virgolioness - Tumblr blog

[virgolioness]

the Columbia University arrests are worse than they seem. They're arresting protesting students for trespassing. It goes without saying students cannot meaningfully "trespass" in the common areas of a university they attend. So Columbia University has suspended all student protestors from their institution, in the process revoking their access to housing, their belongings, and most crucially damaging their academic futures. We are witnessing full scale silencing and removal of anyone of conscience from the next generation of academia.

[virgolioness]

[virgolioness]

@wizard_bisan1 and AJ+ have been nominated for a Peabody Award for her coverage of Gaza. ⁣

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For over 6 months, Bisan Owda has shown the world how life in Gaza has been through her eyes. She has told the story of Palestinian survival in the face of the Israeli genocide. ⁣

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Before Oct. 7, Bisan was making films about cultural life in her native Gaza for her own YouTube channel. ⁣

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In 2023, AJ+’s @denatakruri won a Peabody Award for her story “One Day in Hebron,” which gave a firsthand account of the Israeli occupation in Hebron, in the occupied West Bank. ⁣

⁣

[virgolioness]

Minutes ago: Atlanta cops tasing a restrained student protester at Emory University

[virgolioness]

Action needed!!

Pro Palestinians are protesting peacefully in front of the Indiana governor's house when 14 of them got arrested. Please call these numbers and demand for their immediate release without charge.

[virgolioness]

Here's my family tent and their kitchen and how they heating water to take shower.

[virgolioness]

[virgolioness]

[virgolioness]

When I made this post just ten days ago, it was about mass graves discovered at Al Shifa hospital and now we have learned that the same had happened at Nasser hospital in Gaza. The same genocidal pattern: a hospital is put under siege, patients and medical staff are abducted, tortured and buried in mass graves.

But to build on the last point I wanted to bring attention to in the previous post, it is very crucial to also keep in mind is that the Palestinian Civil Defence have reported that Israel had deliberately concealed the identities of those it killed and buried in these mass graves. Close to 400 bodies have been buried in these mass graves, 58% of the recovered bodies have not been identified.

In a press conference, a spokesperson of the civil defence in Gaza said that Israel had intentionally disfigured the bodies postmortem in order to remove any identifying markers such as birthmarks. He also mentioned that they suspect that the bodies have been placed in body bags that expedited the decomposition process, destroying any possibility of them being identified.

One of the main and only ways families have been able to identify the bodies of their loved ones is through the clothes they remember them wearing the last time they saw them. I saw a video of a mother identifying her son by his striped jacket. You can see the grief mixed with relief that she will be able to give her son proper burial.

Remember when months ago I said that to be identified and buried in Gaza has become a luxury? This is very much still the case.

[virgolioness]

Among those arrested in Atlanta today were Noelle McAfee, Chair of the Philosophy Department at Emory University. You can hear her ask the PhD student taking the video:

“Can you call the Philosophy Department office and tell them I’ve been arrested?...I’m Noelle McAfee, I’m Chair of the Philosophy Department”

[virgolioness]

[virgolioness]

[virgolioness]

Fuck Israel and fuck everyone who still wants to pretend this is confusing or complicated. Is it really that hard to point out the "bad people" in a scenario where a multi-billion military apparatus is handcuffing and killing children and medical staff inside a fucking hospital?

[virgolioness]

‼️🇵🇸 An activist, who destroyed multiple engine parts of the jets Israel uses, has been released!

🔸 Source: pal_action

[virgolioness]

feeling the need to post again about this. i'm standing with every single person who is protesting for palestine right now. especially all the people at these universities setting up encampments and having guns and police brigades pointed towards them. these are PEACEFUL protests and should not be threatened with tear gas, force, or even snipers pointed at them. palestine needs our voices more than ever. we're nearing 50K marytered palestinians when there shouldn't have even been 1.

if you personally cannot protest in public for whatever reason it may be, at least voice your support for protesters who are and also voice your support for palestinians. they need your voice. their voices are getting silences constantly online whether through suppression or the IOF marytering them along with everyone else.

i stand with every palestinian in the world. i stand with every protester in the world speaking for palestinians.

FROM THE RIVER TO THE SEA, PALESTINE WILL BE FREE!!!!!

[virgolioness]

María Rivera Maulucci, a professor of Urban Studies at Barnard, spoke out against the arrests.

“The root of word education means to lead out, but how are we leading our students out? In zip ties. Where are we leading students out? To buses? To police stations?” she told the crowd, according to the blog.

Comments such as that — and the general support for the anti-Israel students — left Rory Lancman, the senior counsel of the Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law, lamenting his alma mater.

3Columbia University’s faculty is facing backlash after their decision to back students at the anti-Israel demonstration on campus was denounced as “grotesque” by members of New York’s Jewish community.Getty Images

“It’s grotesque that we have professors who can’t discern the difference between hateful, discriminatory and violent rhetoric that violates the university’s anti-discrimination policies and terrorizes a segment of the university community and reasoned free speech and debate,” said Lancman, whose legal advocacy groups works to battle antisemitism.

“What you’re witnessing at Columbia is the anti-Zionist, antisemitic movement at its core.”

Lancman described the protesters as wannabe “fascists” who were trying to get their way “through harassment, intimidation and violence.”

Several Columbia graduate students, who only gave their first names, also questioned the professors’ support for the student protesters.

“I don’t think it was a smart thing for them to do,” Dana, 34, told the Post.

3Professors appeared on the school’s steps to support the right of the “Gaza Solidarity Encampment” to take over campus space and denounce the administration’s decision to have protesters arrested.REUTERS

“The professors siding with them, basically that tells me, ‘OK Columbia is not a place of discourse, it is not [a] place where you can peacefully argue. It’s a place that sides with a very specific student body.'”

Ali, 26, a transfer student from Tel Aviv University, said the faculty walkout made it clear that the professors were not just endorsing the protest at Columbia, but were actively taking part as well.

“There was no reason to believe that they weren’t part of the protest. They joined the movement because they came out and joined the protest,” Ali said.

He added that the protesters at Columbia have “made no effort to distance themselves from pro-terrorism positions,” calling the demonstrations “disturbing.”

Omer, another graduate student who was putting up pictures of the remaining hostages kidnapped by Hamas, said he was also troubled by the professors’ walkout.

[virgolioness]

hey um are you guys seeing that columbia is threatening to bring in the national guard?

for those of you who don’t know, there were protests in the 1970s on us college campuses against the Vietnam War. At Kent State University, they called in the national guard, who massacred the protesting students.

This is an eerily similar chain of events. It’s mind-boggling that the US is so committed to imperialism that they would rather kill their own citizens than stop killing foreigners. More than that, that they would do so multiple times over, decades apart.

I hope I’m wrong and that the students will be okay. My thoughts are with them, just as my thoughts are always with the people of Palestine.

🍉🍉🍉🍉🍉