Fourteen pro-Paelstinian student protestors were arrested at Brooklyn College following a brutal police raid where students were beaten up, dragged, and tased. Those students, who were entirely peaceful , were viciously attacked by police at the command of the CUNY administration and now seven face charges of disorderly conduct and trespassing and risk punishment from Brooklyn College.
The Brooklyn College administration recklessly endangered all of their students, staff, and faculty, protesters and non-protesters alike, by bringing cops on campus to protect a genocide and attack the right to protest. The cops, in the name of genocide and as enemies of democratic rights, punched, kicked, and tased students for practicing their right to speak out. The police had no business being on campus and no business arresting a single person. Yet out of the school’s determination to remain complicit in the occupation of Palestine and defend U.S. imperialism, it is steadfastly moving to quash the movement completely and assailing the very right to protest for anything in the future.
The raid was in response to a pro-Palestine encampment set up by students in the early afternoon. Students were protesting the mass starvation and bombardment of Gaza, the overall occupation of Palestine, and CUNY’s financial ties to the genocidal state of Israel. At the same time, the Brooklyn College chapter of the CUNY-PSC, the CUNY union representing faculty, staff and graduate assistants had organized an action in solidarity with adjuncts, the lowest paid and most precarious faculty on campus.
Students called faculty to join their action and many did. When tents were first erected and campus security confronted students to take them down, Brooklyn College faculty in their union shirts locked arms and formed a blockade between public safety and students in a proud display of worker and student unity. The combined force of about forty people to stop campus security from taking down the tents and protecting students’ ability to speak out.
In response, the university was placed under lockdown and, in typical NYPD fashion, hundreds of police descended on campus. In a terrifying scene, hundreds of Strategic Response Officers, many wearing riot gear, desceneded onto campus. Students followed all orders by the police and were still met with brutal violence. NYPD tased students multiple times, punched and kicked them in the face, and cuffed students simply for recording them.
Anyone at campus that day was at risk of NYPD brutality. This is especially terrifying on a campus made up of majority Black, Brown and immigrant students, as well as many Muslim and Arab American students. Fear of ICE, of racial profiling, of police violence caused terror for the whole campus.
We must protect our ranks and our morale by not allowing our comrades to be picked apart or scared away. Now is the time for the student and labor movements at CUNY to unite against these brutal attacks and advance the fight for Palestine. Let us take from the example of University of Michigan protesters, who through mobilizations, were able to have felony charges against student protesters dropped.
Drop the charges on student protesters! No cops on campus!
