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More from @thestustustudio

Stu

Apr 29

Virginia Tech's Dr. Bikrum Gill was arrested tonight at the Virginia Tech Encampment. I have been a long time critic of his and feel this is someone connected to legitimate terrorist organizations.

I aim to not editorialize until the end of my threads, but it is tough when I see this man rooting for Iran and North Korea to use military power against Israel and America.

https://twitter.com/thestustustudio/status/1772064333251449067

In November of last year, he spoke with Charlotte Kates of Samidoun and Nerdeen Kiswani of Within Our Lifetime at a DSA event. Kates and Kiswani were both speakers at the Resistance 101 event at Columbia University which led to the suspension of multiple students for its connection to terrorism. Their suspension would go on to partially inspire the Columbia Encampment.

Cas Holloway, the COO of Columbia even admitted that Samidoun is in fact a terrorist organization.

Full Youtube of Kates, Kiswani, and Gill

Columbia's Resistance 101 Full Event

https://twitter.com/thestustustudio/status/1772064333251449067

https://twitter.com/thestustustudio/status/1780983374082867514

Gill's philosophy boils down to Anti-Imperialist Anti-Capitalism. Here he explains much of that. It is heady stuff, but I do hope my explanations cut through the academic jargon.

https://twitter.com/thestustustudio/status/1780983374082867514

Read 5 tweets

Stu

@thestustustudio

Apr 29

Updates from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Activists from UNC SJP gave speeches today at a massive rally by Polk Place. This particular student activist shamed the Democrats for sending aid to Israel.

"Last week, 47 out of 50 Democrats in the Senate, and 176 out of 213 House Democrats voted in favor of sending Israel 26 Billion dollars in military aid."

The rally was quite large. This is the first I have seen of a truly composite time lapse used by activists to document their rallies.

UNC SJP reads a letter from a Palestinian student who salutes Columbia, Yale, NYU, Rutgers, the University of Michigan and dozens of other schools for "rising up in solidarity with Gaza."

The letter claims that the ongoing Israel-Hamas war is a "Nazi genocide."

Read 5 tweets

Stu

@thestustustudio

Apr 28

BREAKING: The Encampment at Virginia Tech has been told that they will be arrested if they don't disperse. They are pleading with the administration to not arrest anyone because children are present.

"Do our children scare you?"

One of the student activists feels President @VTSandsman has done nothing to recognize the Palestinian Students at Virginia Tech. She discusses how upset she is and doesn't understand why President Sands won't come to the Encampment and negotiate.

"We have children on these lawns."

The Virginia Tech Gaza Solidarity Encampment: "You don't scare us."

A child reads cue cards as he speaks into a megaphone. He hands the script to an activist so he can read it better.

"We will not leave Tim Sands until you meet our demands."

Read 6 tweets

Stu

@thestustustudio

Apr 26

Today we will be looking at Dr. Mohamed Abdou's presentation at a recent CUNY 4 Palestine Teach-in.

Dr. Abdou has been at the center of a lot of debates of late regarding free speech and academic expression at Columbia University. It seemed he no longer worked there according to President Shafik's testimony before Congress, but he has been seen teaching at the Gaza Solidarity Encampment.

Regardless, here are the Anarcho-Islamic philosophies of Dr. Abdou that clearly inspired the Gaza Solidarity Encampment at Columbia.

Dr. Abdou opens his talk with a prayer and apologies to the audience if any of his students are present because this will be a talk familiar to them. He admits that this speech is similar to the one he gave at the Socialism Conference. He invokes Einstein's famous quote, "Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results."

Abdou states, "I will embrace the madness and the hopes that it alter a change."

A militant group that will be referenced many times throughout the talk is the Zapatista Army of National Liberation. This is a terrorist group that controls much of Chiapas, Mexico and has been at war with the Mexican government since 1994.

There is something about Dr. Abdou's delivery that reminds me of spoken word poetry.

First off, Abdou sees himself as a "settler of color" on stolen Lenape land. He has twenty years of "land defending" under his belt which utilizes "intent, purpose, and action." Land Defending is when anarchists seize land and try to permanently make it theirs like with CHAZ, the Zapatistas, and Stop Cop City.

"Indigenous people are not an add-on unit of analysis, intersectional analysis, wokeness, and whitewashed laissez ways as Academia even movements replicated in this day and age."

Abdou points out how marches don't center Indigenous people. He states, "I don't see or hardly see any organization. What I see is mobilization."

Abdou discusses the "war" he was born into

"I'm filled with a great deal of rage and and amongst many other emotions and feelings which as a person of color I think BIPOC people particularly are entitled too given the fact that we've been born into a war before we even come to recognize and know our conditioning within that war let alone our complicities and relationship to one another."

Abdou then rails against the acronyms of "liberal identity politics" which he thinks conditions people to think a better world is coming when it's not.

"We are talking about survival as opposed to thriving. We are conditioned to talk about resistance which is reactionary as opposed to liberation."

Read 22 tweets

Stu

@thestustustudio

Apr 24

Update on Rice University's Encampment

It appears to be a fairly small affair, but it is day one. However, being Texas, I'm not sure how much support it will receive.

Lots of arts and crafts so far!

The Houston Climate Justice Museum's signage has been taken over for their encampment. They definitely won't mind.

Read 5 tweets

Stu

@thestustustudio

Apr 19

I just love watching @goACTA webinars!

@PoliakoffACTA asks Nadine Strossen, a former ACLU President, "When a group of students call out Intifada now, Globalize the Intifada on a college campus where Jews are walking and going about their business, how different is it from saying let's have a pogrom or how about a lynch mob?"

Strossen points out "I want to set the record straight. You are allowed to do that under the First Amendment if the only element of the distress is the message and let me be very precise about this. This is not a radical proposition under First Amendment law. Way back in 1969, the United States Supreme Court unanimously issued a decision that not a single justice has disagreed with since then, despite the many other differences among them, where they said even advocacy of violent or lawless conduct is constitutionally protected the line is crossed only when it's not just advocacy but it's incitement and moreover intentional incitement to imminent violence which is likely to happen imminently."

Strossen then pointed out, "The line has been crossed on so many campuses and I'm being precise. I'm referring to detailed complaints that I have read that have been brought by Jewish students and organizations against a number of campuses including Columbia and Harvard and we're talking complaints that are almost 100 pages long with hundreds of specific allegations that it's not just chanting odious slogans in the middle of the campus, it's deliberately targeting and sometimes following Jewish students. it's invading classrooms, it's confronting physically with menacing gestures students who are perceived to be Jewish or Israeli."

Strossen detailed how "even the strongest champions of free speech" would consider many of these infamous viral incidents we have seen not to be protected speech due to it posing "an emergency by directly causing or imminently threatening certain specific serious harm."

Strossen details what this would look like: reasonable fear that you're going to be subject to an immediate attack, intimidation, targeted harassment, and violating content neutral time, place and manner restrictions

Remember this is coming from a former President of the ACLU. Nadine Strossen also discussed how...

"One of the Silver Linings to the terrible cloud of what's happened on campuses including after October 7th is D.E.I. is now being subject to very close reexamination.

It seems to me the debate now is only over do you get rid of it entirely or is it something that can be very deeply reformed."