On the afternoon of April 26, Mumia Abu-Jamal known as the Gaza Solidarity Camp on the Metropolis College of New York (CUNY). CUNY college students and staff, in addition to our Harlem neighbors, crowded across the flagpole within the heart of the camp to listen to Mumia share a message of solidarity with the protesting college students, the individuals of Gaza, and the 1000’s of political prisoners held captive in Israel. prisons.
Two days earlier, Mumia had celebrated his seventieth birthday at Mahanoy Jail in Pennsylvania, the place he’s presently serving greater than 40 years of a dying sentence in jail. Like a lot of his Black Panther Social gathering comrades, together with Sekou Odinga, Jalil Muntaqim and Herman Bell, Mumia has spent many years in jail following political prosecution.
On June 12, 22 protesters from CUNY’s Gaza Solidarity Camp have been placed on trial. Like 13 college students arrested at Stanford College for occupying an administration constructing, they face felony theft fees. In my view, these blatantly unfair fees, which may end in a sentence of as much as seven years in jail, are a part of a political technique to repress the Palestinian liberation motion.
The protesters, referred to as CUNY 22, have been arrested on April 30, after the New York Police Division (NYPD) was known as to campus to raid the encampment together with CUNY’s personal police drive. That evening, each police forces on campus pepper sprayed protesters and there have been experiences of damaged bones and concussion incidents amongst protesters.
I imagine that CUNY senior officers failed of their obligation to guard college students and staff by inviting the NYPD to campus, they usually take accountability for the violence inflicted on our group that evening, which has led to the politically motivated fees that CUNY 22 now faces.
Prosecutors have additionally contributed to the hyper-surveillance of working-class and mixed-race communities by bringing felony fees towards CUNY 22.
From the Cease Line 3 motion in Minnesota to the Cease Cop Metropolis motion in Georgia, many prosecutors use huge felony fees to crush organizing, mistakenly believing they will criminalize actions into elimination, when in actuality repression breeds extra types of battle. daring and more and more artistic. endurance.
Following the violent CUNY 22 arrests, New York State additionally revised its penal code to develop the scope of significant theft crimes, notably when prosecuting teams. Along with the growing use of extortion fees towards protesters and the criminalization of bail funds, this alteration within the prison code supplies prosecutors with a brand new device to suppress radical actions.
Benefiting from the ethical panic round shoplifting, in New York the change to the penal code is getting used as a chance to extend policing, surveillance and incarceration of poor and working-class New Yorkers.
The identical police drive that attacked the CUNY encampment on April 30 and brutalized the Brooklyn Nakba Day protest a number of weeks later recurrently harasses black, immigrant, and homeless individuals. We should combat towards the growing repression and criminalization of our motion. Liberation is collective, which implies we should tear down all of the partitions from Rikers to Palestine to the Mexican border. We combat for the abolition of all settler states, from america to Israel, in addition to prisons and police in all places.
In 1966, James Baldwin wrote that “Harlem is policed like occupied territory.” This stays the case at this time, and is why the CUNY camp’s calls for embrace “off-campus police” and the demilitarization of Harlem. It’s no coincidence that the NYPD trains with the Israeli navy and has an workplace in occupied Palestine; the policing of the black group in Harlem and of Palestinians from Gaza to East Jerusalem and Bay Ridge are a part of the identical system of colonial, imperialist, and gendered racial capitalism.
The brutality displayed towards college students at CUNY on April 30 is strictly what police will likely be skilled on within the proposed “Metropolis of Cops,” a 16-agency advanced that may price no less than $225 million to construct (however most likely far more). additional). This so-called “Metropolis of Cops” is a part of Mayor Eric Adams’ imaginative and prescient of a New York that has 1000’s of law enforcement officials on the subways and a brand new multibillion-dollar jail system primarily based on precincts, however with out library service on weekends. This imaginative and prescient, unsurprisingly, additionally contains huge finances cuts to CUNY.
The 5 Calls for of the CUNY Camp (an homage to the 5 Calls for of the 1969 pupil occupation at Metropolis Faculty) embrace a individuals’s CUNY with free tuition, dwelling wages, and “complete help for college students, together with Metrocards, housing, meals , medical care and psychological well being.” recommendation.” The calls for additionally embrace a name to divest CUNY’s funds from the decades-long occupation of Palestine (simply as CUNY removed apartheid in South Africa in 1984), in addition to a name to boycott Israeli universities which might be crucial establishments within the Zionist undertaking and deeply intertwined with the Israeli military.
Significantly vital is the camp’s third demand, “Solidarity with the Palestinian Liberation Battle: Defend CUNY college students and staff for expressing solidarity with the Palestinian Liberation Battle.” This demand extends to group members as a result of CUNY is a public college and its actions have all the time included group involvement.
Parts of the college institution are pushing a story that “outdoors agitators” had taken over the protests at CUNY, posing a menace to the security of scholars and staff and requiring the presence of the NYPD on campus. This can be a grave insult to numerous black Harlem organizers who’ve fought for many years to safe group management of Metropolis Faculty, which based on a 1965 Amsterdam Information editorial was as soon as “nearly as lily white by day because the campus from the College of Mississippi.
For the previous eight months, the Israeli military (with the unwavering political, monetary and navy help of the US authorities) has bombed each college in Gaza, murdering 1000’s of scholars in a “scholasticide” of horrendous proportions. As Israel escalates its genocidal and uneven struggle in Gaza with the invasion of Rafah, we should help CUNY 22 from a spot of solidarity with the individuals of Gaza and the battle for Palestinian liberation. As a CUNY professor, I’m proud to help the 5 calls for of the Gaza Solidarity Camp and stand in solidarity with CUNY 22.
Drop the fees now! Freedom for all political prisoners, free CUNY and free Palestine!
The views expressed on this article are these of the creator and don’t essentially mirror the editorial place of Al Jazeera.
