Good to see this hard-hitting statement from the USC Palestine Justice Faculty Group about the cancelling of Asna Tabassum’s valedictorian speech. Hope huge numbers of the USC community sign it. #protestworks

change.org/p/the-usc-comm…

that a person can major or minor in something like 'resistance to genocide' & then not be allowed to speak abt or take action against actually existing genocide in that context is totally consistent w what i know abt universities, yes.

Every liberal thinks they will be put in camps under fascism but all evidence suggests they’d be the ones running the camps

The level at which institutions (literary, academic, otherwise) are so boldly catering to the feelings of genocide-accomplices, & actively turning away from Palestinians right now + dismissing actions (regardless of how organized/intentional/etc), is unforgivable & unforgettable

Some people on my campus have just discovered that there’s a problem and I am not giving any of them a fucking cookie for it

–3 Palestinian college students shot in Vermont
–Arab Muslim Stanford student hit-and-run by a car
–Columbia students (Jews, Muslims, more) harassed & attacked at a Gaza rally
–South Asian Muslim USC valedictorian's grad speech unilaterally cancelled

And this is just a sampling

Liberals are like “Is murdering people a crime against humanity? Let the courts decide.”

lol

I don’t know how many examples of fascism we need to see, before more of you realize that it’s already here, it’s been here and didn’t start with Trump. Y’all did not vote it out in 2020, because that’s not how fascism works.

3 University Presidents have been assassinated in Gaza. Where is the outrage? Instead, we are supposed to protect the “feelings” of Israeli students who don’t want to be called Settlers or associated with Apartheid. This will not age well.

Fascism isn’t a political party, it’s an ideology. Rikers in New York and Angola in Louisiana are the same problem in a different font. Please, wake the fuck up. None of us are “safe” from either party when both of them serve corporations and billionaires over their voters.

States are making protests illegal, colleges and universities are canceling valedictorian speechs, while Biden is president, not Trump. Again, believing all bad things started with Trump and simply voting for Democrats and Biden in November will “save” us is dangerously ignorant.

Jodi Dean was given the chop because she concretely and historically dealt with Palestinian resistance rather than abstract the different factions away, refusing to assume epistemological, political, moral distance. A lesson to all: no more vague wishy-washiness going forward

They bombed the Jabalia Refugee Camp yesterday night.
I don’t know how many were killed, but this is the picture.

So at USC cops decide what speech is allowed?! According to the Los Angeles Times, Dr. Erroll G. Southers —president of LA’s Board of Police Commissioners, law and order enthusiast and staunch LAPD apologist—“was part of the decision” to cancel valedictorian Asna Tabassum’s commencement speech.

She has a minor in genocide studies from the institution that is barring her speech, proving that academia is all about theory and not praxis.

California universities love to put us on their brochures as tokens of diversity, but that’s it. We’re there to be seen and not heard.

I should know. My Los Angeles uni put me in their brochure three times. And I didn’t even know until after the fact.

“Study ‘resistance to genocide’ but please don’t act on what you learn.” —USC

Also note that the genocide studies center at the school where she got her degree has to this day said exactly nothing about the genocide in Palestine

Statement from USC’s Palestine Justice Faculty Group on the university’s predictably spineless, manifestly racist and Islamophobic silencing of valedictorian Asna Tabassum