Columbia University students built a Gaza Solidarity Encampment in the university campus to voice their support for Palestine. Photo: Social media.
By Masar Badil – Apr 22, 2024
The following is the statement of the Palestinian Alternative Revolutionary Path movement, Masar Badil, in support of the students of Columbia University and other US institutes of higher education who are walking out of classes and demonstrating in support of Palestine and against the US academia’s association with the Zionist entity.
We, the undersigned organizations and individuals, stand with the students at Columbia University who have undertaken a Gaza Solidarity Encampment, confronting harsh repression from the university administration and New York Police Department, and pledging to remain in place until the university responds to their demands for divestment. The students launched the encampment on April 17, the day when Columbia president Minouche Shafik was summoned before Congress to answer a series of right-wing, Zionist attacks on students and faculty, particularly Professor Joseph Massad. We strongly condemn these attacks, a part of a renewed campaign to fire Professor Massad, a tenured faculty member and author of numerous groundbreaking publications, from Columbia University.
Joseph Massad has faced reactionary reprisals for his scholarship on Palestine and US imperialism for decades. In the early 2000s, he was targeted by propagandists, such as Daniel Pipes and Martin Kramer, and the disgraced former US Representative Anthony Weiner. Zionist lobby groups also sought to block his tenure at Columbia in 2009. The attacks against Professor Massad have continued ever since. The latest such incident occurred on April 17, when Columbia University President Minouche Shafik testified in front of US Congress. The McCarthyite-style inquiry probed President Shafik into the activities, writings, and statements made by Professor Massad. Rather than defending Professor Massad, Professor Mohammed Abdou, and her own students, Shafik instead joined the attack. Her answers reinforced the intellectual McCarthyism permeating Columbia’s campus and across the United States.
The efforts to censor and blacklist intellectuals like Professor Massad are occurring in the context of a US-funded and -coordinated genocide against the Palestinian people. The Zionist state’s genocidal war accelerated in October 2023 following a Palestinian resistance operation to liberate political prisoners languishing in Israeli jails. Since October, the Biden administration has regularly sent officials to the military operating rooms of the Zionist state to oversee the effectiveness and efficiency of the genocide, which targets refugee shelters, schools, universities, and civilians sleeping in their homes. It has also destroyed all operating hospitals in the Gaza strip.
Gaza has been under siege for 17 years without free flow of supplies, food, fuel, or medicine. The blockade—which was reinforced after October 7, and the genocide have killed or injured over 100,000 Palestinians in Gaza, with 42% of the casualties being children. Yet, instead of complying with international law and listening to the demands of protesters around the world, including in US cities, the Biden administration redoubled its support for the Zionist regime’s extermination of Palestinians. Irish Prime Minister Michelle O’Neil stated in February 2024 that Gaza has become the graveyard for children. That is a graveyard that was created with the arms and funding provided by the United States, through the deep alliance of US imperialism with Zionist colonialism in occupied Palestine and throughout the Arab region.
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As part of this systematic repression, US federal, state, and local governments have worked with universities to crack down on academic freedoms, alongside similar attacks in Germany, France, Canada, Britain and other imperialist powers. While the Biden government facilitates the genocidal war in Gaza, Congress has led the charge on US campuses, particularly those rocked by major anti-genocide protests. Intellectuals across the country, including students and academic faculty and staff, have been attacked and threatened. Students have been suspended and evicted from their housing. Student organizations have faced abrupt event cancellations. Students for Justice in Palestine groups have been banned on several campuses. This repression aims to foster and propagate genocide denialism as the intellectual façade for the Zionist regime’s war of extermination.
Columbia University has become the center of intellectual McCarthyism since October, with its banning of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) and Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP). Meanwhile, the university has done nothing to protect students from the violence of racist and Zionist vigilantes. This includes a chemical attack perpetrated by two former Israeli soldiers doubling as Columbia students. Despite these attacks, the student movement for Palestinian liberation has only grown, and is now sparking encampments and popular universities for Gaza across the country.
In addition to standing with faculty like Professor Massad, we demand that Columbia University refrain from targeting the thousands of students who have voiced their support for Palestinian liberation on that campus. We find the NYPD attacks on and arrests of student protesters and legal observers to be reprehensible, and we hold Columbia’s administration responsible for this repression.
We conclude that intellectual McCarthyism constitutes one of the numerous coordinated efforts to suppress all resistance in support of Palestine. History has taught us that declining empires often descend into naked fascism. Recent events indicate that the US is following this trajectory. While it supports an all-out genocide against the indigenous Palestinian people, it simultaneously suppresses any speech that opposes the genocide or calls for Palestinian liberation. The same congressional forces targeting anti-imperialist intellectuals are calling for the condemnation of anyone who utters “From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be Free.”
Joseph Massad is one of the world’s foremost scholars on Palestine. His work was described by Edward Said as genuine brilliance. It is in moments of confusion and state repression that we most need our intellectuals. We demand that Columbia, Congress, and the Zionist lobbies get their hands off Professor Massad and all other Palestinian, Arab, anti-imperialist, and Muslim intellectuals and students. We denounce and will resist all efforts to assault our community thought-leaders.
The fight for a just world, free of slavery, colonialism and racism is the fight for a free Palestine. Intellectual McCarthyism will not prevent the liberation of Palestine.
Hands off Joseph Massad! Hands off the courageous students! Down with McCarthyism! End the blockade on Gaza! Stop the genocide!
From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be Free.
