot police armed with large sticks, subsequently used to violently beat back the students and scuttle their planned march. After interviewing some of the students, I returned to the news bureau covered in the sulfurous stench and sting of tear gas and the grim knowledge of how extensively authoritarian states control and curb student activism.

From undercover informers on campus, to the crushing of any dissent, it was clear: authoritarians hate and fear students. Sound familiar?

You know who was very familiar with the ways authoritarianism in Egypt met student activism with crushing force: Minouche Shafik, the Egyptian-born former president of Columbia who brought police on campus to mete out that crushing force. Before she stepped down, I used to call her the Mubarak of Columbia, after Hosni Mubarak the dictator who ruled Egypt for 30 years before the January 25, 2011 revolution toppled him.

Tyrants hate and fear students, struggle to contain the frenetic fearlessness that immunizes them to the apathy and cowardice that keeps so many others in control.

Authoritarian have a desperate need to crush student activism because tyrants know that left unchecked, student activism is heady and infectious enough to shake you out of that comfort that too many mistake for power.