dostoyevsky-official

[dostoyevsky-official]

City College, CUNY, 1968 /// 2024

#free palestine and free the university

[dostoyevsky-official]

Columbia University students at the Gaza solidarity encampment reading Wisam Rafeedie's The Trinity of Fundamentals and Ghassan Kanafani's The Revolution of 1936–1939 in Palestine (ph. Ian Bartlett).

[dostoyevsky-official]

Columbia Spectator, April 27, 1968

SDS notice, April 25, 1968. Students in occupied buildings made a point of cleaning and organizing building facilities.  The images of destroyed offices and classrooms that appeared in the media after the police bust were often the work of the police themselves as they cleared the buildings.

#1968 #plus ça change

[dostoyevsky-official]

Kenneth Patchen

[dostoyevsky-official]

#1968

[dostoyevsky-official]

Columbia Spectator, April 25, 1968

#1968

[dostoyevsky-official]

#deployed on unarmed college students and faculty who have not once harmed another student #they really really want a kent state 2 #this is directly enabled by all the democrats and joe biden blaming students for violence that NEVER HAPPENED #free palestine and free the university

[dostoyevsky-official]

having very intense flashbacks to the 2020 uprising when democrats and republicans joined hands in saying "outside agitators" were inflaming the otherwise "peaceful protesters" and a whole segment of the population said yes, the powers that be are right, it's white anarchists who are being "bussed in" ruining the movement, not the cops killing dozens of people at the stop cops from killing people protests

[dostoyevsky-official]

U.S. Rep. Virginia Foxx, R-N.C., who chairs the House Committee on Education and Labor, alleged Tuesday on NewsNation’s “Elizabeth Vargas Reports” that the protests are being funded and organized by outsiders. “It’s obvious that someone is funding them,” Foxx said. “They were well prepared.” (x)

“Why is everybody’s tent the same?” Mayor Eric Adams asked at a press conference Tuesday. “Was there a fire sale on those tents? There’s some organizing going on. There’s a well-concerted organizing effort and what’s the goal of that organizing? That’s what we need to be asking ourselves.” Adams said Kaz Daughtry, a deputy police commissioner, “made a good point” in an interview with Fox when Daughtry said, “If you look at the tents, where did they all get them from? The same place, the same person? Somebody is behind this, and we’re gonna find out who it is.” On social media, many users supplied links to a $15 pop-up tent sold online by discount store Five Below. “Looks like what we’ve got on our hands is a classic case of college students buying something cheap and disposable,” the Hell Gate story added. (x)

1970

[dostoyevsky-official]

i cannot convey to you all how much they are lying to you about these protests

#go and see for yourself — stand with the students

[dostoyevsky-official]

people are so upset at students occupying a small part of the university, imagine how the palestinians must feel

[dostoyevsky-official]

What do you see as the practical point of the student protests? What Israel is doing in Gaza is a moral horror, but the actual demands being made at e.g. Columbia seem so unlikely to affect it in any way (school sells small amount of stock in companies with some connection to Israel -> ??? -> ??? -> fewer children die) that it's hard to wholeheartedly support the protests escalating.

Unless the theory is "make demands that the college won't meet" -> "cause attention-catching disruption" -> "Biden admin finds it embarrassing" -> "Biden maybe pressures Netanyahu", in which case the specific demands are completely arbitrary?

one of the primary demands is disclose: the financial investments are not transparent information, thus the demand for the administration to reveal what they are. second, as i've mentioned before, university divestment is an established practice dating back to apartheid. there's nothing crazy, controversial, or quixotic about the demand. students are not making the demand with the idea that it will be the final straw that will finally crush the war effort, but with the understanding that it's their money, their community, and that a boycott of israel is the morally correct choice in line with the BDS movement. would you be comfortable attending a school that was investing in russian assets? i wouldn't. even if it's not a ton of money (we don't know how much) it's still likely to be significant given columbia's $14 billion endowment (and i find your phrasing unnecessarily condescending here.) harvard, where an encampment has been set up, is worth $50 billion. some of the ivies, like cornell, invest in raytheon—setting aside israel, why should any university have investments in the military industrial complex to begin with?

here is the preamble to the most recent currently available columbia divestment resolution:

not exactly pie-in-the-sky stuff here. the apartheid protests resulted in successful divestment and even the 1968 protests resulted in all demands met by the admin. it's a very practical goal. it's also one that happens to be morally righteous and just.

furthermore, i don't know where you have been for the past week, but who have you seen escalate the protests? the reason why there is now a worldwide protest movement is because, for the thousandth time, minouche shafik called the cops to arrest 108 students. the NYPD itself said the students were peaceful and offered no resistance whatsoever, even as police also arrested legal observers. it was not the intention of the protesters to get national or international attention. "hard wholeheartedly support the protests" is an exceedingly strange comment to make that i, frankly, have a hard time understanding. i find it extraordinarily easy to wholeheartedly support fellow graduate students and professors i personally know at multiple universities who are meeting the ire of a lying media, lying administration, and lying government in the form of a police baton for the crime of sitting on some university's lawn.

at this point, given the sheer level of violence the police has unleashed on students and faculty across the country for showing up to said lawns, a portion of the protest support for them stems from the defense of free speech.

additional demands in light of the arrests and suspensions include the reinstatement of SJP and SJVP and amnesty for all arrested. again, not absurd, not without precedent.

lastly, i invite you to go to a protest and see what's happening for yourself. at this point, there's bound to be one near you.

#it's exhausting seeing everyone learn about them exclusively through twitter videos GO TO ONE! #free palestine and free the university

[dostoyevsky-official]

the encampments have also spread to outside the US, here in Sydney Australia there is an encampment at the University of Sydney (USyd) thats been up since Tuesday our time and is still going strong. I don't know if theres many in other countries yet, I know theres at least one in Canada.

Anyhow just wanted to say that when students protest we protest together, internationally as one, free Palestine

there's also an encampment at melbourne! @fils-des-etoiles kindly put together a list of european universities with protest action. huge shoutout to all the students and faculty worldwide who are demanding their universities divest from israel and protesting for gaza

#i hope the french lead the way as they usually do #1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 and fuck 12 #free palestine and free the universities

[dostoyevsky-official]

"cops are called because students aren't allowed to shut down campus" more lies! first of all, campuses aren't getting shut down: students can get to wherever they need to be—if they can't, it's because of the cops. but over the last few years, graduate students did thoroughly shut down campuses with strikes. columbia was again a notable center of labor action, with a 10-week strike during which TAs, discussion sections, grading, and any other graduate labor was cut out, grinding courses to a halt; sporadic picketing shut down access to campus. columbia took illegal measures by threatening to suspend all graduate students, but at no point were any cops called. other key graduate strikes took place at nyu, the university of michigan, and temple university, with no cops called despite other intimidation tactics by university administrations. this is not to mention hundreds of sit-ins, die-ins, encampments, and other protests that take place yearly across the country with no notice. yet tents honoring palestinians is just cause to unleash the police?

#the media is lying to you #free palestine and free the university

[dostoyevsky-official]

U.S. Rep. Virginia Foxx, R-N.C., who chairs the House Committee on Education and Labor, alleged Tuesday on NewsNation’s “Elizabeth Vargas Reports” that the protests are being funded and organized by outsiders. “It’s obvious that someone is funding them,” Foxx said. “They were well prepared.” (x)

“Why is everybody’s tent the same?” Mayor Eric Adams asked at a press conference Tuesday. “Was there a fire sale on those tents? There’s some organizing going on. There’s a well-concerted organizing effort and what’s the goal of that organizing? That’s what we need to be asking ourselves.” Adams said Kaz Daughtry, a deputy police commissioner, “made a good point” in an interview with Fox when Daughtry said, “If you look at the tents, where did they all get them from? The same place, the same person? Somebody is behind this, and we’re gonna find out who it is.” On social media, many users supplied links to a $15 pop-up tent sold online by discount store Five Below. “Looks like what we’ve got on our hands is a classic case of college students buying something cheap and disposable,” the Hell Gate story added. (x)

1970

[dostoyevsky-official]

hi as someone in the new school encampment please cite literally any other source than the new school "free" press they are run by money from our zionist president and have doxxed multiple students as well as a prominent social justice/palestine organizer in nyc. thanks.

all student presses are run by money from the president, but i tried linking to them if i could because they are being honest as opposed to the mainstream media. noted otherwise

[dostoyevsky-official]

(x)

(x)

all the calls for the national guard to be deployed amid cop violence on campus are driving us towards something like this. note how similar the attitudes were

#kent state