#student activism

[rebel-girl-queen-of-my-world]

Members of a private WhatsApp group, including billionaires like the CEO of Dell and the former CEO of Starbucks, allegedly used the chat to discuss ways to pressure New York City Mayor Eric Adams to use police to crack down on Gaza solidarity protests at the city’s universities, according to The Washington Post. AJ+ has not seen the chat messages referenced in The Washington Post’s report directly. ⁣

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NYPD officers raided encampments at schools like Columbia University and the City College of New York, arresting close to 200 protesters in just one day. The police raid at Columbia in late April was the first on-campus mass arrest in 50 years, with police using riot gear and military-grade weapons against mostly peaceful protesters. ⁣

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While Gaza solidarity encampments have been frequently targeted with violence by police and pro-Israel agitators – and over 2,200 people have been arrested – a study found that out of over 550 Gaza protests at U.S. universities, 97% have been peaceful. ⁣

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Senior Producers: Kareem Yasin, Ben Angeloni⁣

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[perrysoup]

REMEMBER TO BLOCK OUT FACES!

REMEMBER TO BLOCK OUT FACES!

REMEMBER TO BLOCK OUT FACES!

REMEMBER TO BLOCK OUT FACES!

REMEMBER TO BLOCK OUT FACES!

REMEMBER TO BLOCK OUT FACES!

If you photograph the protests

[a-very-tired-jew]

Had a student try and get into politics with me (prior to going in for surgery) the other week and it has stayed with me. If you're unaware, Professors are not supposed to push, espouse, or support any particular political party or rhetoric. We have major policies about it with very considerable consequences. Even courses where things might have a political nature, that are not polisci because they're different, have to be touched upon very carefully lest there be some blowback (e.g. a professor at Texas A&M was talking about Texas's drug laws in a criminology course and how they were ineffective and got in trouble because someone who knew Paxton was a student and felt offended because their "uncle" couldn't be bad).

So of course I didn't say anything. My policy is just to go "yeah, I'm gonna vote" and leave it at that.

Said student went on a mini-tirade though about how Kamala is obviously the better choice, but that they might vote for Trump because Biden and Kamala have been "facilitating a genocide". Said student then had the self awareness to admit that a Trump presidency wouldn't be better, more people would suffer, and it wouldn't "stop the genocide", but they wanted to "punish the Democrats".

My TA and I looked at each other a little wide eyed and the student came out of their fugue state to realize what they'd just said in front of their Professor and TA, gathered their things, and then mumbled something before hurrying out the room.

It's clear they care about the I/P conflict, but also about domestic and foreign policies that would result from this presidency. But their behavior is so quintessential college age activist that I had to highlight it here.

Being passionate about something doesn't mean burning everything down because you don't have the perfect response, especially if you are fully aware that your burning everything would actually make it worse.

Why do that?

It's a completely juvenile and immature response that really shows the quality of the person in that moment, where they are in life, and their intellectual and emotional development.

At least they became cognizant of how unhinged they sounded by the time they were done.

[alwaysbewoke]

[maream2636]

2024.11.6

There is not much left and I will finish the exams and be freedom for a week, but I don’t know. I have started to assume vacation mode from now , so I will sit with my friend so that we can continue together.

So ! :

1.Finishing the third lectur

2. And last lecture

3.And have lunch with my friend

[iwriteaboutfeminism]

"Calling me naive just implies that you do not have the kind of peaceable imagination that I do. You don't have the capacity for imagining future joy and prosperity. If you have young people telling you 'another world is possible - we know it is,' and you're saying to them, 'no, it's not,' maybe that's a failure of your imagination.

"If you insist that another world is not possible, you cannot possibly be one of the people that changes the world. If you insist that you can't imagine a better way of doing things, then you will not be one of the people constructing that better way.

"And that's not actually an indictment of other people's naivete, that's an indictment of you and your passivity, if you will."

- Katherine Bogen

[readingsquotes]

"Here’s what you’re not being told: The most pressing threats to our safety as Jewish students do not come from tents on campus. Instead, they come from the Columbia administration inviting police onto campus, certain faculty members, and third-party organizations that dox undergraduates. Frankly, I regret the fact that writing to confirm the safety of Jewish Ivy League students feels justified in the first place. I have not seen many pundits hand-wringing over the safety of my Palestinian colleagues mourning the deaths of family members, or the destruction of Gaza’s cherished universities. 

I am wary of a hysterical campus discourse – gleefully amplified by many of the same charlatans who have turned “DEI” into a slur – that draws attention away from the ongoing slaughter in the Gaza Strip and settler violence in the occupiedWest Bank. We should be focusing on the material reality of war: the munitions our government is sending to Israel, which kill Palestinians by the thousands, and the Americans participating in the violence. Forget the fringe folks and outside agitators: the CUAD organizers behind the campus protests have rightfully insisted on divestment as their most important demand of the Columbia administration, and on sustained attention to the situation in Palestine.

And we are not alone. College campuses across the United States have followed Columbia’s lead. 

And so, it is my hope that we can all learn from their examples to remain clear-eyed about the stakes of this crisis and focus on the actual violence being perpetrated in all of our names. "

[guldaastan]

students of new york university respond to a statement given by vice chancellor charlie jeffreys that misrepresents their demands and undermines the promises they received during negotiations.

[notyourtoday]

Caption on post -

American influencer River Wand condemns Israeli war crimes against journalists in the Gaza Strip, asserting that Israel targets these journalists due to their reporting on its acts of genocide on the Palestinian population.

By @pulseofpal on Instagram.

[ey3bags]

US senator brands college protests as ‘little Gazas’

We are more than proud to be called as "Gazans", and of the saying, "from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!" for who wouldn't be more glad to stand in solidarity and in truth for peace?

One crucial detail I can't help but take note of too though, why is it that when people call for the freedom and peace of Palestinians, Zionists seem to equate that to wishing for the "death" and downfall of Israelis?

They seem to realize that there should have never been any room for oppression, illegal settlements, and unjustifiable crimes and violations of both international laws and conventions and fundamental human rights.

And for that to be achieved, Zionists must have to have their "possessions" taken away, and for their "revenge" to be stopped. For those obviously simple and understandable things to result in them feeling "offended" and "threatened", why else would that be except them knowing that they are the ones accountable and guilty?

This simply needs to stop now. The act of inhumanity and apathy towards the utter humanity of people simply results in the inevitable despair and tragedy that falls on both in different ways; different ways that could only have two outcomes: end in justice and peace, or is on its way to/through the revolution for peace.

Justice and truth had, has, and would always prevail.

May we all remain steadfast in our standing and living for the sake of our humanity, for the sake of acquiring peace and solidarity with all our loved ones, and those that are yet to become.

[allthegeopolitics]

Columbia University indefinitely suspended four students and evicted them from university housing after they attended an “unauthorised” pro-Palestinian event on campus. The event, called “Resistance 101”, featured Khaled Barakat, who some allege is a former senior official from the Popular Front For The Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). The secular, Marxist movement is engaged in armed fighting against Israel in both Gaza and Lebanon and has been labelled a “terrorist organisation” by the European Union, the US and Canada. Barakat, who is based in Canada, denies involvement with the group, which shot to international prominence in the 1970s under its Palestinian founder, George Habash. 

Continue Reading

(News Article Posted April 8th)

[the-peruvian-whovian]

I am so afraid for them.

[alwaysbewoke]

if someone came to your home and told you you had to get out because their parents lived there 50 years ago, you would call the police on them. you would think they are insane. you would rightly think they are out of their minds because having people who once lived in a place a hundred years ago does not give anyone today the right to take someone else's property. however, israel has been spreading the lie that somehow having people who lived on a land 3000 years ago gives them the right to take it from the indigenous population through theft, murder, gr@pe, and worse. i'm so proud of these university kids for seeing the truth.

[news4dzhozhar]

[readingsquotes]

"

The negligible acts of property damage were not, of course, what was being policed. Nor was the holding of campus space; students have done this before in recent decades without their university administrators inviting the force of militarized police.

Instead, it was the protesters’ message that was being handcuffed — the condemnation of Israel and the calls for a free Palestine — and young peoples’ commitment to it.

I have been reporting on political dissent and violent policing for 15 years, particularly in New York City. Compared to Tuesday night, I have never witnessed, at the scene of a protest, the use of police power so disproportionate to the type of demonstration taking place.

Make no mistake: This is an authoritarian escalation."

....

The “Outside Agitator” Myth

The crackdown on campuses offered a grim continuity: Police and other officials churned out all the same old excuses for quashing resistance. Most notably, their rhetoric relied on the predictable canard of the “outside agitator.”

New York Mayor Eric Adams trotted it out as grounds for sending in an army of baton-wielding cops against the city’s students. And Deputy Police Commissioner Tarik Sheppard went even further on MSNBC Wednesday morning, brandishing an unremarkable chain lock — the sort of which I’ve seen on bikes everywhere — as proof that “professionals,” not students themselves, had carried out the takeover of the Columbia building.

The bike-lock business quickly came in for rightly deserved mockery, but the “outside agitator” myth is no joking matter.

In this current moment, the “outside agitators” conjured are both the perennial anarchist bogeymen or Islamist terror groups sending funds to keep student encampments flush with the cheapest tents available online.

The “outside agitator” trope has a long, racist legacy, including use by the Ku Klux Klan. In the 1930s, the Klan issued flyers in Alabama claiming that “paid organizers for the communists are only trying” to get Black people “in trouble.” The allegation does double rhetorical harm by denying the agency and commitment of organizers themselves and suggesting that “outside” support from beyond a given locale or institution is somehow a bad thing.

More recently, the canard has been hauled out in defense of movement repression in Atlanta, against Stop Cop City protesters who had made a national call for backup. And it was a common refrain for politicians nationwide during the 2020 uprising, as well as discourse around the earlier Black Lives Matter protests in Ferguson after police killed Mike Brown.

Blaming outside agitators or interests always was a propaganda ploy and remains so now. The idea that Palestinian liberation struggle is a mere proxy for Iranian interests repeats the delegitimizing logic of the past.

In fact, the Gaza solidarity encampments on campuses are student-organized and led, with Palestinian students at front and center, and a disproportionately large presence of Jewish students too. It is students, over 1,000 of them, who have faced arrest.