Continue reading at https://twitter.com/JamieBelsito/status/1608662031162568704
Student groups protest defense contractors outside ENG career fair by Melissa Ellin
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Lead organizer of the protest Chance Charley, a Students Against Imperialism member and junior in the College of Arts and Sciences, said the protest focused on Raytheon because it is based in Massachusetts but was part of a larger effort to build an anti-war movement.
“These companies are lying about what they did and they’re committing genocide in Yemen, in Afghanistan, in Palestine, all over the world,” Charley said.
Continue reading at https://dailyfreepress.com/blog/2019/10/03/student-groups-protest-defense-contractors-outside-eng-career-fair/
Student group ignites tension over free speech at Williams College on The Berkshire Eagle
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A request by students to create a group supportive of Israel was rejected by the student government, the College Council, in late April, amid accusations that the group’s beliefs did not fit the moral values of the student body. In the face of complaints from national right-leaning news outlets, Jewish organizations and free speech groups, the college’s president and administration intervened, ultimately reversing the rejection in mid-May. When the campus comes back to life this fall, the Williams Initiative for Israel, or WIFI, will be a registered student organization, having full access to funding and services available to official student groups. But along the way, its birth sparked debates over pro-Israeli thought in the United States, scrutiny of how student groups win approval and the nature of campus political debate and free expression… Mohazzab Abdullah, a student who spoke against WIFI at meetings, said such rhetoric is similar to treating free speech like a “buzzword.”
“Free speech arguments need to be qualified,” Abdullah said. “I think that this campus should exclude and suppress pro-genocide discourse.”
Continue reading at https://www.berkshireeagle.com/stories/student-group-ignites-tension-over-free-speech-at-williams-college,575240
Why we opposed WIFI: Challenging WIFI’s complicity in state violence by Joseph Moore and Jesus Payan
Please TAKE ACTION RIGHT NOW and send your letter to the UN Office of the Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide and the International Criminal Court Prosecutor.
one member of WIFI leadership asserted the Israeli state routinely killing Palestinians in order to displace them from their land did not constitute genocide because the Palestinian population as a whole had not declined, due to a high fertility rate. This is totally inconsistent with any definition of the word “genocide”, either provided by a dictionary or defined by international law and deeply offensive to Palestinians who have suffered repeated attempts at ethnic cleansing by the Israeli government.
… If the conversations that were had in the two College Council (CC) meetings are any indication of the positions that WIFI intended to promote on campus, then we ought to celebrate their proposal being denied. Williams ought not to provide a platform to groups that, when provided with first-hand testimony from Palestinian students about the violence of the occupation, attempt to redefine terms like genocide and colonialism to suit their own ends.
Continue reading at https://williamsrecord.com/2019/05/why-we-opposed-wifi-challenging-wifis-complicity-in-state-violence/