What’s happening at Columbia is the kind of resistance we need to cultivate on every campus & every public space—an irrepressible, furious, joyous, effervescent refusal of genocide, a reclamation: we protest because life is precious & protecting it is our only responsibility
As a polyglot proficient in 10+ languages — including the difficult yet critical dialect of "admin talk" — I thought it might be helpful for me to translate the email that our university president Minouche Shafik just sent to Columbia affiliates.
Here goes:
Without Congo there will be no iPhones. Cobalt mining for Big Tech like Apple is driving child labor and deaths in the Congo and the world is silent.
The use of forced labor is getting popular in Congo via arms group who are sponsored by several multinational companies to control several mines.
If you are a soldier sacrificing yourself to protect US interest, you are a rational, noble hero. But if you sacrifice yourself to protest the genocide your country is funding, you are mentally ill.
If you are a Arab man auto-cremating to protest your government, you are romanticized in American newspapers. If you are an American doing the same, your news is buried or obfuscated.
There are no truths in the US. Only narratives that serve the ruling class.
You can’t protest peacefully. You can’t boycott. You can’t hunger strike. You can’t hijack planes. You can’t block traffic. You can’t throw Molotovs. You can’t self-immolate. You can’t heckle politicians. You can’t march. You can’t riot. You can’t dissent. You just can’t be.
A little girl is trapped in a car with the gunned down bodies of the people she loves most in the world. She witnessed them getting killed and sits with their lifeless and bloodied bodies, confused and scared, while Israeli tanks surround them.
This is zionism. This is ‘israel’
I’ve known the world was fucked my entire adult life, but to learn it’s this bad—that not a *single* leader in the West has the moral fibre to condemn an active genocide—unequivocally shows that everything about our society is a charade designed only to control and exploit us
hey remember like a month ago when it was verified by multiple palestinian and foreign reporters that the idf engineered a situation where several premature babies were left to die untended in incubators and then EVERYONE IN THE PRESS JUST FUCKING FORGOT ABOUT IT
The horrors coming out of Gaza continue to escalate, there is no end to this insanity. And having to sit back and watch it unfold is unbearable. The pain cannot be described. All we can do is march.. march and pray that the world will wake up.
“Hamza was not a part of me, he was all of me. He was the soul of my soul.”
There are no words left to describe the cruelty and evil of Israel’s crimes anymore. First they murdered the wife, 2 kids, and grandchild of Wael El-Dahdouh while he was reporting on air. Then he himself was struck but survived a month later. And today they murder his son Hamza who has also been reporting on their crimes. More journalists have been killed by Israel than in any other conflict zone. And even their families are not spared. It is sickening. I swear if it was only the crimes they’ve committed against this single man, it would be enough to damn an entire nation.
May Allah unite you and your family in the eternal gardens of paradise dear brother @WaelDahdouh
the fact that there’s been over 20,000 people murdered and it’s still considered controversial to want a ceasefire is something i will never be able to understand
False! Watch the film “Gaza Surf Club” by Philip Gnadt. Gaza had the largest surfing community in the mediterranean per capita before you turned it to ashes.