The first U.S. faculty-led pro-terrorism protests popped up at a liberal school in a liberal city this week, encouraging students to join in on their hate for the Jewish community.
Just days after the NYPD cleared encampments at New York City’s New School, faculty members established the Refaat Alareer Faculty Solidarity Encampment, making it the first staff-led pro-Hamas demonstration in the country.
The encampment was named after a well-known writer and professor from Gaza who was killed by an Israeli airstrike in northern Gaza in December 2023.
The faculty members set up about a dozen tents and joined students in demanding that the university divest from 13 companies they claim are helping Israel in its ongoing war with Gaza.
“On Wednesday afternoon, autonomous faculty members at The New School launched the first faculty-led encampment in the nation,” New School’s Students for Justice in Palestine (TNS-SJP) said in a statement. “The action follows the mass arrests and violence that took place last week across New York City’s campuses when university leadership called in the New York Police Department to sweep and shutter the Gaza solidarity encampments.”
NEW: Faculty at The New School have established “the first faculty led encampment in the country.” pic.twitter.com/kmNpEGaLmJ
— Steve McGuire (@sfmcguire79) May 8, 2024
The protestors are also demanding for the presence of police to be dispersed on campus as well as for the expulsions of students who were arrested to be expunged.
“40,000 people dead! New School your hands are red! 40,000 people dead! Columbia your hands are red!” The pro-Hamas demonstrators shouted.
“The movement started by our brave students must continue, and it is incumbent upon us as faculty to heed their calls, and help finish what they started,” an anonymous representative who helped organize the encampment said in a statement released by TNS-SJP.
The faculty declared that “the students do not stand alone,” and that “their demands for immediate divestment in companies complicit in Israel’s genocidal war.”
“Students nationwide have shown extraordinary courage, risking arrest, loss of future opportunities, suspensions, and expulsions, not to mention ferocious harassment and physical violence. They have been demonized in the establishment media, by university leaders, and at the highest levels of government for an unequivocally moral act – standing against genocide, apartheid, and oppression,” the statement continued.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member