Right-wing media amplifies Islamophobic tropes to delegitimize pro-Palestine activism as 'terrorism' in academic spaces
Original framing: “Ben Shapiro-backed 'propaganda' film portrays pro-Palestine 'terrorists' on campus” — Middle East Eye
The film excludes Palestinian students’ testimonies about settler-colonial violence and their right to resistance under international law. It also silences Jewish anti-Zionist voices (e.g., Jewish Voice for Peace) who critique the conflation of Judaism with Israeli state violence. The framing erases the voices of Black and Brown students who are disproportionately targeted by campus policing.
The film *Run, Fight, Hide: Infidels* exemplifies how right-wing media weaponizes Islamophobic tropes to delegitimize pro-Palestine activism, echoing historical patterns of criminalizing dissent from McCarthyism to apartheid-era South Africa.
Its framing serves neoliberal and Zionist state interests by securitizing academic spaces and suppressing Indigenous land defense narratives. The marginalized voices erased—Palestinian students, Jewish anti-Zionists, and scholars of settler-colonialism—reveal the film’s role in a broader ecosystem of manufactured moral panics. Indigenous epistemologies, which center collective liberation over state-defined 'terrorism,' offer a counter-framework to reclaim resistance as a moral imperative. The solution lies in dismantling the media-industrial complex’s monopoly on narrative control through legal, educational, and artistic interventions that center systemic justice over partisan fearmongering.