Metadata

• When: 2024-02-01

• Where: Columbia University

• Who:

• Organizations:

• Tags:

Description

• A protest was planned for 4:15pm at Low Library. The flier reads “Imperialists are not welcome here” with a picture of John Kerry with devil horns. The protest was supposed to interrupt the Weatherhead Institute’s 75th Gala Dinner, where John Kerry was the keynote speaker. The post from CUAD reads, “Kerry is a staunch imperialist and Zionist, who pushed for Isreal’s construction of the apartheid wall surrounding Gaza and the West Bank throughout his time as a senator. As the current ‘special climate envoy’ of the Biden administration, he continues to support the ongoing genocide of over 20,000 Palestinians as he invests in corporations that fund and profit form US-backed Israeli atrocities. Columbia students do NOT welcome genocidal imperialists here. Get John Kerry off our campus!”

• The rally was eventually canceled.

• An Instagram post by SJP and others notes that the protest was canceled because of “extreme measures of repression” by the university and that they view their cancellation of the protest as a “tactical retreat” which will allow them to “regroup in stronger ways which they cannot predict.” In the following post, they write, “this points to our ability to be flexible in our tactics of resistance, to know how to seize the right moment to strike and when to allow our aggressors to run in circles.” The post ends with “we do not plan on backing down any time soon.”

• Post from SJP’s Instagram confirms that the university barricaded Low steps, presumably to stop the protest from occurring.

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