Columbia Erupts + Movie Screening & Discussion Tomorrow
Columbia University’s Gaza Solidarity Encampment is now in its sixth day. The occupation began early last Wednesday morning when a group of a couple hundred students with Columbia’s Students for Justice in Palestine and Columbia University Apartheid Divest set up on the main lawn in the middle of campus.
In rapid order, protest leaders were suspended and thrown out of their student housing, 108 peaceful student protesters were arrested and led off campus in handcuffs by NYPD riot police and a furious backlash ensued causing Columbia President Nemet “Minouche” Shafik to backpedal on her hardline position. The encampment is now bigger and better organized. Earlier today, hundreds of faculty and staff walked out and joined the protest. And this afternoon at New York University, where an encampment was erected in the morning, faculty and staff walked out too, linking their arms in front of student protesters after administrators had threatened them with arrest.
The Columbia protest has also inspired pro-Palestine students at more than a dozen campuses across the country to set up similar encampments with more joining every day. Here are some highlights from our coverage.
NYPD raids Columbia encampment on day two.
Palestinian writer and journalist Mohammed el-Kurd and actress Indya Moore speak at Columbia.
Protesters at Columbia break out into dabke dance.
Jewish students celebrate Shabbat at Columbia encampment.
Physicist and ‘68 alum Eric Lerner speaks at Columbia encampment.
For more, see Indy Instagram and twitter.
Film Screening & Discussion This Tuesday Night!
National liberation movements swept through the Global South from the 1950s to the 1970s ushering revolutionary governments into power. In Algeria, the National Liberation Front (FLN) ousted the French in 1962 as chronicled in Gillo Pontecorvo’s epic film The Battle of Algiers.
With the struggle in Palestine in mind, we will screen The Battle of Algiers tomorrow (Tuesday) at Starr Bar in Bushwick, Brooklyn at 6 p.m. No film about revolutionary warfare before or since has managed to capture the suspense, the danger and the primordial struggle between oppressed and oppressor.
Following the film, we will host a panel discussion with Elaine Mokhtefi and Vijay Prashad about anti-colonial movements then and now.
Elaine Mokhtefi served in Algeria’s new government for its first dozen years and collaborated with revolutionaries from around the world, including the Black Panthers, who sought refuge in Algeria.
Mokhtefi is the author of Algiers, Third World Capital: Freedom Fighters, Revolutionaries, Black Panthers. See photos of Elaine with her husband, FLN member and writer Moktar Mokhtefi, and with June Cleaver.
Indian historian and journalist Vijay Prashad is the author of forty books, including Washington Bullets, Red Star Over the Third World, The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World and The Poorer Nations: A Possible History of the Global South. He is Executive Director of The Tricontinental Institute for Social Research.
The Indypendent’s Associate Editor Amba Guerguerian will be the moderator. We put together this conversation hoping it could be fruitful in a time when the genocidal nature of colonialism is on full display in Palestine and people are coming together to defeat it.
Doors open at 5 p.m.; film at 6 p.m. (arrive early for an introduction by Mokhtefi, who has a cameo); discussion at 8 p.m.
To purchase tickets, click here.