US students revolt against the genocide of the Palestinians

Columbia, NYU, The New School…MIT, Tufts, Emerson… Berkeley, Chicago, Chapel Hill… Everywhere…

By Michael Albert

I went to MIT, class of 1969, so I was a Senior in 1968. It is now 2024 not the late sixties, but rebellion for change is again in the air. I think it is just getting revved up. I can feel it. I’ll bet you can feel it too. And maybe, hopefully, it will not crescendo any time soon but will instead persist. And perhaps, hopefully, it will seek more than immediate changes. And maybe, and I think I can feel this too, it will be much smarter than we were back then, back in 1968.

The rebellious events at Columbia last week have spurred rebellions of students and sometimes others at a rapidly enlarging community of campuses, including at my personally much-despised alma mater, MIT. [Note, I am not unbiased about campus rebellion or about MIT. The former undergirds mass change, over and over. Have at it. The latter is an instance of elite, academic, grossly rotten business as usual. When I was president of MIT’s student body, during steadily growing and intensifying rebellion, among the epithets I used for MIT was “Dachau on the Charles” because of its war research. Some on campus were too literal or too dense to see why I named it thus. For them, I would acknowledge the main difference, which was that MIT’s victims were not local, like Dachau’s—no, MIT’s victims way back then were half a torn-up world away in Vietnam enduring American carpet bombing. And regarding Dachau, MIT’s victims were not hanging like burned out lightbulbs in MIT’s corridors nor lying breathless like fish out of water gassed in MIT’s labs. And now, 56 years later, MIT’s current victims are way off in Gaza enduring Israeli carpet bombing (but with American bombs). They are not being forcefully exiled from MIT’s classes, dorms, playing fields, and clinic—not yet, anyway. My point: history sometimes repeats, sometimes with ironic differences, sometimes with healthy differences.

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Pro-Palestinian Campus Encampments Spread Nationwide Amid Mass Arrests at Columbia, NYU & Yale

Apro 13, 2024

Palestinian solidarity protests and encampments are appearing on college campuses from Massachusetts to California to protest Israel’s attacks on Gaza and to call for divestment from Israeli apartheid. This week, police have raided encampments and arrested students at Yale and New York University. Palestinian American scholar and New York University professor Helga Tawil-Souri describes forming a faculty buffer to protect students, negotiating with police, and the ensuing crackdown that led to over 100 arrests Monday night. Uptown in New York City, the encampment at Columbia University is entering its seventh day despite mass arrests of protesters last week. “In my opinion, the NYPD were called in under false pretenses by the president of the university,” says Joseph Slaughter, professor at Columbia University. “The university is being run as a sort of ad-hocracy at this point, the senior administration making up policies and procedures and prohibitions on the fly, changing them in the middle of the night.”

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Protests erupt on campuses across the US in opposition to the Gaza genocide and attack on free speech

By Jesse Thomas, John Conrad
Apr 23, 2024

In the wake of the arrests of over 100 pro-Palestinian Columbia University student protesters on Wednesday last week, a growing movement of students and youth has swept across the United States. Within days of the crackdown, which was coordinated between Columbia President Nemat Minouche Shafik, Democratic New York City Mayor Eric Adams, the New York City Police Department (NYPD) and the Biden White House, solidarity protests have spread across the country.

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Last Friday, hundreds of students at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, established a protest encampment in Beinecke Plaza on the university campus. Twenty-four tents were erected outside of a Board of Trustees dinner honoring outgoing President Peter Salovey, with students demanding that Yale disclose its investments in military weapons and manufacturers supplying the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) and divest from them.

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President Biden Smears Pro-Palestinian Protesters as ‘Antisemitic’

Some members of Congress are calling for the National Guard to be sent in to break up a protest at Columbia University

by Dave DeCamp
 April 22, 2024

On Monday, President Biden smeared protesters at college campuses around the country opposed to the Israeli slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza as “antisemitic.”

“I condemn the antisemitic protests. That’s why I’ve set up a program to deal with that,” Biden told reporters. “I also condemn those who don’t understand what’s going on with the Palestinians.”

Biden’s comments came as the media is focused on Columbia University in New York City, where students have set up a camp named the “Gaza Solidarity Encampment.” Some of the students involved in the protest were arrested last week and suspended by the university, prompting a walkout by faculty members to show support for the students.

Continue reading at www.wsws.org

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