a “Gaza solidarity camp” at Columbia University | EUROtoday
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IThey arrived when it was nonetheless darkish. In the house of an hour, a “solidarity camp with Gaza” of round fifty tents was arrange on the lawns of Columbia University to place strain on the president of the institution, who was testifying this Wednesday earlier than the American Congress. While Nemat Shafik assured elected officers that she was doing all the things to battle anti-Semitism on her campus, these college students refuse to go away camp till Columbia has reduce its monetary ties “with the companies that benefit from the Israeli apartheid and the occupation of Palestine.
On Wednesday, around twenty NYPD vehicles were on a street adjacent to the university, but the New York police had not yet intervened to dismantle the encampment in the evening.
READ ALSO On American campuses, the factory of barbarism must hand overThis mobilization is organized by the collective Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD), which brings together members of several student associations, including two which were suspended by the university last November for unauthorized demonstrations and “threatening rhetoric”: Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace. Some notably sang “death to the Zionist state” and “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” within the fall. This slogan, which refers to a Palestinian territory stretching from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean, is anti-Semitic, in response to the Anti-Defamation League, as a result of it “signifies a dismantling of the Jewish state”.
“We refuse to accept a world in which the death of 30,000 Palestinians is normal. We are here in solidarity with the Palestinian liberation movement,” responds to Point a spokesperson for the CUAD collective, ignoring our query about problematic songs.
The president of the college ready for Congress
In December, the presidents of Penn State and Harvard, Liz Magill and Claudine Gay, struggled to obviously denounce the anti-Semitic excesses of sure college students in direction of American elected officers – and at last resigned within the following weeks.
Nemat “Minouche” Shafik didn’t hesitate when confronted with the query “Does calling for the genocide of Jews violate Colombia’s code of conduct”? Answer in three phrases, with out ambiguity: “Yes, it does”. Born in Egypt, the previous vice-president of the World Bank was extra nuanced on the rhetoric “from the river to the sea” and “long live the intifada”. Anti-Semitic slogans? “I see them that way, but that’s not the case for everyone.” But the president insisted: she suspended 15 college students out of 37,000 and several other professors are the goal of disciplinary investigations, together with one, Joseph Massad, who described the October 7 bloodbath as a “stunning victory for the Palestinian resistance.”
“Anti-Semitism has no place on our campus, and I am personally committed to doing everything I can to confront it,” Shafik promised. Who shall be judged on the outcomes.
https://www.lepoint.fr/monde/antisemitisme-un-campement-de-solidarite-avec-gaza-a-l-universite-columbia-18-04-2024-2557991_24.php