Below is a Jill Stein campaign email from April 28th (at 7:45pm ET) and a GPUS press release sent out this morning. See also: twitter.com/DrJillStein/status/1784599149746237794 and a satire: www.normalisland.co.uk/p/us-police-capture-hamas-leader-at
I think the encampment at UNC-Chapel Hill was broken up by police today. I haven't heard that the students were doing anything more than occupying a central lawn, popular with students in warm weather anyway, and I think UNC Occupy was allowed to camp for a longer period. Classes ended today and most students will be gone for summer break by mid-May, so why did UNC's administration feel the need to bring in the police? The governor of NC is a 'moderate' Democrat elected with Trump, while the General Assembly is Republican-dominated and I think has made vocal and material support for Israel an issue in recent years. Maybe UNC was told to do this, or wanted to preemptively avoid trouble with legislators and the Board of Governors, the same way Congress has pressured a few representative university administrators to repress student and faculty solidarity with Palestine (or else), no doubt cowing others. On the other hand university administrators are in bed with the ruling establishment anyway. I heard that UNC students once chased the CIA off Campus and out of Chapel Hill, and Democratic Congressman David Price might have moved his Chapel Hill office because of student and community opposition to the Iraq War (including one or two occupations of his office).
What is going on at Duke: www.dukechronicle.com/article/2024/04/duke-university-israel-hamas-war-encampments-protests-on-college-campuses-student-arrests-oct-7th-attacks-comparison The "Durham Revolutionary Study Group" (Maoist??), SJP, and the PFLP are reference. A Free Expression Bridge Ramadan painting defaced: www.dukechronicle.com/article/2024/04/duke-university-free-expression-bridge-office-of-institutional-equity-student-affairs-investigation-red-cows-muslim-nation-flags-not-merciful-announcement
I haven't heard about anything happening at NCSU, but I am more familiar with their free expression tunnel under the railroad tracks than the bridge at Duke. A few months ago the main pro-Palestinian demonstrations in the Triangle seemed to be at Moore Square in downtown Raleigh, relatively close to NC State.
The defenders of "our democracy" against Trump and MAGA "fascism" demand that "negotiations" end and "action" be taken at the universities (on the 29th Steny Hoyer, Adam Schiff, and others in Congress sent a letter to Columbia's Board of Trustees), plus more on the Stein arrest: www.wsws.org/en/articles/2024/04/29/jenj-a29.html Remember to "Vote Blue No Matter Who." Is it 1968 again, and what will happen at the DNC in Chicago this summer? Are things escalating much more quickly under Biden now than under Bush in 2003, or when the Occupy movement was dispersed? In recent years a self-declared radical Marxist academic regularly denounced the Democrats, but wanted them in power, to expose them and to prevent Trump from going after leftists.
A permitted encampment in front of the Bundestag in Berlin was violently suppressed April 27th? -- www.wsws.org/en/articles/2024/04/29/ywni-a29.html
Dear [ ],
Last night didn’t end up the way I planned.
By now you’ve probably seen the headlines reading “Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein arrested at Pro-Palestine rally” (or some less flattering variations).
Here’s the full story.
First and foremost: My team and I are okay. Bruised and battered, and with some legal issues to resolve. But we are out. We are okay. And we are undeterred.
Yesterday, my team and I were invited by students at Washington University in St. Louis to visit their Gaza Solidarity encampment. We gladly accepted this invitation.
Once there, it was apparent that tensions were escalating quickly. The student organizers asked us to intercede with university officials to try and de-escalate the coming confrontation. Again, we gladly accepted this responsibility.
But authorities were having none of it. The scene was tense from the beginning, and it was clear that a crackdown was inevitable.
The students asked us to link arms and block access to their encampment by police. And we did.
We braced for impact, but nothing prepared me for what came next.
We were then violently thrown to the ground, zip-cuffed, and placed under arrest.
We were arrested around 7:30pm local time and released around 1:30am. You can catch my interview with local news here.
The students of Washington University have established an encampment to protest the school’s financial holdings in Boeing, which is producing some of the munitions being used against the people of Gaza just a few miles away in their St. Charles facility.
The students are exercising their constitutionally protected right to free expression to pressure their university to divest from death.
The university’s response is to violently assault and incarcerate anyone who dares speak out.
The students are in the right here, as they always are. I am proud to stand by their side as the ONLY pro-peace, anti-genocide, pro-worker candidate slated to be on the ballot across the country this November.
Today I am tired, I am bruised, I am battered – but I am undeterred in my resolve to stop Israel’s genocide and end their illegal occupation of Palestine.
This is not my first protest arrest, but it was unnervingly violent. What we are experiencing on university campuses across the nation right now is a pale shadow of what is to come if the twin parties of war and Wall Street are allowed to remain in power.
I urge you to contribute to our campaign today and make sure EVERY American has a pro-peace candidate on the ballot in November.
In solidarity and gratitude,
Jill
After Her Arrest at Washington University, Jill Stein Slams Police Repression… and the Two-Party System That Supports It
On Saturday, April 27th, campus police physically repressed and assaulted students and supporters during a peaceful pro-Palestinian demonstration on the campus of Washington University in St. Louis. Dr. Jill Stein, a candidate seeking the 2024 Green Party presidential nomination, was among those assaulted and arrested by police. The Green Party is outraged by the violence perpetrated on students and others exercising their First Amendment rights.
Green Party of the United States
gp.org
For Immediate Release:
April 30, 2024
Contact:
Gregg Jocoy, Co-Chair, Media Committee, media [at gp org], 202-804-2758
Gloria Mattera, Co-Chair, Media Committee, media [gp org], 202-804-2758
Gloria Mattera, co-chair of the Media Committee of the Green Party, said, "The Green Party is appalled at the level of brutality that campus administrators and local police have employed in breaking up peaceful protests by students exercising their First Amendment Rights to protest what they view as genocide by Israel in Gaza. We see yet again that free speech rights are perfectly okay in America, until someone advocates a position that runs afoul of the agenda of the two parties of war and Wall Street. When that happens, the state will respond with illegal violence and unconstitutional repression, and candidates for rival parties will not be spared."
Dr. Stein was in Missouri to collect signatures for her name to be placed on the state's ballot in November. She visited the campus to offer her support to the students and community when she was invited to join the demonstration. A frightening and disturbing video shows Dr. Stein, 73, who had linked arms with other protesters, being assaulted by the police, including one wielding a bicycle against her as a weapon, before she was arrested. Dr. Stein, who has since been released, said in an email to her followers, "We are okay and we are undeterred."
"I was there to support the students and community members who were holding a peaceful, really wonderful, gracious, educational community gathering," Dr. Stein said in a video interview. "The police basically attacked us and assaulted us as well as arrested us... Zionism is something that needs to be debated and anti-Zionism is not the same as anti-Semitism." She has called the crackdown on protesters nationwide a violation of fundamental First Amendment rights. She told an interviewer for a radio station: “This is about freedom of speech, and not just any old freedom of speech, but freedom of speech on a very critical issue that needs debate and dialogue.”
Dr. Stein, who is Jewish, has called for an independent investigation into Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for his conduct during the six-month assault on Gaza and the West Bank. "The war crimes being perpetrated by Netanyahu against Palestinians... are in a league of their own and have reached genocidal proportions." It has been widely rumored that Prime Minister Netanyahu as well as others in his government may soon be served with arrest warrants by the International Criminal Court in the Hague.
On her campaign website, under the slogan of "People Planet Peace," a statement by Dr. Stein reads, "I'm running for president with the Green Party to offer a choice for the people outside the failed two-party system. We'll put a pro-worker, anti-war, climate action agenda front and center in this election and on the ballot in November." Prof. Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia University, Director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia and President of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network, is among those who have endorsed Jill Stein for President.
Said Margaret Elisabeth, co-chair of the Green Party of the United States, "It's very convenient that the American mainstream media have made the campus protests, as well as unsupported allegations by bad faith actors of threats to Zionist Jewish students, the big current story, which obscures the real story of war crimes being committed in Gaza, including mass burials. We would like someone in the media to explain to us how the "pain" of Zionists who are having their worldview peacefully challenged by people, including many Jews, who happen to disagree with them is in any way commensurate with the agony and anguish suffered by the people of Gaza and the West Bank during this ongoing genocide."
On its main website, the platform of the Green Party of the United States, under the heading "The Palestinian-Israeli Conflict" reads, "The U.S. Greens recognize and reaffirm the right of self-determination for both Palestinians and Israelis, and their right to live in a single undivided secular and democratic state where all residents have full and equal rights, and freedoms... We call on the U.S. President and Congress to suspend all military and foreign aid, including loans and grants, to Israel until Israel withdraws from the Occupied Territories, dismantles the separation wall in the Occupied West Bank including East Jerusalem, ends its siege of Gaza and dismantles settler colonies and systemic apartheid toward its non-Jewish citizens."
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