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Walkout hits North Carolina hate crime

Palestinian students fight back

Published Feb 17, 2007 7:53 AM

On Jan. 20, 15 members of the Guilford College football team in Greensboro, N.C., used their fists, feet and brass knuckles to attack three Palestinian students while yelling anti-Arab epithets. Only three of the white students involved, Michael Bates, Michael Robert Six and Christopher Barnette, were arrested on the spot for assault and ethnic intimidation. Guilford College is refusing to classify the attack as a “hate crime,” severely decreasing the severity of the charges.

The college released a statement saying that it would refrain from taking action against the accused students until they had been prosecuted in the local courts. Three more football players were later charged. Witnesses claim that the racists involved in the attack yelled “terrorists” after the violent onslaught began, thus signifying that the attack was not motivated by hatred based on race, nationality or ethnic origin, which it clearly was.

This attack cannot be understood outside the context of U.S. imperialism, which is a global war to eliminate all unity amongst working people and extract the highest profits from their labor and land via these divisions. U.S. imperialist attacks on Iraq, Somalia, Colombia and the ongoing land theft and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people are only a few symptoms of global capitalism that also has effects within the borders of the United States. Under the “war on terrorism,” the ruling class has created a white-supremacist culture here and across the world that violently attacks and oppresses Arabs and people of color. This anti-Arab and white-supremacist furor continues to deepen as the contradictions of U.S. imperialism deepen.

Recalling the incident, a Palestinian student at N.C. State University told YES! Weekly that as he was trying to pull the assailants off his two Guildford student friends, “That’s when they put me on the dirt and beat my a—. All this was accompanied by ‘sand n——-s,’ ‘f—-ing Palestinians,’ ‘terrorists.’ I would like to say seven to eight people were attacking me.” (Jan. 22)

Less than a week after the attack, more than 300 students walked out of class at Guilford College carrying scarecrows, placards and banners condemning the hate crime and offering solidarity to the attacked Palestinian students.

Students fight back

At the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill a new group has formed in reaction to the beating, called SPEAC—Solidarity with Palestine through Education and Action at Carolina. The group includes Muslim students, members of Students for a Democratic Society, members of Raleigh FIST—Fight Imperialism, Stand Together—and others.

At a SPEAC demonstration on Jan. 2, more than 50 students spoke about the hate crimes on campus and the lack of university response. Speakers stressed that the attacks on Muslims are directly related to U.S. imperialism and Israeli state terrorism. The group is circulating a petition that has already gotten hundreds of signatures demanding that Guilford call the attack what it is—a hate crime.

At N.C. State University the Muslim Student Association organized a meeting with campus police, city police and university administrators to sequester more information about their rights and protections. More than 75 students attended the session where the cops, through their creepy charisma, attempted to build trust amongst the Muslim students. After participants raised questions about U.S. imperialism and the ongoing rash of police brutality and killings at the hands of cops—including the killing of 18-year-old UNC Wilmington student Peyton Strickland on Dec.1—there was an overwhelming mood of solidarity amongst the students against the cops. Muslim students inquired about the local cops’ history and asked about the repeated tasering of an Arab student at the University of California, Los Angeles, in November. N.C. State students left with a greater sense of what the cops really stand for and are working to build a support committee to support the N.C. State student involved in the racist beating.

Raleigh FIST and other progressive students continue to build relationships with other community and labor forces in North Carolina to foster a genuine anti-imperialist movement that can stop this violence and oppression at its roots.