Bay Area

Defend Pro-Palestinian Protesters!

Reprinted from Young Spartacus pages of Workers Vanguard No. 783, 14 June 2002.

As Israel continues its bloody offensive in the West Bank, terrorizing Palestinian towns and demolishing the compound of the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah, a sinister campaign is gaining steam in the U.S. to smear as “anti-Semites” and persecute students and others who defend the Palestinian people. In tandem with the “war on terror,” local police and prosecutors and campus administrations, abetted by the virulently Zionist Anti-Defamation League (ADL), are seeking to set up such students for state surveillance and repression.

This crusade has reached a fever pitch at San Francisco State University (SFSU), where the administration is pushing for “hate crime” charges to be brought against protesters at a May 7 pro-Palestinian demonstration for such activities as allegedly stomping on an Israeli flag and engaging in “hate speech.” Railing against “pro-Palestinian groups fueled by hatred of Israel and Jews,” the ADL claims that the SFSU protesters “verbally assaulted and threatened” pro-Israel Hillel students, who were staging their own demonstration at the same time. The story was picked up as far away as Israel, where the right-wing Jerusalem Post (16 May) headlined on its front page: “Anti-Semitic Riot at San Francisco State University.”

Goaded by the head of the Jewish studies program, SFSU president Robert Corrigan issued a statement soon after the protest which declared the anti-Zionist students guilty as charged. Corrigan subsequently singled out two pro-Palestinian students and one pro-Zionist student for university discipline and also called on the San Francisco district attorney’s office to prosecute the three students on criminal charges.

This incident is far from the only case of victimization of those who sympathize with the plight of the Palestinians. On May 25, Sophia Ibrahim, an eleven-year-old girl, and 30 others were arrested at a protest demanding an end to U.S. aid to Israel at the Golden Gate Bridge. California Highway Patrolmen in riot gear blocked the march back across the bridge and physically assaulted the protesters, including with pepper spray. For yelling at and allegedly hitting the cops, Sophia was thrown to the ground, handcuffed and left face down for several minutes. She was charged with felony assault of a police officer. When her brother Mousa went to pick her up from police custody, he was arrested for felony endangerment of a minor—because he had driven Sophia to the protest! Drop the charges against all the protesters!

Around the same time, two courageous University of California students studying in Cairo, Robert O’Neill of UC Berkeley and Nauman Zaidi of UC Riverside, were subjected to university discipline for having put their lives on the line in defense of the Palestinians. Their “crime” was to answer the call of the International Solidarity Movement and enter Bethlehem’s besieged Church of the Nativity on May 2 to bring food and water to those seeking refuge from the rampaging Israeli army. After being confined for more than two weeks in an Israeli jail at the conclusion of the siege on May 10, both were deported from Israel and subsequently dropped from UC’s Education Abroad Program, ostensibly for violating a rule against endangering themselves while abroad. No reprisals against O’Neill and Zaidi!

At UC Berkeley itself, 41 students still face up to a year’s suspension from school for supposedly violating the “core mission” of the university by allegedly disrupting a handful of classes on April 9. More than a thousand students took part in a protest that day against the Zionist massacres in the Occupied Territories. This protest, organized by Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), culminated in the occupation of a campus building for a couple of hours. Cops assaulted the protesters, arresting 79. Since then, criminal charges have been dropped, although the protesters were required to pay nominal fines. The administration suspended the SJP as a student organization but recently backed down in the face of opposition (including by the SYC) to this suppression of political dissent. No administration reprisals against the Berkeley protesters!

ADL: Zionist Fingermen

The ADL has worked as an unofficial adjunct to the FBI and other state agencies for more than 50 years in a variety of anti-Communist and other reactionary causes. On May 30, the ADL issued a statement hailing the overhaul of the FBI and lamenting, “For too long, the FBI has been hamstrung in its efforts to combat extremism and has taken a too timid approach to initiating investigations against potential terrorists.” The ADL recently hosted a daylong meeting of the “Committee on Terrorism” with the FBI and has formed a partnership with various state and federal law enforcement agencies to help wage the domestic “war on terror.” One ADL spokesman in L.A. gloated: “We have extensive resources available to law enforcement, including current and archival information, analysis and programs.”

We’re sure the ADL has plenty of “current and archival information” after decades of spying on not only Arab activists but also leftists, black leaders, unions, gay organizations—and, only incidentally, fascist and anti-Semitic groups. The ADL provided extensive information to the FBI as well as to the apartheid regime in South Africa and Latin American death squad regimes. In 1993, the San Francisco D.A.’s office released a flood of documents that revealed the ADL’s extensive spy web (see “Zionist Fingermen for Apartheid, Salvador Death Squads—ADL’s Massive Spying Operation,” WV No. 577, 4 June 1993). The ADL—after initially claiming the charges were an anti-Semitic “Big Lie”—has been forced by various lawsuits to pay up to the victims of its spy operation. The latest of these lawsuits against the ADL culminated this February in a significant cash payment to the plaintiffs, who moreover won the right to continue to expose the ADL’s spy operation.

“Hate Speech” Legislation: Tool of Repression

On campus, the ADL brags of having been “proactive in working with campus groups, administrators and faculty.” The SFSU incident on May 7 is a case in point. From the outset, the administration had it in for supporters of the Palestinian cause. While the Zionists were allowed to demonstrate unmolested, the protest organized by the General Union of Palestinian Students (GUPS) was forced into a police pen.

Responding to the accusations of anti-Semitism, GUPS held a press conference at which it replayed a videotape of the protests. The videotape showed Zionists hurling racist anti-Arab epithets at the counterdemonstrators but did not show the pro-Palestinian activists using anti-Semitic slurs as the ADL claimed. Only after the press conference did Corrigan scramble to present a more “balanced” approach to the persecution, adding a pro-Israel student to the list of those facing disciplinary action. One student was suspended. We say: No reprisals against any of the SFSU protesters!

Racist slurs are vile, but stomping on an Israeli flag is an expression of political opposition to the Zionist state. We don’t know who shouted what or how much of all this is a Zionist fabrication. But neither the bourgeois state nor the university administration has any business passing judgment on what students yell at each other, even if what is said is racist or otherwise offensive. Both GUPS and Hillel have been working with the D.A.’s office to better enable it to launch “hate speech” charges against each other’s supporters. As we said in the WV No. 533 (30 August 1991) article “Racism and Witchhunts on Campus,” when “politically correct” academics and anti-racist students pushed for such laws, “Ninety-nine out of a hundred times, speech codes will be used against the left and anti-racists.... The problem with this strategy is it disarms the victims by fostering illusions in the supposed ‘neutrality’ of the racist university administrations and the cops.” As the ADL’s wielding of “hate speech” laws demonstrates, such legislation has little to do with fighting racism and everything to do with ratcheting up the repressive power of the state and its university auxiliaries, allowing them to dictate what is “acceptable” political activity.

There have in fact been vile expressions of anti-Semitism on the SFSU campus, most notably on April 4 when grotesque flyers were posted for a Muslim Student Association (MSA) event. The flyer featured a bloodied Palestinian baby with the caption: “Palestinian Children Meat—Slaughtered According to Jewish Rites Under American License.” MSA later issued an apology for the flyer, and GUPS, which co-signed it, denied responsibility and subsequently declared its opposition to anti-Semitism and racism. This flyer was a gift to the Zionists in their crusade to equate anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism and was a pretext for the Zionist rally on May 7.

The crackdown on protests sympathetic to the plight of the Palestinians illustrates that the university administration is far from neutral. Soon after September 11, more than 200 universities, including SFSU, handed over the records of Near Eastern students to the Feds. A December 12 united-front demonstration at SFSU initiated by the SYC and endorsed by GUPS, among others, demanded: “Down with SFSU collaboration with FBI anti-immigrant witchhunt! Defend immigrant rights!”

American imperialist aggression abroad and that of its regional allies like Israel are necessarily reflected in domestic repression against the supporters of the oppressed Palestinian people. It is necessary to translate this support into struggle against the American imperialist behemoth, drawing in particular upon the power of the multiracial working class. Defend the Palestinian people! All Israeli troops and settlers out of the Occupied Territories! U.S./UN out of the Near East!