Columbia University Students Gaza Solidarity Camp Repression – Support for Joseph Massad, April 2024

Masar Badil, 22 April 2024. We, the organizations and individuals who sign this document, support the students of theColumbia University who put in a Gaza Solidarity Campwhile they had to face severe repression from the university administration and the police department New York (NYPD), and has promised not to leave the building until the university has responded to their demands to reverse this repression.

We strongly condemn these attacks, which are part of the new campaign to the fire Professor Massad from Columbia Universitytenured faculty member and author of several seminal publications.

For decades, Joseph Massad has to face revenge back because of his scholarship on Palestinian and American imperialism. In the early 2000s, he was targeted by propagandists including Daniel Pipes, Martin Kramer and former US Representative Anthony Weiner, who has since fallen from grace.

groups are Zionist lobby also to block his tenure at Columbia in 2009. The attacks on Professor Massad have continued since then. The latest such incident occurred on April 17, when Columbia University President Minouche Shafik testified before the US Congress.

The investigation, in pure McCarthyist style, questioned President Shafik about Professor Massad’s activities, writings and assertions. Instead of protecting the latter, as well as Professor Mohammed Abdou and his university students, Ms Shafik joined the attack. His answers confirmed the Intellectual McCarthyism which is spreading more and more on the Columbia campus and in the United States in general.

The trends with a view to censor and blacklist intellectuals like Professor Massad take place in the context of a US funded and coordinated genocide against the Palestinian people.

The genocidal war of the Zionist state gained intensity in October 2023, following an operation by the Palestinian resistance aimed at freeing political prisoners languishing in Israeli prisons.

Since October, the Biden administration has regularly sent senior officials to the Zionist state’s military operations rooms to monitor the effectiveness and efficiency of the genocide, which targets refugee shelters, schools, universities and sleeping civilians. at home. It also destroyed all operational hospitals in the Gaza Strip.

Gaza has been under siege for seventeen years, without the free flow of supplies, food, fuel or medicine. The blockade, which was further tightened after October 7, and the genocide have killed or injured more than a hundred thousand Palestinians in Gaza, and 42 percent of the victims are children.

However, instead of complying with international laws and listening to the demands of activists around the world, including in US cities, the Biden administration has backed -doubling for the elimination of the regime of Palestinians.

The Prime Minister of Ireland, Michelle O’Neil, said in February last year Gaza had become a children’s graveyard. And this cemetery was created with weapons and funding provided by the United States, through a deep alliance between American imperialism and Zionist colonialism in Palestine and the Arab region.

As part of this systematic repression, US federal and local governments joined with universities to suppress academic freedom at the same time that similar attacks were taking place. in Germany, France, Canada, Great Britain and in other imperial powers.

As the Biden administration facilitates the genocidal war in Gaza, Congress is leading the charge against American campuses and especially against those that have been ravaged by mass anti-genocidal protests.

Intellectuals across the country have been attacked and threatened, including university students, faculty and staff. Students were suspended and kicked out of their accommodation. Student organizations have suddenly canceled their scheduled events.

Students from groups “Justice in Palestine” are banned from certain places. This rehearsal aims to promote and spread the denial of the genocide as an intellectual front aimed at the war of destruction imposed by the Zionist system.

Since October, Columbia University became the epicenter of intellectual McCarthyismsince she is banning the attendance of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) and Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP).

Meanwhile, the university has done nothing to protect students racist and Fox vigilante violence. This violence includes a chemical attack by two Israeli soldiers posing as Columbia students.

Despite these attacks, the student movement for the liberation of Palestine has only increased and is now constantly organizing new camps and popular universities for Gaza in many places in the United States.

In addition to supporting faculty members, such as Professor Massadwe want that Columbia University refrain from targeting thousands of students who have shown support for the liberation of Palestine on this campus.

We believe that the NYPD’s attacks on student protesters and legal observers and their arrests are plausible, and we hold the administration of Columbia University accountable for this repression.

We conclude that the Intellectual McCarthyism as one of many coordinated efforts to suppress any pro-Palestine struggle.

History has taught us that declining empires often descend into full-blown fascism. Recent events indicate that the US is indeed following this path.

While they continue to promote total genocide against the indigenous people of Palestine, they at the same time suppress any speech that opposes the genocide or calls for the liberation of Palestine.

The same forces in Congress that target anti-imperialist intellectuals also demand that anyone who sings be condemned “From River to Sea, Palestine Will Be Free” (From river to sea, Palestine will be free).

Joseph Massad He is one of the world’s leading scholars on Palestine. Edward Said has said that his work is great.

It is in times of confusion and state repression that we need our minds most.

We call on the Columbia, Congress and Zionist lobbyists to take their hands off Professor Massad and all Palestinian, Arab, anti-imperialist and Muslim intellectuals and students. We deny and will resist all attempts to attack the enlightened leaders of our community.

The fight for a just world, free from slavery, colonialism and racism, is the fight for a free Palestine. Intellectual McCarthyism will not prevent the liberation of Palestine.

We will not touch Joseph Massad. We do not touch brave students. Down with McCarthyism. Let us end the blockade of Gaza. Let the genocide stop.

From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.

Published on April 22, 2024 on Masar Badil
Translation: Jean-Marie Flémal, Charleroi for Palestine

Source: Ismfrance.org