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Protests and Repression Across the U.S.

At UC Santa Barbara, Students for Justice in Palestine, the Department of Black Studies and several campus organizations united for a “Day of Interruption” on March 7, 2024.

 

At UC Santa Barbara, Students for Justice in Palestine, the Department of Black Studies and several campus organizations united for a “Day of Interruption” on March 7, 2024.    Photo: Lizzy Rager/Daily Nexus

  • Vanderbilt University, Tennessee: The University expelled three students, suspended one, and put 22 more on probation. This was a repressive response to a sit-in of two dozen students which began on March 26 at an administration building after the University blocked students from voting on whether student government funds would be barred from going to businesses that support Israel. 154 faculty members have signed a letter protesting these harsh punishments.1
  • Pomona College, California: 19 pro-Palestine demonstrators were arrested on Friday, April 5. For several months, Pomona students had been demanding the college divest from all companies with ties to Israel. During the past week, the students built a mock “apartheid wall” on the campus quad. After campus security took it down on Friday, students marched into an administrative building and 18 occupied the college President’s office, while dozens more protested in the hallways outside. Some 100 more protested outside chanting. When students occupying the President’s office were arrested, over 100 protesters followed them to the Claremont Jail and stayed there for over four hours.2
  • University of California, Santa Barbara: On March 7 Students for Justice in Palestine, the Department of Black Studies, and other campus organizations held a “Day of Interruption” rally and teach-in to protest the temporary suspension of the MultiCultural Center, the University administration’s threats to free speech, and its refusal to divest from companies “supporting Israel’s occupation of Gaza.” Some 300 students, faculty and staff took part in the protest.
  • The MultiCultural Center (MCC) was temporarily closed on February 26 after anti-Zionist, pro-Palestinian signs were posted on its walls, sharply polarizing the campus and sparking charges of “anti-Semitism” and the doxing of MCC faculty, staff and affiliates. On March 2, faculty from the Black Studies Department had issued a statement condemning the University for the closure.3
  • Syracuse University, New York: Over 1,000 faculty nationwide signed a “Statement of Solidarity in Opposition to the Repressive Climate on US Campuses.” Following attacks on pro-Palestinian forces at Syracuse, faculty there and around the country circulated a statement denouncing “the increasingly repressive climate on our campuses across the US.” The statement, which has now been signed by over 1,100, declares: “we refuse to adhere to the censorship, policing, and the circumventing of our academic work and mission as educators.”

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This Sunday, a front-page New York Times article detailed how, across the U.S. protests are popping up against Biden and the Democrats' support for Israel’s murderous assault on Gaza: 

  • A congressman’s holiday party in Detroit “devolved into chaos and a broken nose after demonstrators protesting the war in Gaza appeared with bullhorns.” 
  • The mayor of Fort Collins, Colorado “abruptly ended a meeting during which protesters demanding a ceasefire in Gaza glued their hands to a wall.”
  • “In places as disparate as a historic church in South Carolina and Radio City Music Hall in Manhattan, President Biden has been heckled and drowned out by demonstrators objecting to his support for Israel.”
  • At a White House gathering for Ramadan this past week, a Palestinian American doctor—one of the few Muslim community leaders who agreed to attend—walked out in protest after telling Mr. Biden that Israel’s looming ground invasion of Rafah would be a “blood bath and a massacre.”
  • Pro-Palestinian demonstrators have spent weeks protesting outside Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken’s house, spilling pitchers of fake blood and shouting at him and his family.
  • Even supposedly cheery photos posted on social media by the White House—of children at the Easter Egg Roll or newly planted tulips—are flooded with comments accusing the administration of being complicit in mass killing and starvation in Gaza.
  • Other examples are cited from Santa Ana and Berkeley, California; Detroit and Ann Arbor, Michigan; Danbury, Connecticut; and Bernie Sanders getting heckled on an overseas trip. 
  • “A lot of people here, they’re tired of having to choose between what they feel is the lesser of two evils,” Ms. Johnson, 28, said as she joined the hundreds of protesters gathered outside the event. “What he’s doing doesn’t feel like the lesser of two evils to me. It feels like something very evil.”4
  • Hillary Clinton got called out at her alma mater (former school) Wellesley. She went to celebrate the opening of a research center named for her.  But pro-Palestine protesters didn't let this go down in silence—they protested outside and disrupted her talk inside, righteously calling her a war criminal.5 

For more, see As Students Speak Out Against U.S./Israeli Genocide of Palestinians, Crackdown Intensifies, Revcom.us, April 1, 2024.

 

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