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Walkout hits North Carolina hate crime
Palestinian students fight back
By
Dante Strobino
Raleigh, N.C.
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.
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