#Birzeit University

[mirkobloom77]

‼️🇵🇸💚 ‘Your voices are heard’: Birzeit University in the West Bank says it appreciates worldwide support

[Plain text: ‘Your voices are heard’: Birzeit University in the West Bank says it appreciates worldwide support]

🔸 Source: Al Jazeera

[eretzyisrael]

By  Kassy Akiva

Birzeit University, located just outside of Ramallah in the West Bank, is home to an overwhelmingly Hamas-affiliated student government that holds on-campus terrorist parades. It also has relationships with some of America’s most prestigious universities, despite the fact that its leadership and faculty openly harbor pro-terrorist and anti-American sentiments.

The chairwoman of Birzeit’s Board of Trustees denied Hamas’s brutality and rape on October 7, and the school’s official account called for “glory to the martyrs” days after the attack. Yet its relationships in the United States remain largely intact — it has active relationships with Harvard University, Rutgers University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and others across the country.

Harvard University is set to host a “Palestine Social Medicine Course” next month at Birzeit, where students will learn about “settler colonialism.” Rutgers University affirmed its relationship with Birzeit in May amid student encampment protests and William Paterson University entered into an agreement with the Hamas-run university in 2022 for exchange programs, sharing curricula and joint degree programs. Other schools, such as MIT, have recently co-hosted conferences, invited Birzeit professors for speaking events, or had student groups visit its campus.

Experts say the university has “gone off the deep-end” since Hamas’ October 7, 2023 terrorist attack, with leadership openly defending the actions and broadcasting lies about the conflict.

Birzeit’s Terrorist-Sympathizing Leadership

Hanan Ashrawi, the chairwoman of Birzeit University’s Board of Trustees, has denied Hamas committed sexual assault on Israeli civilians during its October 7 massacre, endorsed the lynching of Israeli soldiers, and defended Hezbollah, according to CAMERA UK.

On October 11, Ashrawi wrote that Israel’s “spin machine” was “manufacturing horrific lies in an orchestrated smear campaign claiming rape, slaughtering babies, beheadings, burnings alive” and that the Western media “immediately swallowed & regurgitated such vile slander.” Ashrawi doubled down on sexual assault denial in March, calling a UN report finding grounds that Hamas committed sexual violence invalid because it included mostly interviews with Israelis.

Jonathan Schanzer, Senior Vice President for Research at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, said he is not surprised that Birzeit’s radical views are expressed at the highest levels.

“Ashrawi has had a forked tongue for decades,” Schanzer told the Daily Wire, pointing out that she was once part of the Oslo Accords. “While she was once seen as a woman of peace, that ship sailed a long time ago and she has since been a mouthpiece for radicalism for the better part of a decade.”

In a January 2, 2024 post on X, Ashrawi voiced her frustration with the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) killing Saleh al-Arourui, the founding commander of Hamas’s military wing, the al-Qassam brigades, who she labeled a “Palestinian leader.”

Hanan Ashrawi, the chairwoman of Birzeit University’s Board of Trustees, has denied Hamas committed sexual assault on Israeli civilians during its October 7 massacre.

“The long-distance assassination by drone of Hamas leader Saleh al-Arouri is a typical Israeli pattern of murdering Palestinian leaders of all factions. Not only does it not bring security or capitulation, it provokes & produces a serious escalation with long-term ramifications,” Ashrawi wrote.

Ashrawi also sat on the Honorary Editorial Board of the Palestinian Chronicle, the U.S.-based non-profit that employed Abdallah Aljamal, who was killed by Israeli forces in Gaza in June as three hostages held prisoner in his home were rescued.

Previously a member of the Palestinian Legislative Council, she was also a founding member of Miftah, an organization with a history of anti-Ssemitism, including publishing an article claiming Jews use Christian blood to make matzah for Passover before apologizing, according to the Times of Israel. Ashrawi was denied a visa to the United States in 2019, according to her Twitter though it is unclear if she was given one in the following years for trips. 

“I think it is quite revealing that she has been supportive of Hamas and other extremist groups after being part of the peace process for so many years,” Schanzer said. “I think she has gone well past the tipping point and there is no return for her. I suspect she knows that.”

[sbahour]

WOW, what an outstanding and diverse student group from Columbia and Georgetown Universities that visited Birzeit University today. This generation will see the collapse of the Israeli occupation in their lifetime, partly due to their sustained actions, building on all past generations' actions. It was wild to find someone from Youngstown (and from Al-Bireh on top) in the audience. I was proud to meet several other diaspora Palestinian-Americans in the group too--a sign of changing times, for sure. Onward and upward, friends! Thanks to @george.s.rishmawi and the Siraj Centre team for organizing.

#Palestine #Israel @Columbia.SIPA @ColumbiaSIPA  @georgetownuniv  @georgetown @BirzeitUn @BirzeitU 

[bassia-bassensis]

"Following her abduction by the IOF from her home two weeks ago in #Ramallah, the zionist courts issued PFLP leader Khalida Jarrar an administrative detention order, without charge or trial.

Khalida, 60 years old, has been imprisoned at least four times on baseless charges, most recently in 2016 and 2021. She was freed in September of 2021 after two years of administrative detention without charge or trial. Just two months before her release, the zionist entity denied her a temporary release to attend the funeral of her 31-year-old daughter, activist Suha Jarrar. Additionally, Khalida lost her father while she was imprisoned in 2021.

Khalida, a lifelong activist, intellectual, and leader, has stood defiantly in support of the prisoners' struggle. She has held many civil society positions, elected as a deputy in the Legislative Council in 2006, where she was responsible for the prisoners' file. Before her abudction, she was working as a researcher on Palestinian female prisoners at Birzeit University."

Taken from RNN

[leftistfeminista]

Israel tied a Palestinian coed into a banana position during her menstrual period while denying her underwear or tampons

In a long corridor, Israeli intelligence operatives were standing and clapping sarcastically as jailers were taking handcuffed Mays Abu Ghosh to a military interrogation cell.

“They were mocking me, saying I'd die in the interrogation,” Mays told Anadolu Agency.

Amid her menstrual cycle, Mays was tied to the chair by her hands and ankles and stretched her body into a banana shape for hours, making it impossible to sleep.

“I wasn’t able to walk, the jailers were holding me to the cell,” Mays added.

May's hands were constantly bleeding due to the shackles. She refused to be subjected to another military interrogation session, so the intelligence officer grabbed Mays and slammed her against the wall.

Mays continued: "They didn't provide me with any tampons or undergarments I needed in this delicate period for any woman in the world."

33 days of torture

Gosh, 24, of the Qalandiya refugee camp, is a journalism and media student at Birzeit University who was arrested on Aug. 29, 2019, and then subjected to horrific torture in solitary confinement for 33 days at Al-Maskobya Interrogation Center.

During her confinement at the notorious facility, she lost 12 kilograms (26.5 pounds).

“The officers were constantly trying to convince me that I had gone insane and was trying to kill myself, so they brought social workers, but they were actually other officers,” Mays recounted.

When those officers were in the cell with Mays, she showed them the wounds and bruises she suffered as a result of the abuse she had been subjected to and asked them: "Who wants to kill another person? I'm a student, and you're detaining me."

Mays frequently asked for painkillers to alleviate the pains in her head and muscles, but she was usually denied.

During the interrogation sessions, the officers deliberately forced Mays to hear the screams of detainees subjected to physical torture in military interrogation, while also threatening her that what would happen with her would be even more horrible.

“They threatened me that I'd be out here either dead or paralyzed, and they threatened to rape me too,” she said.

Mays was not allowed to wear a hair scrunchie because the officers were constantly beating, punching, kicking, smacking, and pulling her hair.

“I was tearing the plastic bag they put breakfast food in and using its strips to tie down my hair, but they were taking it from me,” Mays recounted.

Mays was kept in one of the cells for several days with a bug rat that lurked in the sewers and attacked her while she was sleeping, indicating a high risk of infection transmission to Mays.

She was completely isolated for 33 days, unable to communicate with any lawyers or human rights groups. She lived in terrible conditions due to the constant torture she was subjected to, as well as the filthy cell where sewage overflowed, soaking her thin sleeping mattress.

Horrific tales of Palestinian girls in Israeli jails

PALESTINIAN journalism student Mays Abu Ghosh has been tortured in an Israeli jail, her family alleged today as human rights groups warn of systemic abuse of prisoners by authorities.

Her mother said Ms Abu Ghosh’s face was “full of bruises” and barely recognisable after 30 days of interrogation at the notorious Moscovia detention centre in Jerusalem.

“I could not hug her due to the pain hurting all of her body,” she explained.

Ms Abu Ghosh, who is studying at Bir Zeit University, has been held in prison since August 28 when she was detained along with five other young Palestinians.

She has been campaigning against the torture and treatment of Palestinian prisoners held in Israeli jails.

According to Addameer, Ms Abu Ghosh was forced into a number of stress positions during her interrogation, including the so-called “banana.”

[houseofpurplestars]

Free Khalida Jarrar! The feminist, leftist, and Palestinian scholar was seized from her home in El-Bireh, occupied Palestine, in the morning hours of 26 December 2023 as part of mass arrests by Zionist forces in the West Bank of occupied Palestine during the genocide in Gaza.

Jarrar is a historical leftist leader with the PFLP and is currently a scholar and researcher at the Muwatin Institute at Birzeit University. In fact, she was scheduled to appear on 27 December at a panel convened by Jadaliyya on imprisonment in the time of genocide.

She is a lifelong advocate for the liberation of political prisoners and was targeted specifically for her statements and advocacy for the liberation of Palestinian prisoners.Jarrar has been imprisoned on multiple occasions by the occupation regime, including in 2015, when her administrative detention without charge or trial drew global protests before she was then transferred to the occupation military courts.

In 2019, she was once again seized by the occupation regime. While she was imprisoned, her daughter Suha tragically passed away. She was denied the right to see Suha's body and attend her funeral before she was released again in 2021.

During both of her times of imprisonment, she established independent educational programs to teach the imprisoned minor girls the high school education they were denied as well as the adult women prisoners their rights under international law.

She discusses her imprisonment in the book by RamzyBaroud and Ilan Pappe, "Our vision for liberation;" her piece is published at the PalestineChronicle:

Samidoun network

@ SamidounPP

[i-am-aprl]

Historical photo of the day: Palestinian students at Birzeit College outside Ramallah, 1964.

Initially established as a girls school in 1924, Birzeit College would later become Birzeit University, one of Palestine's leading educational institutions today, and among the top 3 percent of universities worldwide, as of 2019 (according to the QS World University Rankings).

[fursasaida]

For anyone looking to educate themselves, the second teach-in, this time on Gaza's history, will be on the Jadaliyya youtube channel at noon on Thursday the 26th. (If you can't join live, they'll have the video record up later.)

Beshara Doumani is the currently serving president of Birzeit University and author of Rediscovering Palestine. Ilana Feldman is the author of Governing Gaza and Life Lived in Relief: Humanitarian Predicaments and Palestinian Refugee Politics.

[athena5898]

(Samidoun Network) Free Mohammed Arman Birzeit University's past student Council President, Jailed without charge or trial On 27 October 2024, Zionist occupation forces renewed the administrative detention- imprisonment without charge or trial- of Mohammed Nidal Arman, past president of the Birzeit University Student Council and sixth-year student in Accounting for an additional 6 months. Mohammed, from Ein Yabroud East of Ramallah, was elected president of the Birzeit Student Council on 2 October 2023, following the arrest and imprisonment of then President Abdel Majeed Hassan. He was abducted by the occupation one month later, on 2 November 2023, and ordered to 6 months of administrative detention. His detention was renewed again in May, and now once more. Mohammed Arman has been abducted by the occupation on multiple previous occasions. In May 2022, he was arrested and beaten by occupation soldiers on the eve of the university elections, as one of a group of 7 leaders of the Islamic Bloc. They were targeted as part of the ongoing attempts of the occupation to interfere with the student movement. On that occasion, he served 9 months in Zionist jails. This came only four months after his release in January 2022 from 8 months of imprisonment in Zionist jails, where he was also targeted for his student work and activism. In January 2024, Saleh Hasan was elected president of the Birzeit University Student Council to succeed Mohammed as he remains a prisoner in the occupation's jails. He emphasized the continuity of the student movement and loyalty to the path of Abdel-Majeed Hassan and Mohammed Arman, who he called "the heads of the Prisoner's Council". Mohammed Arman is among over 150 Birzeit University students jailed by the occupation and approximately 3,500 Palestinians jailed without charge or trial under administrative detention - among over 10,000 Palestinian prisoners of the occupation. This number does not even include the thousands kidnapped from Gaza by the genocidal invading forces. Free Mohammed Arman and all Palestinian prisoners!

[satellitebroadcast]

Samidoun Network: Telegram

Zionist occupation forces abduct Duaa al-Qadi, Birzeit University student in the Faculty of Media from her home. Duaa's brother, Mustafa, also a Birzeit University student, is currently detained inside Zionist prisons. Freedom for Duaa, Mustafa and all imprisoned Palestinians!

[opencommunion]

"On Monday, 1 July, Hadeel Shatara, Palestinian educator and an administrator of the graduate program at Birzeit University, was seized by occupation forces as she returned to Palestine from Jordan at the Karameh crossing. She is currently being held incommunicado under interrogation, and her family and lawyer have not been informed of her location. We raise our voices to say: Free Hadeel Shatara and all Palestinian prisoners now!

The abduction of Hadeel Shatara is part and parcel of the systematic attack on Palestinian education by the Zionist occupation regime. She joins six Birzeit University women students – Yara Abu Hashish, Layan Kayed, Shahd Owaida, Mona Abu Hussein, and Wafa Nimr – and hundreds of Palestinian male students – seized by the occupation. Students, particularly throughout the West Bank of occupied Palestine, have been subjected to mass arrest, while Palestinian student blocs are labeled 'illegal organizations.'

In Gaza, every single university has been systematically destroyed by the occupation forces as part of their genocidal assault on every aspect of Palestinian life and society. University administrators have been targeted for assassination and kidnapped with fellow civilians, especially health care workers, and subjected to extreme forms of torture and abuse in the concentration camps for Palestinians from Gaza operated by the occupation forces.

This attack on Hadeel Shatara and Palestinian education is happening as university students are rising up around the world in a global student intifada to confront the genocide and resist Zionism and imperialism. Around the world, and particularly in the United States – the heart of the imperial core and the co-sponsor of the genocide, supplier of billions of dollars in bombs and weaponry to the Zionist regime – students have been beaten and arrested by police in an attempt to suppress this growing international movement with the liberation of Palestine at the core.

We urge all to demand freedom for Hadeel Shatara and all Palestinian students and educators – and all of the over 10,000 Palestinian prisoners held in Zionist jails – and to include the liberation of the prisoners in all campaigns for Palestinian liberation and an end to the genocide. We further emphasize the urgency of a complete academic boycott of all Zionist institutions, which are fully complicit in the all-out assault on Palestinian education and 76 years of genocide targeting the Palestinian people as a whole."

[wingedalpacacupcake]

Birzeit University students expel German ambassador over Israel support

[eretzyisrael]

by Kassy Akiva

The Palestinian school describes itself as a “thorn in the side of the occupation” and says it is committed to making an impact through “resistance.” Birzeit has a building named after Kamal Nasser, the leader of Black September, the terror group that kidnapped and killed 11 Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics.

Birzeit also has annual on-campus military parades where students honor Hamas and PFLP with mock suicide belts and rockets, and chants calling to “blow up the settler’s head,” the Middle East Media Research Institute reported.

The university’s student body has closely aligned itself with terrorist groups. During the school’s 2023 student council elections, the Hamas-affiliated Islamic Bloc won 25 of the 51 seats. The PFLP-affiliated group picked up six seats in the race, which had a 77 percent voter turnout, according to the Jerusalem Post.

Many Birzeit students have been arrested for assisting and joining terror groups. Last week, five members of Birzeit’s student council were arrested for attempting to carry out a shooting terror attack on behalf of Hamas. The group had an assault rifle and thousands of dollars in cash from Hamas at the time of arrest, the Times of Israel reported.

In 2022, Birzeit students were arrested for helping to launder money for terrorist attacks from Gaza to Hamas members in Turkey, The Jerusalem Post reported. On X, Birzeit said 140 students and four staff members were in prison in April.

[good-old-gossip]

After more than 200 days of war on Gaza, many of Gaza’s educational institutions lie in ruins.

According to a team of UN experts, there are currently no universities remaining in Gaza due to the devastating bombardment of the Israeli army.

Palestine has one of the highest literacy rates in the world, but the war on Gaza has devastated the education sector, killing thousands of students, and leaving hundreds of thousands others out of school for almost seven months.

“It may be reasonable to ask if there is an intentional effort to comprehensively destroy the Palestinian education system, an action known as ‘scholasticide’,” the experts said in a recent press release.

The experts called on the international community to condemn attacks on education and support the reconstruction of Gaza’s education system to ensure the right to education for Palestinian children.

Israel’s targeting of Palestinian academic institutions is nothing new.

“It’s always been a strategy of Israel,” Samia al-Botmeh, an assistant professor of economics at Birzeit University, told MEE.

“For the Palestinians, [education] is a survival mechanism. We survive colonisation through becoming more and more educated.”

The 17-year siege on Gaza has hamstrung its universities through restrictions on movement in and out of the strip. Gaza’s students struggle to travel abroad for their education, while international scholars are unable to visit universities in the strip.

“Teaching is about broadening your horizons, it’s about interaction. It’s about working together and of course, Israel tries to curtail all of that,” said al-Botmeh.

[the-garbanzo-annex-jr]

by Melanie Phillips

According to an anti-Israel Jewish professor at Duke University, Rebecca Stein, the programme is aimed at “remaking the dominant paradigm of Israel Studies as it has been configured in the United States and increasingly in Great Britain, with its proud ‘advocacy’ mandate on behalf of the Israeli state. Birzeit’s programme turns this paradigm inside out, providing students with a radical alternative”.

More fundamentally still, the shocking scenes on campus are the outcome of the west’s willed educational collapse. The understanding of education as the transmission of a culture to the next generation was junked decades ago in favour of a propaganda narrative of western oppression.

This opened the way for the colonisation of curricula by anti-western ideological causes. The admission of students selected on the basis of identity politics rather than intellectual ability further reduced education standards to positively infantile levels.

This was illustrated at Columbia by the keffiyeh-clad Johanna King-Slutzky, who spoke to the media on behalf of the encampment. Jaw-droppingly channelling Hamas’s strategy in Gaza, she stated that the university had an obligation to bring in food and water to the illegal encampment, demanding, “Do you want students to die of dehydration and starvation? … This is like basic humanitarian aid”.

Her remarks attracted widespread incredulity and ridicule. But so should Columbia’s educational standards.

In her biography on Columbia’s website, now deleted, King-Slutzky describes her dissertation as “a prehistory of metabolic rift, Marx’s term for the disruption of energy circuits caused by industrialisation under capitalism … theories of the imagination and poetry as interpreted through a Marxian lens in order to update and propose an alternative to historicist ideological critiques of the Romantic imagination”.

This gobbledygook is beyond parody. Alas, it’s all too typical of what now passes for higher education in America and Britain. The universities, the supposed crucibles of knowledge, intellectual challenge and open minds, are now in the business of propaganda, dumbing-down and the closing of the mind. They have become the principal vehicles for coercing cultural conformity to hatred of both Israel and the west.

In the appalling scenes on campus, a number of monstrous chickens are now coming home to roost.

[vague-humanoid]

US Empire, Israeli Settler Colonialism & "Reconfiguring" the Region? - Fathi Nimer & Abdaljawad Omar

In this episode Fathi Nimer and Abdaljawad Omar will both return to the show to discuss some of the most recent developments in the increasingly regional war Israel and the United States are conducting in the Middle East. We will discuss recent developments including the assassination of Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, the pager attacks, the ground invasion of Lebanon and Iran's retaliatory strikes on Israel's airbases. We will also discuss the increasing interest in the west of supporting Israel in trying to conduct a regional war against Iran, Lebanon, and perhaps Syria.

Fathi Nimer is Al-Shabaka’s Palestine policy fellow. He previously worked as a research associate with the Arab World for Research and Development, a teaching fellow at Birzeit University, and a program officer with the Ramallah Center for Human Rights Studies. Fathi holds a master’s degree in political science from Heidelberg University and is the co-founder of DecolonizePalestine.com, a knowledge repository for the Palestinian question. Fathi’s research revolves around political economy and contentious politics. His current focus is on food sovereignty, agroecology, and the resistance economy in Palestine.

Abdaljawad Omar is a writer, analyst, and lecturer based in Ramallah, Palestine. He has written extensively in Arabic. In English Abboud has contributed to Electronic Intifada, Mondoweiss, and Ebb Magazine among other outlets.

Both are have been guests on multiple episodes of MAKC

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