Protest Racist Cop Attack at UCLA!

(Young Spartacus pages)

We print below a leaflet issued by the Los Angeles Spartacus Youth Club on November 17. UCLA student Mostafa Tabatabainejad was attacked by campus police after he did not show his student I.D. to student “community service officers.”

The Spartacus Youth Club protests the vicious, racist cop attack on Mostafa Tabatabainejad Tuesday night in the Powell library. Paralleling U.S. imperialist torture chambers from Abu Ghraib to Guantánamo, the UCPD [University of California Police Department] officers, not content with Tabatabainejad’s attempt to leave the library, grabbed him by the arm and began their sadistic Taser attack. Even with handcuffs on, the cops continued to Tase the youth repeatedly in front of 50-60 eyewitnesses, as he dropped to the floor in pain. These racist cops even threatened to Tase witnesses at the scene who asked for the officers’ names and badge numbers! This is an outrage! Drop the charges! Cops off campus!

UCLA students witnessed firsthand what is standard police conduct in the ghettos and barrios across capitalist America. This outrageous assault is a warning to all black and minority students that they are not welcome on campus. It is significant that this racist cop attack on a student of Near Eastern descent took place the night before a scheduled protest against the racist purge of blacks and minorities from UCLA.

As Tabatabainejad dropped to the floor he captured the political meaning of the attack when he shouted: “Here’s your Patriot Act, here’s your...abuse of power.” The Daily Bruin consciously omitted this statement. This attack is nothing but the domestic face of the brutal colonial occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan carried out with the Democratic Party’s blessing. The xenophobic atmosphere permeating campuses is exactly what the Bush cabal and their right-wing minions on campus try to foment. In the aftermath of 9/11, we Marxists of the Spartacist League/Spartacus Youth Clubs warned that the bi-partisan “war on terror” is a war on blacks, immigrants and labor.

Like the “war on communism” and “war on drugs,” the “war on terror” is a political construct designed to regiment the population and justify government repression. The Democrats no less than the Republicans have been at the forefront of carrying out the “war on terror.” You don’t have to look far to see what the Democrats are all about. Democratic mayor Antonio Villaraigosa has presided over arrests of youth who walked out in defense of immigrant rights in the past year and is currently overseeing brutal cop sweeps of overwhelmingly black skid row. The leadership of the various student groups on campus appeal to Democrats as allies. This is a dead end! We say break with the racist, capitalist Democrats!

Side by side with the racist purge at UCLA, the Regents facilitate the capitalists’ campaign to maintain universities as a bastion of race and class privilege. The fact that a student has to produce identification just to be in the library speaks volumes. We of the Spartacus Youth Club call for free, quality, integrated public education for all! Down with the racist purge of higher education! We call for open admissions, no tuition and a state-paid stipend for all students! Abolish the administration—the universities should be run by those who work and study there!

This outrage must be protested! Begging the administration to be “fair” is no solution. It is necessary to mobilize the power of the organized working class. If students and campus unions walked out together in defense of Tabatabainejad, blacks and minorities would be a lot safer on campus. But racist outrages will happen as long as this rotten capitalist system exists. We in the Spartacus Youth Club have joined the struggle to build a revolutionary workers party that would mobilize in defense of all the oppressed as part of the fight for socialist revolution.