Former Pro-Palestine protestor Taryn Thomas explains how the October 7th terrorist attack changed her outlook completely:
“After October 7th, by October 20th, Stanford already set up its encampment, 'Sit-In to Stop Genocide." This is before the families had even finished identifying their dead. This is a week before a single soldier had even crossed into Gaza, and we were already labeling it a genocide.
There was no time spent to even grieve those that lost their lives, and if you did grieve and mourn publicly, you were immediately outcasted and you lost your social belonging.
At one of our protests in June of 2024, they broke into the Stanford University President's office and caused $700,000 in damages. 12 students received felonies, and they spray-painted like disgusting things, such as ‘Death to Israel,’ ‘Death to America.’
I was just confused on like, where is Gaza in any of that? We completely lost sight of who we were claiming to be fighting for, and at some point our pro-Palestine movement became more of an anti-Israel, anti-American one, and I no longer could recognize what we were doing anymore.”