University students rising up against ties with Israel (title edited by MNHQ at request of OP)

[EasterIssland]

Many university students are raising up against the ties their universities have with Israel. Students are asking for this agreements to stop
I can see this is happening in USA which has been in the news quite a lot but I can also read news about Paris as well as UK.

I really doubt much will change but I’m glad people are against these agreements. We can’t change what Israel / Hamas do. But we should be able to change what our governments / universities do.

Undoubtedly there are dickheads on both sides.
Whether it’s throwing fireworks, spraying graffiti, breaking windows, trashing buildings, preventing people from going about their business, chanting racist slogan or terrorist-support, attacking people, pushing people around, releasing mice…whatever. It is doing neither side any good and is making the whole thing more about how dickheaded they all are than making any particular political point.

They’ve been attacking reporters as well

100% agree. They really are fulfilling the role of ‘useful idiots’ remarkably well.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Useful_idiot

Palestine Solidarity Encampment Press Release
April 30th, 2024
The life-threatening assault we face tonight is nothing less than a horrifying, despicable act of terror. For over seven hours, zionist aggressors hurled gas canisters, sprayed pepper spray, and threw fireworks and bricks into our encampment. They broke our barriers repeatedly, clearly in an attempt to kill our community. Campus safety left within minutes, external security the university hired for "backup" watched, filmed, and laughed on the side as the immediate danger inflicted upon us escalated. Law enforcement simply stood at the edge of the lawn and refused to budge as we screamed for their help. The only means of protection we had was each other. WE KEEP EACH OTHER SAFE.

Despite the danger, we refused to engage standing by the principles of our encampment self defense. For all the school's pretense of student safety, we have experienced an unprecedented amount of violence and hatred while they stood by. The university's hypocrisy all too apparent, as signs of this escalation were reported, documented, and indicated early on. The zionist attacks, their use of chemical weaponry, their hatred, their destruction, are but a microcosm of the genocide in Gaza. The university would rather see us dead than divest. Media portrayal of neutrality and both sides only obfuscates the truth. We have no pepper spray, no gas canisters, no fireworks, and no aggression. All we had was our community to hold our wooden barriers. What more can we do? We ask yet again- no, we demand that the university end this sham. The sham of pretending that the school is neutral- it has chosen genocide before and it chooses genocide again.

Call on UCLA, protect your fellow students, and call for what we need- a divestment from systems of death that profit off of indiscriminate bombing and a call to end the genocide in Gaza and the occupation of Palestine.

In solidarity,

The besieged UCLA Palestine Solidarity Encampment

which was replying to:
Hippyhippybake· 26/04/2024 19:17

Most of the students involved are unbelievably uninformed on the subject - it’s embarrassing. They are pawns and too stupid to see it.

Wait until they hear what most Palestinians thinks about homosexuality and women’s rights.

Re:
Wait until they hear what most Palestinians thinks about homosexuality and women’s rights.

They may be uninformed on some aspects but they aren’t so idiotic or uninformed that their starting point is not, unlike some far right powerful people in the Israeli government, wanting any Palestinian people (whether man, women, children,) to be allowed to live in the first place.

It hardly matters if Palestinians are women or gay when they are dead, maimed or starving, their homes, medical facilities and educational institutions destroyed, and they are under the control of a military state.

https://x.com/alijla2021/status/1785622396591800817?s=61&t=nilGqPeurpC5xVqZAZdZog

I want to catch up with this thread properly asap but just wanted to leave this here.

The zionist attacks, their use of chemical weaponry, their hatred, their destruction, are but a microcosm of the genocide in Gaza. The university would rather see us dead than divest

They are cosplaying as Gazans. They are privileged students at supposedly elite universities and they can go home.
Appropriating what is going on in Gaza to describe their situation is offensive and thoughtless.

https://apple.news/ATlR01K1wQW2mBPpOHi-wyw

Interesting in this article that the Palestinian societies and Jewish societies get on fine and on an individual level as well, but that the trouble is caused by outsiders almost appropriating the conflict.

The least said about the lecturers mentioned the better.

Wait until they hear what most “Palestinians thinks about homosexuality and women’s rights “
The students are protesting in support of the right to life, to safety, to food and to clean water and for the right to self determination. They protest against the arming of those responsible using US tax money and of university endowment funds being invested in ways that support the actions of the Israeli government.
If the entire population of Gaza were devil worshippers, they would still have these rights.
Furthermore, this conflict increases the likelihood that Gaza will go the way of Afghanistan or Haiti with even more violent Islamic extremist war lords rampaging for decades after the majority of tolerant and educated people are killed or forced to leave. Even Russia hasn’t targeted hospitals, universities and even places of worship.

Or another way of looking at it is that they’re protesting in order to damage the ability of the only functioning democracy in the Middle East (with equal rights for women and gay people) to fight an existential war against an Islamic death cult which wants the state of Israel obliterated and all Jews murdered.

I wondered what was meant by ‘chemical agents’ in the letter written by the pro-Palestine students and heard on the LA news that ‘Bear Spray’ was being used.

Capsaicin bear spray was developed in the mid-1980s[3]under principal investigator Carrie Hunt, a University of Montana graduate student working under the supervision of Charles Jonkel and Bart O'Gara.[4][5] Hunt had identified commercial pepper sprays as an effective deterrent for bears in previous research; however, they were unreliable[6] and required close proximity. Hunt's thesis was published by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in 1984.[7]Bill Pounds, who eventually founded Counter Assault bear spray, assisted Hunt and offered to help devise a prototype for a reliable aerosol bear spray canister for Hunt's research. They developed a bear spray formula with a spray range of over 30 feet (9.1 meters) and a spray time of over 7 seconds

and

In Canada, while legal for use against bears, bear spray is a prohibited weapon if intended to be used against humans.[18]
(Wikipedia)

NBC News;
March 20, 2021, 6:00 AM EDT
By Rich Schapiro

Melissa Lewis, an independent journalist from Oregon, was documenting a far-right rally in Portland last August when she says a man rushed up and sprayed her with bear mace. The chemical seeped into her eyes and inside her ear canal, causing excruciating pain that sent her to the emergency room.
"It took three shots of fentanyl to get me to a place where I wasn’t screaming,” Lewis said.

Bear spray has been used as a weapon by civilians in a number of high-profile incidents in recent months.
The chemical irritant, which is similar to pepper spray but more potent, has been deployed by right-wing and left-wing protesters against one another and police in the Pacific Northwest. In Staten Island, New York, police say a man used it to incapacitate deli clerks in a series of robberies last December. And at least three people who participated in the Jan. 6 Capitol riot are accused of spraying police officers with bear repellent
www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/unbearable-pain-how-bear-spray-became-prized-weapon-violent-protesters-n1261615

Ilhan Omar’s daughter was part of the Columbia protest and claimed they’d been the victims of Israeli supplied “chemical weapons”. Turns out it was fart spray bought from Amazon.

In practice, it is the Israeli government doing the mass murdering at the moment though.

To be clear, in my post I was talking about events at UCLA last night and this morning where Good Morning LA said people were using Bear Spray.

For interest, possibly you talking about this incident where an ex IDF Columbia student used “fart spray” on protesters:

Student accused of alleged chemical spray sues Columbia, claims substance was ‘non-toxic fart spray’

The lawsuit claims that the spray was the student’s “harmless expression of speech.”

Excerpt:

Columbia charged the plaintiff with disruptive behavior, harassment, and endangerment, the lawsuit states
Updated on April 17 at 12:25 a.m.

A Jewish student who formerly served in the Israeli military filed a lawsuit on Tuesday against Columbia claiming it went through “biased misconduct proceedings” for his actions at a Jan. 19 protest, at which students allege they were sprayed with a foul-smelling chemical.

The lawsuit claims that the plaintiff, named as “John Doe,” sprayed “gag gifts” of fart sprays called “Liquid Ass” and “Wet Farts.” The plaintiff brought the spray with him to the rally and sprayed it in the air, “not directly at any individual,” according to the suit.

The “plaintiff’s actions were a harmless expression of speech to demonstrate discontent with the pro-Hamas pro-Palestine message through the use of a gag gift, and nothing further,” the lawsuit states.

It continues……
https://www.columbiaspectator.com/news/2024/04/16/student-accused-of-alleged-chemical-spray-sues-columbia-claims-substance-was-non-toxic-fart-spray/

This.

The level of intelligence of a spokesperson. They could just go to the shop for food!

https://twitter.com/themacrostory/status/1785529298067349867/mediaviewer

The “useful idiots” described by one of their professors

https://twitter.com/dr_tey/status/1785645513271902395

The good students should tell the ones cheering support for terrorist organisations and demanding humanitarian aid to pack it in.

@ScrollingLeaves yep, that’s why I said “at Columbia”. I love the way you use ex IDF as though it was something malign and sinister, it was fart spray! A staple on college campuses.

It is not an existential war in the sense that Hamas cannot destroy Israel militarily. And Netanyahu’s government facilitated Hamas by displacing more moderate more secular actors in order to avoid progressing the two state solution. Without Netanyahu’s intervention, rather than a death cult , Gaza would be more likely to be ruled by a party with a two state solution as its objective.

And calling Israel a democracy is technically true but at least half of Netanyahu’s coalition are theocrats. A Pew study in 2016 said “A majority of Arabs in Israel (64%) – including most Muslims, Christians and Druze – say Israel’s Jewish character is incompatible with the principles of democracy.”

Then before accepting that Israel is a democracy in the conventional sense, like Britain , Ireland etc, we really need to take to consider the occupied West Bank which is definitely not a democracy . And the military courts have such high conviction rates (approximately 100%) with a 20%+ lifetime risk of arrest, you might be better off in some dictatorships should you be unfortunate enough to be to be honest .

https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/netanyahus-government-takes-a-turn-toward-theocracy
https://www.pewresearch.org/religious-landscape-study/2016/03/08/religion-politics-and-public-life/

https://x.com/saeeddicaprio/status/1785698911014801589?s=61&t=nilGqPeurpC5xVqZAZdZog

I wonder how many of the ‘counter protestors’ who attacked the ucla students had just got back from serving in the idf? Or helping out the settlers attacking Palestinian farmers and making their lives impossible. Same bully tactics.

Sorry, wrong thread.

......to fight an existential war against an Islamic death cult which wants the state of Israel obliterated and all Jews murdered. @Hippyhippybake

"Existential war" .... nonsense. Go to wiki and see what hardware Israel has at its disposal.

"Islamic death cult" ........ highly offensive, the hate that the Palestinians feel towards Israel is not because of Islam, but because they have been at the beaten, rather than beating, end of the sick for so long. This sounds similar to the writings of a poster who wrote a few months ago that "antisemitism is intrinsic to Islam."

"all Jews murdered".... Whilst it may suit your agenda to portray the Palestinians as viscous antisemites, I don't think Palestinians in Gaza could give two hoots about Jews outside Israel, unless those Jews were staunch supporters of Israel, their oppressors.

Sorry, what?