Columbia crackdown led by university prof doubling as NYPD spook

 

Rebecca Weiner is a Columbia U. professor who also serves as intelligence director of the NYPD. Mayor Eric Adams credits her with spying on anti-genocide student protesters and directing the militarized raid that dislodged them from campus.

The violent crackdown carried out on Columbia University students protesting Israel’s genocidal assault on the Gaza Strip was led by a member of the school’s own faculty, New York City Mayor Eric Adams has declared.

During a May 1 press conference, just hours after the New York Police Department arrested nearly 300 people on university grounds, Adams praised adjunct Columbia professor Rebecca Weiner, who moonlights as the head of the NYPD counter-terrorism bureau, for giving police the green light to clear out anti-genocide students by force.

“She was the one that was monitoring the situation,” Adams explained, adding that the crackdown was carried out after “she was able to — her team was able to conduct an investigation.”

On April 30, dozens of police in riot gear descended on Columbia’s Hamilton Hall after students seized the building earlier in the day, citing a request from the administration. Several hours later, officers used a heavily armored NYPD BearCat vehicle to enter the building through the window on the second floor and arrested those inside, while another team swept up members of the encampment outside.

Starting on April 17, students at Columbia escalated their ongoing protest against Israel’s genocidal assault on the besieged Gaza Strip. They encamped on school grounds, stating their refusal to leave until the university fully divested from its Israeli-related investments. That protest model has since spread to over 100 other universities in the US, and even been taken up abroad, with similar actions occurring at Leeds University in the UK and the Sorbonne in Paris.

Just a few hundred meters from the Gaza protest encampment, Weiner maintained an office at Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA). Her SIPA bio describes her as an “Adjunct Associate Professor of International and Public Affairs” who simultaneously serves as the “civilian executive in charge of the New York City Police Department’s Intelligence & Counterterrorism Bureau.”

In that role, according to SIPA, Weiner “develops policy and strategic priorities for the Intelligence & Counterterrorism Bureau and publicly represents the NYPD in matters involving counterterrorism and intelligence.”

The NYPD’s Counterterrorism Bureau currently maintains an office in Tel Aviv, Israel, where it coordinates with Israel’s security apparatus and maintains a department liaison. Weiner appears to serve as a bridge between the Bureau’s offices in Israel and New York.  (more...)

Columbia crackdown led by university prof doubling as NYPD spook

Rebecca Weiner, head of the NYPD "counter-terrorism" bureau, identifies one of the threats that supposedly necessitated the Columbia raid: "Mainstreaming of rhetoric associated with Terrorism." No question this is recasting political speech as "Terrorism." She also blames TikTok pic.twitter.com/nqz5NuetPu

— Michael Tracey (@mtracey) May 1, 2024

Rabbi supporting pro-Palestinian students at McGill University

 

On May 2, 2024 Rabbi Dovid Feldman from Neturei Karta International speaking in support of students at their pro-Palestinian encampment at McGill University in Montreal. This rally took place one day after winning a victory against an injunction to ban the encampment as anti-Semitic.

Canadian students camping for Gaza aren’t antisemitic—they’re building brave new alliances for justice

 

At McGill, Jewish, Palestinian, and other students are working together to upend their university’s complicity in Israel’s assault on Gaza

For a supposed hotbed of antisemitism, the scene at McGill’s Gaza protest encampment was distinctly Jewish: giant bottles of kosher grape juice and matzah bread piled on the ground, the fixings for a Passover dinner.

On Sunday, when I visited the university’s campus, now the source of daily national headlines, a large group of students were settling in for this religious ritual.

Passover tells the story of Jewish struggle against enslavement in Egypt—including the Pharaoh’s commandment to kill every newborn boy. It’s also the most justice-oriented of our holidays, demanding we apply the imperative of liberation to the present.

“In the midst of Israel’s genocidal assault on the people of Gaza,” one Jewish student read out to the circle, “these verses now resonate with unbearable urgency.”

As students passed around the flat matzah—symbolizing the meager “bread of affliction” baked quickly while fleeing Egypt—they wove in the current reality of Palestinians in Gaza, enduring a catastrophic famine imposed by the Israeli blockade.

In the middle of the circle, a large painted tapestry depicted Passover’s other symbolic foods. In the background, a large Hebrew banner hung on a fence: “thou shall not covet thy neighbour’s home.”

Many were first-time participants in such a meal. People drummed and sang Jewish songs.

This environment—of respect, curiosity, and support for freedom, apparent at Passover and through the rest of the camp—is what B’nai Brith claimed this week represents a “horrifying normalization of antisemitism on university campuses.”

It’s what the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs claimed was a “toxic” situation full of “calls for violence and antisemitic slogans.”  

I witnessed no such thing.  (more...)

Canadian students camping for Gaza aren’t antisemitic—they’re building brave new alliances for justice

Historic student movement for Gaza reaches Canada

 

Students who’ve set up camp on McGill’s campus have faced torrential downpour, a court injunction, and threats of police violence. 

But they’re refusing to move until their demands are met: divestment from companies, weapons makers, and universities implicated in Israel’s assault on Gaza.

“Our university is complicit”

 

Inside the pro-Palestinian student encampment at the University of Toronto

University of Toronto (U of T) is ground zero for pro-Palestinian activism in Canada as Occupy for Palestine (O4P) mobilized encampments at King’s College Circle. As previously reported by The Media Co-Op, students breached the fenced perimeter around the Circle on Thursday, May 2, racing to evade campus security and set up tents at 4 a.m. The encampments follow weeks of pro-Palestinian student activism sweeping across post-secondary campuses in Canada and the United States to protest Israel’s war on Gaza, as well as end partnerships with Israeli universities in the Occupied Palestinian Territories.

O4P organizers describe an atmosphere of quiet tension in the days leading up to the encampment. The university’s preemptive fencing of King’s College Circle came as students began occupations in institutions including McGill and the University of British Columbia. 

Renewed action follows a two-day occupation of U of T’s Simcoe Hall that ended on April 3 after students secured a meeting with President Meric Gertler. Students say that Gertler was unprepared and dismissed their demands in a letter posted on the university’s website.

After rushing to set up their “People’s Circle for Palestine” with supplies, a tarp for prayer, and a wide perimeter of tents, student organizers reiterated three main demands, asking the school to disclose all investments and financial holdings, divest all financial holdings that “sustain Israeli apartheid, occupation and illegal settlement of Palestine,” as well as end partnerships with Israeli universities in the occupied West Bank. 

“Ultimately, we know when the university responds – when there’s public pressure and when their reputation has been harmed,” explained Erin Mackey, a political science student at U of T and a media liaison at the camp. “This university needs to listen to its students and be on the right side of history. It’s not a question of persuading President Meric Gertler, he doesn’t have a backbone.”  (more...)

“Our university is complicit”

The Enemy Is Among Us?

 

Anti-genocide groups are being targeted by media and government

Well friends, the verdict is in! If you are opposed to Israel’s slaughter of something like forty thousand Palestinians, mostly women and children, or the clearly enunciated plans by that nation’s government to ethnically cleanse the rest of historic Palestine, making the developing Eretz or Greater Israel a legally Jewish state, and are prepared to protest or speak up about it, then you are an antisemite Jew-hater and probably even a holocaust denier. If you are a student demonstrating against the slaughter you are increasingly being referred to by talking heads and the media as a pro-Hamas terrorist. That you must be condemned and sanctioned or even criminalized as a consequence of the labels is only fair in a country that apparently has come to believe that Jews and Israel, uniquely, cannot be criticized due to their cited ad nauseam victimhood and their anointment by God no matter what the First Amendment to the US Constitution relating to freedom of speech might say. After all, it’s just an old piece of paper though it might strike some as a bit odd that a group of people carrying out a genocide are being given a pass while those trying to stop it are being beaten, going to jail and, in some cases, being denied that degree they earned from four years at college.

That antisemites and even evil foreign governments like China are behind the recent student demonstrations over the atrocities in Gaza is gradually becoming part of the new Gospel, ritually endorsed by the cowering university administrators themselves as well as by a large majority in Congress, the White House and the mainstream media. Pro-Palestinian groups are being routinely shut down and their supporters clubbed, gassed and arrested while Jewish groups supporting Israel’s “right to defend itself” are being allowed to express their rage violently, as occurred at the University of California in Los Angeles on last Tuesday night with police standing by to let the pro-Israel attackers (who were mostly non-students) have access to beat on the pro-Palestinian campers. It was an alignment of hearts and minds that apparently serves both justice and God, who has declared Jews to be his “chosen.” The University of Southern California’s administration has labeled pro-Palestinian groups as “homegrown violent extremists” as an excuse to shut down graduation ceremonies later this month. Governors in Texas and Florida have declared war on those despicable antisemites, insisting that there will be no Jew haters in their states and expressing a willingness to use police and national guard to make sure that that is the case. Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida has vowed that any student who speaks up or demonstrates against Israel will be expelled from college. National Guard troops have also been called in to clear campuses in a number of other states, with more than a thousand demonstrators being arrested and removed on Tuesday alone.  (more...)

The Enemy Is Among Us?

Politics As Art: No Sympathy for the Devil!

 

Though fighting for a just cause is often well-intentioned, and even noble, we are warned by Paul in the famous letter to the Church at Corinth that “though I give my I body to be burned, and hath not charity, I am nothing.” The poet Friedrich Schiller contended that it is through Beauty that one proceeds to true Freedom.” In supporting the cease-fire and reconstruction of Palestine/Gaza, and breaking from the United States Congress and the Biden’s Administration’s support for mass murder, now being carried out by students from scores of American campuses and activists from Jewish Voice for Peace, If Not Now, Code Pink and others for Gaza, the world has been inspired by the glimpse of the beauty of the now-partially-awakened American people. People around the world are overjoyed. They have seen Beauty reflected in the refusal by tens of thousands of students, faculty and citizens to condone the mass murder of innocent people in Gaza, including those about to be slaughtered in Rafah in the next days.

This university-based battle is not only against both the genocide that has occurred, but that upcoming in Rafah—a genocide condoned by Wall Street and the City Of London, who are the hand actually throwing Israel’s psychotic hand-grenade, Benjamin Netanyahu, for that purpose. Yet, there is a higher ground, that of cultural warfare, which is the actual domain where the next phase of the battle for the continuance of human civilization will be won, or lost, over the several months, or years at the most. This goes beyond Gaza, to Ukraine, China, and other conflicts, acknowledged and unacknowledged.

Lawfully, it is in the domain of music and poetry, that the battle is presently most lethally conjoined. First, there was the racialist banning of Russian performers and music at various music venues in the West. Now, with the recent announcement that conductor Kerri Lynn-Wilson intends to tour the world performing a butchered version of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, substituting the word “Slava” for “Freude” —“Glory!” For “Joy”—as a supposed way of “standing up against Putin,” the 1930s Nazi practice of appropriating Beethoven for propagandistic ends has re-emerged. This cannot, and will not be tolerated.

Tonight’s Fireside Chat, held in the shadow of both President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Lyndon LaRouche, will propose what people, who still believe in freedom of thought, freedom of conscience, and freedom of advocacy, can and must do to roll back the new fascist onslaught on the human mind, a form of “menticide” which must be vigorously confronted and defeated. In only this way can we rebuild Gaza, rebuild the United States, and rejoin the human race’s commitment toward progress and an upwardly advancing humanity, a humanity whose highest expression is in the actual words and music of Friedrich Schiller and Ludwig von Beethoven. Speakers: David Shavin, John Sigerson