In a radical act of solidarity with the Palestinian people, university students across the country have escalated the struggles on their campuses with the campus encampment movement. At Emory University in Atlanta, students, faculty and community members created one such encampment demanding for the immediate and total divestment from the Israeli apartheid state. The Atlanta Police Department and Georgia State Patrol were called to the encampment by the Emory administration where they brutalized, beat and arrested dozens of protesters.
Arcata, CA – On Monday, April 22, around 4 p.m., roughly 30 students began a sit-in in Siemens Hall at Cal Poly Humboldt, California, to show solidarity with Palestine and with other campuses that are doing the same. While many students on other campuses are setting up encampments, theirs is the first in the movement to take over a building so far, and an admin building, no less. This also made them the first state university to join the movement.
Fight Back News Service is circulating the following statement by the New Students for a Democratic Society (SDS).
While standing in solidarity with Palestine, the student movement has once again escalated protests on campus with the campus encampment movement. Students are calling out their universities and its administrators for their decades’ long support of Israel’s genocide of Palestinians and are demanding that our universities divest and cut all ties to Israel! University administrators have no right to ignore the students as university administrators continue to support the genocide in Gaza and maintain support for Israel.
Tucson, AZ – Members of the Tucson Anti-War Committee are preparing for an historic action in Colorado to demand the release of Colombian revolutionary Simon Trinidad. Trinidad, a member of the FARC, is in solitary confinement at a federal Supermax prison infamously known as the “Guantanamo of the Rockies.”
Mark Burton is the lawyer for Colombian revolutionary Ricardo Palmera. Palmera is a political prisoner of the U.S., currently held in the Florence, Colorado supermax prison. Mark Burton is one of the few people allowed to visit and communicate with him. There is a campaign to Free Ricardo Palmera so he can take part in ongoing Colombian peace talks happening in Cuba. Ricardo Palmera is popularly known as Simón Trinidad in Colombia. For more information see www.FreeRicardoPalmera.org.