complicity

Students stand with Palestine, Palestine stands with students

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Original article by Natalia Marques republished from peoples dispatch under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 (CC BY-SA) license.

People in Yemen express their support for US students protesting genocide (Photo via @Aldanmarki/X)

Fighting people across the world show support with the student movement in the US facing repression

“We, the students of Gaza, salute the students of Columbia University, Yale University, New York University, Rutgers University, the University of Michigan, and dozens of universities across the United States who are rising up in solidarity with Gaza and to put an end to the Zionist-US genocide against our people in Gaza,” wrote the Student Frameworks Secretariat, composed of a variety of student organizations part of larger resistance groups and left parties—including but not limited to the Islamic Resistance Movement, the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, the Islamic Jihad Movement in Palestine, Fatah, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, and the Palestinian People’s Party. The Gazan students are expressing their support for the dozens of student encampments that have emerged in the United States, in which students occupy public spaces in their universities to demand that their institutions divest from Israel.

“We welcome the examples of solidarity offered by students facing arrest, police violence, suspension, eviction, and expulsion in order to demand that their universities end their complicity in the Zionist-US genocide and renounce their support for the occupation and the war profiteers that arm it,” the students stated, referring to the central demand of divestment that has been leveraged by students in the encampments. 

Palestinians sheltering in the without tears humanitarian camp in Rafah have created banners in support of US students, which they have hung on their tents. The banners read “From Rafah we send you strength,” “the children [of] Gaza are proud of you,” and “thank you students for Columbia uni.”

On April 26, millions gathered on Sana’a Square in Yemen, some holding banners with images from the US student encampments. Their banners showed images from Columbia and other encampments across the country, and featured slogans such as: “To the brave American students, stand your ground! Yemen stands with you! For a free Palestine!” “Dear American Student: They can arrest you, but they can never break your spirit!” and “The Columbia encampment was just the spark! Long live the great student revolution!”

Bisan Owda, a Gazan journalist whose on-the-ground broadcasts of the Israeli genocide have reached millions if not billions across the world, released a video applauding the student protesters. “I’ve lived my whole life in Gaza Strip and I’ve never felt hope like now,” she said. “For the first time in our lives a Palestinians, we hear a voice louder than their voices and the sound of their bombs…It’s children and youth who are leading the movement now for a free Palestine, putting everything they have on the line to demand justice, an end to the genocide, and a new era of the world.”

Students staging peaceful encampments have been met with brutal force by their administrations, who have launched police attacks.

Police deployed snipers near the Gaza Solidarity Encampment at Ohio State University, and beat, tased, and arrested protesters. 

Students were also brutalized while staging an encampment at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. Students at the Emory Gaza Solidarity Encampment had drawn powerful links between the struggle for Palestine and the struggle against Cop City, a multi-million dollar urban warfare training ground for US police. Students demanded not only divestment of the university from Israel, but also to divest from the construction of Cop City. 

Emory students were brutalized by Atlanta police within hours of setting up their encampment. Police fired rubber bullets and teargas at protesters, tased a student, and detained both students and faculty.

On the night of April 24, Emerson College students in Boston, staging an encampment in solidarity with Gaza, were brutally evicted by Boston police. So brutally, in fact, that video from the next day showed city workers hosing off what appeared to be blood from the streets of the former encampment.

Students across the country staging encampments in solidarity with Palestine, in opposition to the genocide and in favor of liberation, have been subject to all manner of state repression. Faculty have watched in horror as their administrations call the police to brutally arrest students, many of whom are undergraduates. 

In response to the University of Texas – Austin calling in state troopers to arrest students staging a Gaza Solidarity Encampment, faculty at the university expressed deep concern “for our students’ well-being and safety.” 

“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 simply for standing at the front of the crowd,” the faculty stated. “There can be no business as usual when our campus is occupied by city police and state troopers who are preventing our students from engaging in a peaceful demonstration of their first amendment rights.” The faculty are calling for what is effectively a strike, declaring, “No business as usual tomorrow. No classes. No grading. No work. No assignments.”

Ansar Allah in Yemen, which has been boldly resisting Israeli genocide through its blockage of ships with ties to Isreal in the Red Sea, released a statement condemning the police crackdown on student protesters. “This unjustified repression exposes the falsity of the US government’s claims to defend freedom, protect human rights, and spread democracy,”  the organization declared. “We affirm the right of American citizens to demonstrate peacefully, and we value the moral stance of the demonstrators, which expresses an increased state of societal awareness in the face of the official US policy supporting Israeli crimes in Gaza.”

Original article by Natalia Marques republished from peoples dispatch under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 (CC BY-SA) license.

Continue ReadingStudents stand with Palestine, Palestine stands with students

Stop the genocide

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https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/stop-the-genocide

Thousands to rally once again for Gaza ceasefire

HUNDREDS of thousands of protesters will rally in central London tomorrow [today] as calls for an end to Britain’s export of arms to Israel and a ceasefire in Gaza persist.

Protesters, including those travelling from across the country, will assemble at Parliament Square for noon and march to Hyde Park, where a rally will be held.

Weekly demonstrations have been taking place across Britain since Israel’s bombardment of Gaza began following October 7, with activists demanding action from ministers and MPs from both main parties, as well as local government authorities involved in dealings with Israel.

Action groups have also targeted weapons manufacturing companies to stop the supply of arms to Israel as well as firms with financial links to the illegal occupation, including banking giant Barclays.

Organisers of the weekly protests have said they are redoubling their efforts to mobilise following attempts by government ministers and pro-Israel lobbyists to defame the movement.

More than 34,000 people — 14,000 of them children — have been killed in Gaza and thousands more remain missing while famine is imminent for half of the strip’s 2.2 million people facing food insecurity.

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https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/stop-the-genocide

Continue ReadingStop the genocide

Elites in the global North are scared to talk about Palestine

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https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/elites-global-north-are-scared-talk-about-palestine

FREE SPEECH NATION? Arrests are made as pro-Palestinian students and protesters are pushed off campus at the University of Texas, Wednesday April 24

While people across the world have been taking bold action in support of Palestine, the global North ruling class has used all tools at its disposal to support Israel’s genocide and criminalise solidarity writes VIJAY PRASHAD

ISRAELI BOMBS continue to fall on Gaza, killing Palestinian civilians with abandon. Al-Jazeera published a story about the destruction of 24 hospitals in Gaza, each of them bombed mercilessly by the Israeli military. Half of the 35,000 Palestinians killed by Israel were children, their bodies littering the overwhelmed morgues and mosques of Gaza.

The former UN assistant secretary-general for human rights, Andrew Gilmour, told BBC Newsnight that the Palestinians are experiencing “collective punishment” and that what we are seeing in Gaza is “probably the highest kill rate of any military, killing anybody, since the Rwandan genocide of 1994.”

Meanwhile, in the West Bank section of Palestine, Human Rights Watch shows that the Israeli military has participated in the displacement of Palestinians from 20 communities and has uprooted at least seven communities since October 2023. These are established facts.

Yet, these facts — according to a leaked memorandum — cannot be spoken about in the “newspaper of record” in the US, the New York Times. Journalists at the paper were asked to avoid the terms “genocide,” “ethnic cleansing” and “occupied territory.”

Indeed, over the past six months, newspapers and television shows in the US have generally written about the genocidal violence using passive voice: bombs fell, people died.

Even on social media, where the terrain is often less controlled, the axe fell on key phrases; for instance, despite his professions of commitment to free speech, Elon Musk said that terms such as “decolonisation” and phrases such as “From the river to the sea” would be banned on X.

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https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/elites-global-north-are-scared-talk-about-palestine

Continue ReadingElites in the global North are scared to talk about Palestine

Israel’s War on Gaza Has Helped Fuel ‘Near Breakdown of International Law’: Amnesty

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Original article by OLIVIA ROSANE republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).

Body bags are laid in front of the White House as part of a protest calling for a Gaza cease-fire.  (Photo: Lauren Murphy/Amnesty International USA)

“What we saw in 2023 confirms that many powerful states are abandoning the founding values of humanity and universality enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights,” Amnesty’s secretary-general said.

Government aggression and the rise of Big Tech are threatening the rules-based international order and global human rights, Amnesty International warned in its annual State of the World’s Human Rights report, released Wednesday.

The organization expressed particular alarm over Israel’s war on Gaza and the inability or unwillingness of its allies to rein in the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu from bombing civilian populations, displacing more than 1.9 million people, and restricting the flow of aid into the besieged Gaza Strip. This and other conflicts, such as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, had led to a “near breakdown of international law,” Amnesty said.

“For millions the world over, Gaza now symbolizes utter moral failure by many of the architects of the post-World War Two system; their failure to uphold the absolute commitment to universality, our common humanity, and to our ‘never again’ commitment,” Amnesty International’s secretary-general Agnès Callamard wrote in the preface to the report.

“One country, one government is allowed to annihilate international law, to put its middle finger in the eye of international law.”

Amnesty wrote that Israel had made a “mockery” of some of the key tenants of international humanitarian law such as proportionality and distinction by targeting civilization populations and infrastructure such as refugee camps, hospitals, bakeries, and United Nations schools. As of the end of 2023, Israel had killed 21,600 Palestinians, a third of them children. At present, the death toll has surpassed 34,200, though that is likely an undercount as many remain buried beneath rubble.

Amnesty International researcher Budour Hassan toldDeutsche Welle that it was “utterly disappointing” that “one country, one government is allowed to annihilate international law, to put its middle finger in the eye of international law, and go on as if nothing has happened, normalizing the abnormal, normalizing the atrocities that have been happening, so that the crime that was an atrocity two days ago would become normal.”

Hassan said there were things that the international community could do to try to stop the violence, such as cutting off weapons sales to Israel and Palestinian armed groups.

“It’s just that the international community has proven desperately unwilling and incapable of upholding these norms,” Hassan added, saying that, by failing to act, it could be “signing a death sentence to the whole international order.”

In particular, Amnesty criticized the U.S. for spending months vetoing U.N. Security Council resolutions calling for a cease-fire, as well as European Union countries like Germany and the U.K. that called out their opponents’ human rights abuses but continued to back Israel.

“What we saw in 2023 confirms that many powerful states are abandoning the founding values of humanity and universality enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights,” Callamard said.

In addition to Israel and its Western allies, Amnesty also pointed to Russia and its ongoing invasion of Ukraine, as well as China’s human rights abuses against the Uyghur and financial backing of the Myanmar military, which killed at least 1,000 civilians in 2023.

“We have here three very large countries, superpowers in many ways, sitting on the Security Council that have emptied out the Security Council of its potentials, and that have emptied out international law of its ability to protect people,” Callamard toldThe Associated Press of the U.S., Russia, and China.

In addition to state actors, Amnesty International sounded the alarm about the growing power of large technology companies, and, in particular, the rollout of artificial intelligence. The human rights group said that both new and existing technologies were making it easier for governments to target vulnerable groups like women, minorities, and members of the LGBTQ community. For example, the New York City Police Department informed Amnesty that it used facial recognition technology to keep tabs on Black Lives Matter activists, while Israel used it in the West Bank to help control Palestinian movement. The organization warned of how under-regulated technologies could exacerbate the scapegoating of marginalized groups as many countries hold elections in 2024.

“Big Tech’s surveillance business model is pouring fuel on this fire of hate, enabling those with malintent to hound, dehumanize, and amplify dangerous narratives to consolidate power or polling,” Callarmard said. “It’s a chilling specter of what’s to come as technological advances rapaciously outpace accountability.”

Callarmard called for reforms to the U.N. Security Council so that no country could use its veto power to obstruct action and for better governmental regulation of developing technologies.

The silver lining is that ordinary people around the world continue to demonstrate for human rights, both their own and others. Amnesty cited the international movement for a cease-fire in Gaza; abortion rights protests in the U.S., El Salvador, and Poland; and the Fridays for Future youth movement to phase out fossil fuels and address the climate emergency.

“People have made it abundantly clear that they want human rights; the onus is on governments to show that they are listening,” Callamard said.

Original article by OLIVIA ROSANE republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).

Continue ReadingIsrael’s War on Gaza Has Helped Fuel ‘Near Breakdown of International Law’: Amnesty

Student movement for Palestine stands defiant in face of police repression

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Original article republished from peoples dispatch under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 (CC BY-SA) license.

Students set up a Gaza Solidarity Encampment on Harvard Yard (Photo: Micah Fong)

Police continue to crack down on growing movement of Gaza Solidarity Encampments, students stand their ground

Police throughout the country have continued to heavily repress students engaging in protest in solidarity with Gaza. Despite the brutalization of student protesters on campuses such as University of Texas – Austin and the University of Southern California, students continue to stage encampments across the globe.

This is happening in the backdrop of US President Biden signing a bill into law that would provide USD 26 billion to Israel as it conducts genocide in Gaza. Even the European Union has backed a UN call for an investigation (which the US refuses to support) into the over 300 killed Palestinians found in mass graves beneath the ruins of two hospitals. Israel has also begun its attack on Rafah, killing five people in an air strike on a residential building in Rafah City. 

Students at UT Austin have had to withstand brutal repression, as ultra-right wing Texas Governor Greg Abbot called in State Troopers, some mounted on horses, who violently clashed with protesters and made multiple arrests. 

Despite the downpour of state violence, student protesters held their ground, chanting ““You don’t scare us!” and “Get off our campus!”

Protesters also experienced a wave of repression at the University of Southern California, where arrests are currently underway as Los Angeles Police attempt to clear the encampment.

Earlier in the day, Los Angeles police used batons and fists to violently beat organizers. Organizers continued to be defiant in the face of such repression, however, and managed to successfully de-arrest a protester who had been detained in a police car, surrounding the car and chanting, “Let him go!”

On the morning of April 24, Columbia student organizers made important announcements to those participating in the week-long protest, the “Gaza Solidarity Encampment” at Butler Lawn. The previous night, Columbia administration had threatened to bring in the National Guard to sweep the encampment, in a disturbing echo of the Kent State massacre in 1970 of four students protesting the US war in Vietnam by the Ohio National Guard. 

However, that morning, students announced to the entire encampment that “we won a huge concession—we have it in writing that we are here for 48 hours and we will not be swept; we will not be moved!”

Due to a mass mobilization of both students and supporters, inside and outside campus gates, the administration was deterred from sweeping the camp, according to organizers. The administration has set a new deadline for an encampment sweep: Friday at 3 am.

As student organizers at Columbia plan for repression, other campuses across the country and around the world continue to establish their own encampments in solidarity with Gaza at universities such as Harvard and Brown. On April 24, students Sciences Po in Paris erected their own encampment in solidarity with Gaza.

Students across the globe have issued messages of solidarity with the US students braving repression in solidarity with Gaza. The Arab and Maghreb Youth Student Front Against Normalization and in Support of Peoples’ Causes has called for a “global youth student battle in support of Palestinian resistance and all solidarity forces with it,” stating that “what happened at Columbia University in the United States today is the best evidence of what we say, as after six days of sit-ins inside the campus, many other American universities like the University of California witnessed student movements supporting Palestine, shaking the throne of the entity and pushing the Biden administration to ruthlessly suppress protests supporting the Palestinian people and demanding an end to the genocide in Gaza.” 

The Student Front has called for a mobilization of all Arab and Maghreb youth students to “to intensify field movements in support of the Palestinian cause and to stop the genocidal war in steadfast Palestine, strengthening the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement and protesting in front of American embassies and their symbols.”

The International People’s Assembly (IPA) also issued a statement denouncing the  “brutal repression and mass arrests of students peacefully protesting their administrations’ investments in the Zionist entity and demanding an end to all academic partnerships and cooperation.” 

Original article republished from peoples dispatch under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 (CC BY-SA) license.

Continue ReadingStudent movement for Palestine stands defiant in face of police repression