Emory Students and Faculty Brutalized and Arrested by Police at Peaceful Protest

THURSDAY MORNING, APRIL 25 AT EMORY 

Emory University students, following the example of dozens of other universities and colleges, began setting up a peaceful encampment on the Quad. 

Their demands are for the university to divest from apartheid Israel to stop the genocide in Gaza and cut ties with the Georgia International Law Enforcement Exchange (GILEE) Program, which has allowed the Israeli military to train the police in the United States for the past 15 years. 

As soon as the tents went up, the administration called the police. It was a peaceful protest until the Georgia State Patrol and Atlanta police arrived. As we have seen before, the police responded with violent and brutal force, using tear gas, stun guns, and rubber bullets, and arrested students and faculty. In total, 20 students, eight community folks, and three faculty members were arrested. Noelle McAfee, chair of the Philosophy department; Emil Keme, professor of English and Indigenous studies; and Caroline Fohlin, Economics professor.

 In a video, you can see a police officer throwing Caroline Fohlin to the ground, hitting her head on the sidewalk, and handcuffing her. As he violently arrests her, she tells him that she is an economics professor at Emory.

Professor McAfee said on Democracy Now (DN) that she heard chanting and walked over to the Quad as an army of police officers rushed in. She saw four Georgia State Parole officers hitting a young man on the ground over and over. McAfee started to film, and they arrested her. 

It was also Georgia State Patrol officers who shot Manuel Paez Teran (called Tortuguita) 57 times.  Tortuguita was camped on public land in the Weelaunee Forest and was the first environmentalist killed in the United States.

As Professor Keme was walking to work, he stopped to talk to his students when the police stormed in. He smelled tear gas, and the next thing he knew, officers threw him to the ground and arrested him.  “I literally felt that I was in a war zone. It was an unacceptable and horrible experience,” Keme said on Democracy Now.

The Atlanta Police also brutalized the Cop City forest defenders and falsely charged them with terrorism and later the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RIC0) Act.  Activists in Atlanta have seen this type of police violence for years.  That is one of the reasons they oppose Cop City.

2019 GILEE Letter_final.pdf  A letter from numerous organizations to request that Atlanta cut ties with GILEE.

Atlanta sends police to train under a military that is illegally occupying land in Palestine to learn surveillance techniques and tactics on how to suppress and repress protesters in Atlanta. They bring back techniques that are highly militarized and violent and used against students, Umaymah Mohammad, an MD/Ph.D student at Emory, explained to Democracy Now. 

Mohammad claims that Emory represses students’ speech and silences our voices around Palestine. 

As far back as this reporter can remember, reporters have been censored from writing about Israeli apartheid laws, the occupation, West Bank settlers who stole Palestine’s land, and the slow ethnic cleansing that has been going on for over 75 years. For additional information on this subject, read “The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine” by Ilan Pappe, an Israeli historian.

THURSDAY EVENING AT EMORY

The police are gone, and peace has returned to the Emory campus. About 500 students sit peacefully on the grass at the Quad, listening to Emory students speak. 

The students remain peaceful but refuse to remain silent while 34,000 plus Palestinian children, women, elderly, and disabled citizens are killed by U.S. bombs dropped by the IDF.  An unknown number of Palestinians died under the rubble that was once Gaza. Over 78 thousand Palestinian children and civilians are wounded. Their legs, arms, hands, and feet are missing, with a destroyed healthcare system. Over a million Gaza citizens are homeless and living in tents around Rafah.

Also, over 400 healthcare workers, 203 aid workers, 176 workers from the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), and seven World Central Kitchen workers have been killed in Gaza, plus 103 journalists.

 All of this death and destruction is attributed to U.S. bombs and Netanyahu’s out-of-control rabid revenge for the October attack by Hamas that killed 1,200 Israelis and took 250 hostages, which was a war crime. But his genocidal response was an excuse for what Netanyahu and his right-wing Zionist government have always wanted to do – ethnically cleanse Israel of all Palestinians.

Netanyahu has often said that Palestinians have the choice to submit, move or die. It was widely reported that he knew about the Hamas attack for a year and did nothing. Critics of Netanyahu believe he wanted this excuse to destroy Gaza and, once and for all, to get rid of all the Palestinians by any means possible. 

Some of the Zionist politicians and military leaders consider Palestinians less than human and call them animals. It is necessary to dehumanize a group of people in order to torture and kill them.

Netanyahu has called the Palestinians and other Arabs “wild beasts,” and he talks about “mowing the lawn,” which is code for killing Palestinians. Unfortunately, he is not alone in this type of thinking.

Israel Defense Minister Yoav Gallant described Palestinians as “human animals.”  He announced a siege on Gaza to deny the people electricity, food, water, and fuel as Israel bombs Gaza, reported the HuffPost. 

The problem is not about being Jewish but the ideology of Zionism. A national movement to create an exclusively Jewish state in an Arab country. Zionists claim the Bible gives them all of Palestine, and that means all Palestinians must leave one way or another.

A UNIVERSITY STUDENT SPEAKS OUT

There are thousands of students across the nation and hundreds more at Emory with powerful stories to tell. For the purpose of this article, I have chosen one that covers several important issues. The following speech is by an Emory graduate student.

“I am a loud and proud anti-Zionist Sephardic Jew. It is my Sephardic Jewish heritage, values, family history, beliefs, rituals, practices, and identity that compelled me to speak out against the decades-long oppression and ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people. ” 

“I stand here as one of the hundreds of thousands of anti-Zionist Jews across the country and around the world. The 75-plus years of Israeli apartheid and occupation, all of which have led to horrific and unimaginable atrocities and human suffering, the erasure of entire generations of Palestinian families.“

“From great grandparents, ages 95 and older, who survived the Nakba, to week-old infants murdered, slaughtered, starved, and bombed in this ongoing genocide and humanitarian catastrophe, which is being carried out deliberately and meticulously by the Israeli government.“

“Many Jewish Americans are taught that if Israel is not safe, Jews everywhere will never be safe, but this is a lie. American Jews are taught they must have unwavering and absolute support for the existence of the State of Israel by any means necessary, including genocide, and to charge anyone critical of the State of Israel with antisemitism.“

“Conflating anti-Zionism and antisemitism is harmful, and it is being used to silence pro-Palestinian voices, movements, and organizations everywhere. You will hear people try to justify today’s horrific and violent actions by claiming that it was in an effort to stifle anti-Semitism, anti-semitic speech, or to protect Jewish students. “

“As a Jewish student who was a part of the movement for Palestinian Liberation, I can tell you that not once have I ever felt unsafe by my fellow Palestinian students, Muslim and non-denominational students. There is no place for antisemitism. There is no place for hate. The only thing that ensures Jewish safety is collective safety.”

Over 500 students have been arrested nationwide. The movement for human rights for Palestinians continues to grow as the censorship ban on anything pro-Palestine crumbles and the truth flows out.

Never stop talking about Palestine.

Written and photos by Gloria Tatum