'BRUTALIZE,' 'ESCALATE': CUNY anti-Israel group threatens violence against NYC and police officers
‘The city of New York and their pigs are going to keep brutalizing and escalating, and so will we,’ the group wrote.
The group also alleged that ‘[a]n encampment should not normalize the institution, it should disrupt it, dismantle it and abolish it. A principled encampment should not collaborate with the pigs.’
An anti-Israel student group at the City University of New York posted a statement seemingly calling for the dismantling of the university and appearing to urge violence against New York City and the police.
The July 25 statement was published by CUNY for Palestine, a group that describes itself as “a network of CUNY students and workers organizing for Palestinian liberation on campus.”
“We are an autonomous group of students, faculty, community members and outside agitators who chose to disrupt the encampment’s status quo in order to dismantle CUNY’s active role in this genocide and ongoing apartheid,” the authors of the statement explain.
The document, which repeatedly refers to police officers as “pigs,” attacked the police for cracking down on disruptive anti-Israel protests, and appeared to support violent attacks on law enforcement and New York City itself: “The City of New York and their pigs continue to escalate their repression of the city. . . . The city of New York and their pigs are going to keep brutalizing and escalating, and so will we.”
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The anti-Israel activists also warned that “Anyone that chooses to play the role of a pig is the enemy.” [emphasis in original].
“As the zionist entity continues its destruction of the Gaza Strip—and the United States maintains its genocidal hegemony from Palestine to Harlem—the working class people of the world escalate,” the group argued.
Although the group claimed that the takeover of university buildings by “students and outside agitators” can “draw attention to injustices and force institutions to address the demands of protestors,” it stated that the anti-Israel encampments that proliferated on college and university campuses did not go far enough.
CUNY for Palestine seemed instead to suggest that CUNY and other universities should be destroyed entirely.
“The encampments were an escalatory response, but they often failed to envision an end goal beyond a meeting, a committee or an email,” the statement continued. An encampment should not normalize the institution, it should disrupt it, dismantle it and abolish it. A principled encampment should not collaborate with the pigs.” [Emphasis in original.]
The statement also attacks CUNY’s ties to the Jewish State, and shrugs off the university’s condemnations against anti-Semitism on campus as “disingenuous.”
“Whether we are fighting in Atlanta, New York City, Sudan, or Palestine, the enemy remains the same. The zionist entity escalates, so does the Palestinian Resistance. The pigs and institutions escalate, so do the agitators of the world!” the statement concluded.
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The statement from CUNY for Palestine comes in the wake of an Instagram post the group made in collaboration with other anti-Israel activists on July 20, calling for an “NYC Week of Rage for Gaza” and calling on followers to “flood CUNY for Gaza” on July 22.
During an April 25-30 protest on CUNY’s campus, anti-Israel demonstrators initiated a disruptive protest that reportedly caused at least $3 million costs in damages.
Campus Reform has contacted the City University of New York for comment. This article will be updated accordingly.
