Pro-Palestine Students Win Good Settlement

Our peace movement is already reaping rewards and advances. The UC Berkeley students who were denied their degrees, their right to attend graduate school and were facing disciplinary charges due to a sit-in at Wheeler Hall on April 9, 2002, 10 months ago, have won a settlement dismissing possible suspensions and allowing them to receive their degrees and attend graduate school, including the most famous, Roberto Hernandez.

The story was on Friday's 6 p.m. news, 2/21/03, on KPFA, 94.1 FM, http://www.kpfa.org and is in the San Francisco Chronicle, 2/22/03, at:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2003/02/22/BA158361.DTL

I hope the update will soon be posted on the students' website at:
http://ucdivest.org/wheelersolidarity/

The UCDivest-Wheeler Solidarity site has all kinds of exposes of the legal lies of the UC administration, perpetrated with our tax dollars, as well as contrasts in what UC considers acceptable behavior. The football garbage, which is completely contemptuous of serious academic and political thinking and activity, is allowed to do all kinds of outrageous activities with no arrests and no harassment of any kind, and is in fact actively encouraged by the UC administration. In the following article, we read how the football idiots are allowed to disrupt classrooms with their stupid football parade in the classrooms. See the 2/6/03 Berkeley Mic, a student paper, at:
http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/%7Emicmag/axe.php

Quotable quotes:
"The following Monday, per tradition, the UC-Berkeley Rally Committee (Rally Com) celebrated the win by holding a large "Axe Rally" on Sproul Plaza. Afterwards, participants triumphantly marched through campus with the captured Axe, a totem of victory. They burst into classrooms and lecture halls unannounced -- all over campus, singing the Cal fight song in celebration and "showing" students the Axe. Both the rally and the procession through classroom buildings were marked by virtually no police presence. No arrests or administrative reprimands were made."

Contrast that with what the pro-Palestinian students did on Deir Yassin/Holocaust Remembrance Day, April 9, 2002:

"On April 9th of 2002, Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) held a large protest against the University's silence as its sister school, Bethlehem University, was shuttered by Israeli Occupation Forces. Protesters called on the University to divest its investment portfolio from corporations that profit from the Israeli occupation of Palestine. After a short march through campus, about 150 people entered and occupied the lobby of Wheeler Hall, where they chanted and held an impromptu teach-in. A large police presence was on hand, and moved quickly to break up the sit-in, applying pain-compliance techniques and arresting 79, half of whom were students."

The article continues with the illegal actions of the UC administration, the phony cover-ups, the contempt for education in its promotion of the football garbage all the way up to the Chancellor leading the parade through classrooms, disrupting education. That Chancellor's salary and his many benefits are paid for with our tax dollars.

Keep in mind, UC, and in particular, UC Berkeley, is supposed to be one of the leading universities in the United States. Both the students and the taxpayers expect the highest regard for education, culture and political thinking at UC. Clearly, UC Berkeley's Chancellor has total contempt for education, as does the fascist ruling class which he represents.

It is our peace movement, with hundreds of thousands marching for peace in San Francisco, and thousands marching for peace in the many towns surrounding San Francisco, as well as the peace resolutions, the pickets of the Armed Forces Recruiting Stations, and the Battle of the Budget occurring everywhere, demanding money for education, housing, healthcare, transportation and all other social needs instead of the military, prisons and police, that has forced UC to finally stop wasting our tax dollars on the illegal persecution and prosecution of the pro-Palestinian students.

We saw this during the Vietnam War, when the peace movement became the umbrella movement for our women's liberation movement that won our right to abortion in 1973 (and earlier in many states, including California), our gay liberation movement that legalized homosexuality in many states, such as in California in 1975, won the liberation of Morton Sobell from prison in 1969 after serving 19.5 years on the political charges of conspiracy to commit atomic espionage for which the US government murdered his co-defendants, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, won all the affirmative action programs, lowered the voting age to 18 in 1971, abolished the death penalty for a few years in the 1970s, and many other progressive advances.

We managed these advances, many of which are now seriously threatened, without a labor movement. It will take a labor movement to defense those victories and move forward. Our peace movement must address the issues of primary concern to the workingclass, the bread and butter issues, and demand the money being spent on war, prisons and police be spent instead on our social needs. We must hear speeches to that effect at our peace rallies. That means superstitious nonsense called religion must end and the despicable hustle of the Democratic Party politicians, attempting to steal the thunder of the peace movement as a cover for their war party and anti-labor activities, must not be allowed at our peace rallies. We need speakers who address concrete issues, based on their experience and expertise, and provide a program as to what needs to be funded to improve the lives of the workingclass. We live in a scientific secular society and we can only advance as a scientific secular society. It is labor that guarantees our scientific secular society and it is labor that has the greatest needs in today's destructive war economy.

So far, 215 faculty at the various UC campuses have indicated their support of transferring the wealth from the greedy military to the needy workingclass by signing the petition for UC to divest from Israel at:
http://www.ucdivest.org/petition.php?facnames=1#sigs

Congratulations to the UC students on their, and our, victory. The struggle continues.