Subscribe to Workers Vanguard

View archives

	Workers Vanguard No. 881	24 November 2006

San Francisco State

Down With Ban on Edward Said Mural!

Defend the Palestinian People!

(Young Spartacus pages)

We print below a leaflet issued by the Bay Area Spartacus Youth Club on September 24 protesting the banning of a mural in honor of the late scholar and Palestinian rights activist Edward Said at San Francisco State University. While he was for many years a member of the Palestine National Council, Said personally opposed the reactionary logic of nationalism. The mural, sponsored by the General Union of Palestine Students, depicts a cartoon character holding a key that symbolizes the Palestinian people’s right of return to their homes, a right we defend. The College Republicans, emboldened by the administration’s actions, held a rally in support of the “war on terror” on October 17, an act of intimidation of pro-Palestinian and Muslim students on campus, many of whom protested against the rally.

We have intervened on campus around this issue, bringing our revolutionary Marxist perspective of the need for working-class struggle against the U.S. imperialists and their Zionist partners, and all the capitalist rulers in the Near East. The SYC addressed a September 12 rally commemorating the Zionist massacre of Sabra and Shatila in Lebanon, stating: “The UN is only a fig leaf for imperialist slaughter.... Remember that it was the UN-brokered disarming of Palestinians in Lebanon that prepared their massacre in Sabra and Shatila Palestinian refugee camps twenty-four years ago! We say: No UN intervention!”

The International Socialist Organization (ISO), also active on the campus, has for decades tailed anti-communist Islamic fundamentalists, including the mujahedin in Afghanistan, and cheered the “Islamic Revolution” in Iran. They gush over the anti-woman Hezbollah as “potentially opening the way for a secular, left-wing alternative to take root and grow” in the Near East (Socialist Worker, 22 September)! During Israel’s war on Lebanon, the SYC made clear that we stood for the military defense of Hezbollah against the Zionists, but gave no political support to these reactionary fundamentalists (see “Lebanon: Down With UN Intervention! Israel Out Now!” WV No. 875, 1 September).

* * *

As part of U.S. imperialism’s bipartisan “war on terror,” its justification for imperialist mass murder and colonial-style occupations in Afghanistan and Iraq, the U.S. firmly backed Israel’s devastation of Lebanon and strangulation of Gaza. The domestic side of the war has been an attack first and foremost against Muslims and immigrants of Near Eastern descent, but is ultimately aimed at leftists, blacks, labor and all the oppressed. Universities across the country are in the grip of a McCarthyite witchhunt against Arab professors and student groups, and all those critical of U.S. and Israeli wars of depredation. San Francisco State University (SFSU) president Corrigan has imposed a “moratorium” on murals, explicitly intended to ban a mural sponsored by the General Union of Palestine Students (GUPS) honoring the late Edward Said. The ban demonstrates the administration’s role not as self-styled partisans of “equity and social justice,” but as lieutenants in the bourgeoisie’s witchhunt. The planned Native American mural has also been indefinitely postponed by the “moratorium.”

Edward Said was a distinguished scholar, eloquent humanist and defender of the Palestinian people who faced harassment and intimidation at the hands of American jingoists and Zionists in life, and continues to be persecuted in death. As we wrote in “Edward Said: Passionate Advocate of Palestinian Freedom, Human Dignity” (WV No. 817, 9 January 2004): “Said always insisted that the Hebrew-speaking nation has a right to exist and to self-determination in Palestine. However, it has no right to a ‘Jewish state’ through the expulsion and suppression of the indigenous Palestinian nation.” While not a Marxist, he dedicated his life to the cause of the Palestinian people. Said opposed the dead-end and reactionary programs of nationalism and religion and advocated a binational and secular solution to the Israel/Palestine conflict. However, without the overturn of capitalist rule in the region, there can be no solution which guarantees the national rights of all the peoples of the Near East, including the right of refugees to return to their homeland.

The university is no “ivory tower.” At SFSU particularly, the administration has always inflamed racial and ethnic hostilities on campus. In 1994 President Corrigan ordered that a mural of Malcolm X be painted over and sent a tactical squad of nearly 60 cops to storm the student union. The cops chased off the students who were defending the mural and it was eventually removed. The administration’s role as junior officers in the “war on terror” goes back to 2001, when the administration handed information on Near Eastern students to the FBI. In response, the SYC led campus protest. Four years ago, following a counter-protest GUPS held against a pro-Zionist demo, Corrigan retaliated by placing sanctions on GUPS. When GUPS requested that sanctions be lifted, Corrigan responded, “Why, so you guys can start throwing bombs in January?” Today the charges are that the mural is “conflict-centered” and hostile. This is a pathetic facade for censorship and intimidation. The same administration that has been forcing through budget cuts, tuition hikes and gunning for the campus faculty union is attacking the rights of Palestinian students. Campus workers and left-minded students have an interest in fighting this ban, for it will fuel further attacks on those in the administration’s cross hairs.

At a GUPS-sponsored rally on September 12, an SYC speaker said: “Our perspective in the Near East means a struggle here in the belly of the imperialist beast against all the ruling-class parties, the Republicans, the Democrats and the Greens! The Green Party is a shill for the racist, pro-Zionist Democratic Party, seeking to pull the Democrats in the right direction. The fake socialists of the ISO are campaigning for U.S. Senate on the ticket of the capitalist Green Party.... We stand for the independent mobilization of the working class, the only force in society with both the social power and objective interest to rid this world of capitalism and imperialism.” The SYC is giving critical support to the Socialist Action (SA) candidate, Jeff Mackler, because he draws a crude class line in favor of working-class independence against the capitalist Democrats, Republicans and Greens (see “Critical Support to Socialist Action in Senate Election,” WV No. 876, 15 September). Unlike the reformist SA, we fight for a workers socialist revolution to end imperialist war for good! Down with the ban on murals! Defend the Palestinian people! Israel out of the Occupied Territories! UN out of Lebanon! U.S. out of Iraq and Afghanistan! For a socialist federation of the Near East!