|
Post by Webster on Apr 24, 2024 19:54:20 GMT -5
(The Guardian) Members of faculty at the University of Texas Austin have condemned what they called a “militarized response” to pro-Palestine protests on campus Wednesday. The statement said the peaceful planned action was disrupted by police and state troopers, who responded violently and “made our entire community unsafe”. “We have witnessed police punching a female student, knocking over a legal observer, dragging a. student over a chain link fence, and violently arresting students for simply standing at the front of the crowd,” the statement said. In response, the faculty members stated that on Thursday there would be “no business as usual”, suspending classes, grading and homework. They called for a gathering on campus at 12:15 pm on Thursday.
Local news station FOX 7 Austin has confirmed that one of its photographers was arrested on campus during the protests Wednesday. A video shows the photographer being pulled backwards to the ground by Texas DPS troopers. The station said he was then detained and taken to jail.
|
|
|
Post by Webster on Apr 24, 2024 19:55:16 GMT -5
|
|
|
Post by Webster on Apr 24, 2024 19:56:03 GMT -5
(The Guardian) Israel prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Wednesday student protests of the war on Gaza were “horrific”, characterizing protesters as “antisemitic mobs”. While there have been reports of antisemitism on campuses in recent weeks, protest organizers have blamed such incidents on outside agitators, insisting that their movements are peaceful. A group of professors at New York University released an open letter denying that any NYU-affiliated protesters had engaged in antisemitism or intimidation of others. Many Jewish-led groups protesting the war on Gaza have also pushed back against such allegations. As protests aligned with the Jewish Passover holiday this week, protest encampments at Yale and Columbia held Passover Seders on Monday. When asked this week whether he condemned “the antisemitic protests,” President Joe Biden said he did. “I also condemn those who don’t understand what’s going on with the Palestinians,” he said.
|
|
|
Post by Webster on Apr 24, 2024 22:26:57 GMT -5
(The Guardian) Summary: Dozens arrested across the US in student protests against war in GazaPolice arrested dozens participating in peaceful student-led protests against the war on Gaza on Wednesday. Students have set up encampments at a number of universities in recent days to protest the war on Gaza and demand the schools divest from companies that are closely linked to Israel’s military operations. Here’s the latest: --At least 34 protesters, including a member of the media from a local news station, were arrested during demonstrations at University of Texas in Austin on Wednesday. --Faculty at University of Texas, Austin have announced a strike in response to what they called a “militarized response” to a “peaceful, planned action” on campus. --At least 50 protesters were detained by Los Angeles police at University of Southern California (USC) during peaceful protests. Earlier in the day, police responding to a demonstration at USC got into a back-and-forth tugging match with protesters over tents. --Last week at Columbia University, the focal point of national student demonstrations, more than 100 students, faculty members and others were arrested. --More than 140 additional people were arrested on Monday night at a separate protest at New York University’s Manhattan campus. --House speaker Mike Johnson appeared at Columbia University on Wednesday where he called for the resignation of the president of the university over her handling of the protests at the school. --Democratic congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez assailed authorities for the “reckless and dangerous act” of calling police to non-violent demonstrations. --US schools where protests have been reported include: University of Minnesota, Harvard University, Ohio State, University of California-Berkeley, University of Southern California, University of Texas-Austin, University of Michigan; Emerson College, MIT, Tufts University, Yale University, the New School, New York University, and Columbia University. Students at Sciences Po in Paris also began a solidarity protest on Wednesday.
|
|
|
Post by Webster on Apr 26, 2024 0:37:51 GMT -5
(National Review) The Russian word “pogrom” refers to an organized effort to displace Jewish populations from the spaces in which they reside by force. That is precisely what we’ve seen on far too many college campuses since the October 7 attack. That’s what we saw at Cooper Union, where a braying mob of what we’ve been assured are only anti-Israel protesters threw themselves at the doors of a library in which a handful of Jewish students took refuge. Chanting “globalize the intifada,” in reference to the outbreaks of violence that targeted Israeli civilians with murder, the demonstrators terrorized their Jewish colleagues and compelled them to evacuate their refuge under guard. The Jewish students are suing their school for “being locked in a campus library to shield them from an unruly mob of students that was calling for the destruction of Israel and worldwide violence against Jews.” Similar language could be used to describe the successful effort to scare Jews away from campus facilities at Cornell University. Following an outbreak of threats to “shoot up,” rape, and slash the throats of Jewish students on campus by pseudonymous harassers calling themselves “hamas,” “jew evil,” “jew jenocide,” “hamas warrior,” and “kill jews,” the school threw up its hands. Cornell advised its Jewish matriculants to avoid the campus’s Kosher dining hall lest they risk bodily harm. Of course, those students heeded their school’s warning. “What shocked me the most,” said one witness to Rutgers University’s conciliatory attitude toward its agitated pro-Hamas contingent, “was the fact that the Jews attending the town hall were escorted out by police, not the individuals protesting and breaking the rules.” The event that so enraged the anti-Jewish protesters was only a banal effort by university president Jonathan Holloway to hold an event in which students could ask questions about the war in Gaza and the school’s approach to it. “Before he was able to answer a single one, anti-Israel protesters unleashed chaos,” Zach Kessel reported for NR. And at Columbia, host to the recent spasm of anti-Jewish sentiment that led Cotton to call for reinforcements, the threat of violent antisemitism has forced many Jewish students off campus. The activists who called Jews “inbred,” demanded they “go back to Poland,” and chanted “Burn Tel Aviv to the ground” and “Go Hamas, we love you, we support your rockets, too” somehow managed to convince their Jewish colleagues that they meant business. Columbia administrators appeared to agree. It facilitated their flight to the shadows by moving classes to a “hybrid” setting so Jews could continue to study out of the sight of their tormentors.
|
|
|
Post by Webster on Apr 29, 2024 11:49:41 GMT -5
(The Guardian) Pro-Palestinian and pro-Israeli protesters clash at University of California, Los Angeles-Skirmishes broke out at the University of California, Los Angeles on Sunday as pro-Palestinian and pro-Israeli protesters rallied on campus where a Palestinian solidarity encampment was set up earlier this week. On Sunday, thousands of demonstrators including students and outside members from the wider Los Angeles community showed up on campus, with many waving Palestinian and Israeli flags as others chanted into microphones. According to UCLA’s student-led newspaper, Daily Bruin, the mass crowd consisted of four protests. Various organizations showed up in solidarity with the protests. According to Reuters, members from the Harriet Tubman Center for Social Justice planned to support the students’ right to protest. The Palestinian Youth Movement also rallied in solidarity with the encampments, the Daily Bruin reported. Earlier this week, UCLA students joined thousands of protesters across the country by setting up a Palestinian solidarity encampment on campus, calling for the university to divest from Israel and for a ceasefire in Gaza. Since Hamas’s killing of more than 1,100 Israelis and kidnapping of over 240 hostages last October, Israel has launched a deadly war on Gaza, killing more than 34,000 Palestinians while forcibly displacing over 2 million survivors amid a famine due to Israeli aid restrictions. A security guard tries to intervene in the confrontation with his bike at UCLA in Westwood, California on Sunday. Photograph: Gene Blevins/Zuma Press Wire/Rex/Shutterstock Israel has also destroyed every university in Gaza, in addition to killing at least 5,479 students, 261 teachers and 95 university professors, according to the UN, which has condemned Israel’s actions as “scholasticide”. In a statement posted on Instagram, UCLA’s Students for Justice in Palestine and the UC Divest Coalition at UCLA posted a list of demands to the university. Those include withdrawing all UC-wide and UCLA Foundation funds from companies and institutions that are “complicit in the Israeli occupation, apartheid and genocide of the Palestinian people,” as well as ending the “targeted repression and policing of pro-Palestinian advocacy on campus and sever[ing] all ties with the [Los Angeles police department]”. -Read more: www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/apr/29/palestinian-israeli-protesters-clash-university-california
|
|
|
Post by Webster on Apr 29, 2024 12:37:24 GMT -5
(The Guardian) Congress’s concern over antisemitism comes amid a wave of protests at college campuses over Israel’s invasion of Gaza that the Guardian’s Edward Helmore reports showed no signs of letting up over the weekend. Republicans have seized on these protests to argue universities are not doing enough to protect Jewish students, while supporters of the demonstrations argue they are merely drawing public attention to the devastation in Gaza, and asking campus administrators to cut ties with Israel: Student protests on US university campuses over Israel’s war on Gaza showed little sign of letting up over the weekend, with protesters vowing to continue until their demands for US educational bodies to disentangle from companies profiting from the conflict are met.
In what is perhaps the most significant student movement since the anti-Vietnam campus protests of the late 1960s, the conflict between pro-Palestinian students and university administrators has revealed an entire subset of conflicts.
The drone of helicopters over New York’s Washington Square Park on Monday previewed the arrival of the strategic response group (SRG), the New York police department’s specialist counter-terrorism and political protests division, which set about arresting more than 120 New York University students and faculty members who had been circulating on a campus sidewalk to the chant of: “Israel bombs, NYU pays, how many kids have you killed today?”-Read more: www.theguardian.com/world/2024/apr/28/us-student-protests-gaza-israel
|
|
|
Post by Webster on Apr 29, 2024 12:44:56 GMT -5
(The Guardian) On Friday, protesters at the City University of New York heard a rare live address from one of the country’s best known incarcerated political activists, encouraging them to keep up their struggle, the Guardian’s Nina Lakhani reports: In a powerful and rousing live address to students at the City University of New York (Cuny) on Friday night, the incarcerated Black political activist Mumia Abu-Jamal praised the pro-Palestinian movement growing at US colleges as being on the right side of history.
“It is a wonderful thing that you have decided not to be silent and decided to speak out against the repression that you see with your own eyes,” Abu-Jamal, a former Black Panther, said while calling from Pennsylvania’s Mahanoy state prison. “You are part of something massive, and you are part of something that is on the right side of history.
“You’re against a colonial regime that steals the land from the people who are Indigenous to that area. I urge you to speak out against the terrorism that is afflicted upon Gaza with all of your might, all of your will and all of your strength. Do not bow to those who want you to be silent.”
As hundreds of students and supporters at the Cuny encampment in Harlem cheered, he continued, “This is the moment to be heard and shake the earth so that the people of Gaza, the people of Rafah, the people of the West Bank, the people of Palestine can feel your solidarity with them.”['/i] -Read more: www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/apr/28/pro-palestinian-cuny-protesters-mumia-abu-jamal
|
|
|
Post by Webster on Apr 29, 2024 14:57:54 GMT -5
(The Guardian) Tensions high at Columbia University after protesters defy 2pm deadline to leavePro-Palestinian protesters remain on Columbia University’s campus in New York City, defying an ultimatum from its administrators to leave by 2pm ET or face suspension. The demonstrators are asking college leaders to divest from Israel, which they have declined to do. Earlier today, Columbia’s president Minouche Shafik said negotiations with protest leaders to dismantle their encampment on the college campus had broken down. Columbia had earlier in the month called police to disperse protesters, resulting in more than 100 arrests and leading to accusations Shafik and the college’s leaders were cracking down on free speech.
|
|
|
Post by Webster on Apr 29, 2024 14:58:26 GMT -5
|
|
|
Post by Webster on Apr 29, 2024 17:29:06 GMT -5
(The Guardian) Tensions high at Columbia University after protesters defy 2pm deadline to leavePro-Palestinian protesters remain on Columbia University’s campus in New York City, defying an ultimatum from its administrators to leave by 2pm ET or face suspension. The demonstrators are asking college leaders to divest from Israel, which they have declined to do. Earlier today, Columbia’s president Minouche Shafik said negotiations with protest leaders to dismantle their encampment on the college campus had broken down: Columbia had earlier in the month called police to disperse protesters, resulting in more than 100 arrests and leading to accusations Shafik and the college’s leaders were cracking down on free speech.
|
|
|
Post by Webster on Apr 29, 2024 17:29:38 GMT -5
|
|
|
Post by Webster on Apr 29, 2024 17:30:53 GMT -5
(The Guardian) Republican House speaker Johnson again threatens universities dealing with pro-Palestinian protestsMike Johnson, the Republican speaker of the House who visited the Columbia University campus last week, reiterated his threat to revoke visas from foreign students involved in protests, and cut funding to universities that do not protect Jewish students: Activists condemned Johnson last week, after he said Hamas “backed” the protesters. While the group has praised the demonstrations, there is no evidence they have been involved in their organization.
|
|
|
Post by Webster on Apr 29, 2024 17:47:42 GMT -5
|
|
|
Post by Webster on Apr 29, 2024 17:48:35 GMT -5
(The Guardian) A university in Portland, Oregon will “pause” accepting donations from Boeing after students called on the school to cut ties with the manufacturer amid the war in Gaza. In addition to setting up an encampment on campus, students also addressed a letter to Ann Cudd, the president of Portland State University (PSU), demanding the university cut ties with Boeing. In a campus-wide message, Cudd said she had been motivated by “the passion with which these demands are being repeatedly expressed by some in our community”. She wrote in her memo: PSU will pause seeking or accepting any further gifts or grants from the Boeing Company until we have had a chance to engage in this debate and come to conclusions about a reasonable course of action.Cudd reiterated that the university “has no investments in Boeing but accepts philanthropic gifts from the company and, given that Boeing is a major employer in the region, many of our alumni work there”.
The response from Portland State University (PSU) is one of the first from university administrators to distance their school from a major weapons manufacturer. Though hundreds of students across the country have been protesting on their campuses, setting up encampments demanding divestment from weapons manufacturers and companies with ties to Israel, many universities have repeatedly said they will not divest from Israel or manufacturers. Colleges and universities in the United States have endowments that they often use as financial buffers. Harvard, which has the largest endowment at $51bn, said that it “opposes calls for a policy of boycotting Israel and its academic institutions”. The University of California, which has an endowment of $169bn for its 10 campuses, also said that it “opposed calls for boycott against any divestment from Israel”.
|
|