...
Christopher was on the inside when it happened. Describe what happened in the (U. of Chicago) quadrangle this morning.
Yeah, it was horrific. They waited like cowards, until every single student was asleep in their tent, basically, and then, they stormed in, maybe 40 or 50 of them with riot gear, screaming. They started throwing wood planks, throwing chairs, throwing absolutely everything in any direction to destroy the encampment as fast as possible, to suppress this movement as fast as possible. And in fact, one of the chairs that they threw came within 3 inches of hitting my girlfriend in the head and they had just woken us up. We had no warning, no, we had no warning. I tried to make sure everyone was safe. I mean it was chaos. It was terrifying. They gave us some ridiculous notice. Out here, saying that like participants in the quad encampment, which no longer exists thanks to them are facing, like an interim leave of absence as well as a criminal trespass charge. I have no idea if that’s just a scare tactic or if it’s real, but it doesn’t matter because the difference between us and people like these cops is that there are limits to when we continue following orders. And when you’re talking about a genocide visited upon a colonized population of 2 million people trapped in a ghetto that as long as a marathon and 6 miles wide. When that ghetto is being systematically starved, slaughtered, every hospital bombed, every university bombed, 70% of homes destroyed, 40,000 people murdered, 15,000 children murdered. The entire population on the brink of starvation. We say if our government and our academic institutions are complicit in this. there comes a point where we say we’re not following orders and it doesn’t matter what you do to us because there are principles, and there are human lives that matter more than our careers and our futures, and that’s what separates us from people like Paul Alivisatos, the coward president of this university, and these coward cops that come in terrorizing an encampment while people are sleeping. What’s happening here? You’d have to ask them. Apparently they’re trying to intimidate us, trying to suppress the protest that is continuing to grow. I think that they thought they could, basically, terrify us into inaction, into flight. But what this university has never understood has never accepted, has never reckoned with about the student movement and not just at the University of Chicago, but around the country is that the commitment to Gaza runs deeper than fears for our safety, fears for our careers, fears for our paychecks. It is a fundamental obligation we have as citizens of a country that is presiding over this genocide, arming this genocide. And a student at a university that is invested in those same weapons manufacturers and has partnered with the same apartheid institutions that train that military and develop its technology.
Have you tried to have a conversation with some of these police officers?
Yeah I’ve been talking to them this whole time. I’ve been asking what it would take for them to stop following orders. I would ask them you know how many kids have to die. So if you say 15,000 kids are killed, they’re still willing to violently suppress a national movement raising the alarm to stop, that the US needs to stop. So what if it was 50,000 kids, 200,000 kids, 1 million kids? What if it was the whole Gaza ghetto? The next step is a simple one, whatever form it takes, which is to continue fighting with every breath we have, with everything we have, for the people of Gazza because the blood of those kids is on our hands. It’s all of our hands, whether we like it or not. US citizens, University of Chicago students we are implicated in a horror that is being visited with total impunity because of US security council vetoes, by the State of Israel.
You're a student?
Yes, a PhD student.
And if you face discipline, what then?
Again I don’t care. It doesn’t matter. There are things that matter more than my academic future, and certainly every one of those children is being murdered, starved, maimed, whose parents are having to choose, you know, do I let this kid store first or that one? This is such an ugly reality of such great magnitude that to even think to really entertain questions about like what might happen if Paul (Alivisatos) puts me on a leave of absence? It’s ridiculous. And it’s insulting to the memory of every child that has been murdered the course of genocide with the full complicity of the United States, of Joe Biden, and people like Paul Alivisatos and his cops he sicks on us in the middle of the night. They're hypocrites. They're cowards and the blood of Gaza's kids is on their hands too. The difference between them and us that we know know that and we reckon with it because we have a duty to them while they hide from the truth and they won’t even admit that a single university has been bombed.
pipe up any time....
