Proud to stand with protesters

To the editor:

U.S. Rep. Ritchie Torres takes huge campaign contributions from AIPAC and votes accordingly.

Torres’ latest con is to institutionalize the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism and police student and faculty speech on campuses nationwide.

That means Jerusalem Declaration definition followers, who separate criticism of Israel from antisemitism, would be punished. Freedom of speech and academic freedom would be criminalized. 

You can’t enforce this any more than calling “the river to the sea: Palestine will be free” antisemitic or stopping boycott, divestment and sanctions.

Rep. Torres, instead of visiting Israel, be courageous and lead trips to Gaza and the West Bank to see our USA tax dollars, ammo and bombs at work with well over 35,000 civilians murdered, 80,000 injured and 2 million displaced, starved and traumatized.

Rafah is being bombed as I type.

I have worked in the Bronx for 25 years focusing on anti-racism and anti-oppression as a professor. I’ve never been prouder of our peacefully protesting students than the CUNY/Gaza Solidarity Encampment that unfolded recently at City College for all of CUNY.

After I attended on the first day, CUNY security and the New York Police Department tried to rush the crowd. Students pushed back and faculty defended the students successfully.

A few days later, the NYPD violently assaulted students, staff and faculty with physical aggression, clubs and mace, resulting in multiple injuries, unwarranted arrests, and destroying the camp.

But as our fascist mayor, CUNY chancellor, CCNY president, and presidents of Columbia, NYU, New School, FIT, New Paltz, SUNY Stonybrook, and U Buffalo unleashed fascist police overreach on Gaza solidarity encampments statewide, as violent attacks from Zionists continue in Gaza, the West Bank (and in the USA at UCLA funded by billionaire Bill Ackerman and Jessica Seinfeld), it only makes the movement to free Palestine and end genocide stronger.

It’s been the saddest two weeks in 55 years for U.S. higher education. Cops, guns, snipers, tasers, mace and violence are not needed on college campuses any more than the thought police or censorship or criminalizing speech. We need dialogue, free speech and academic freedom.

The CUNY Gaza Solidarity Encampment has five demands: divest, boycott, demilitarize, solidarity, and a people’s CUNY. Our students — of all belief systems — lead the way to a nonviolent, non-repressive future that frees Palestine of war, genocide, ecocide, scholasticide, and anti-Asian racism.

Stuart Chen-Hayes