Category Archives: Islamophobia

Labor for Palestine Bulletin: Important Events Thurs., Feb. 2

View in searchable PDF format: Important Events Thurs., Feb


Thursday, 5-6pm in NYC:
Protest at Uber’s Headquarters NoBanNoWall
Location: 3100 47th Ave, Long Island City, NY
Facebook event page

Join us to protest Uber on the day before Uber CEO Travis Kalanick meets with Donald Trump as part of his advisory council.

**** PLEASE NOTE: We’ve updated the our protest end time to 6 PM so that folks can head over to Foley Square for the Rise Up for #RamarleyGraham protest****

Now is the time for all those who value justice and equality to join together in holding Uber accountable, not only for its complicity with Trump’s hateful policies but also for impoverishing workers.

Backed by billions from Wall Street, gig economy corporations like Uber and Lyft are upending labor standards for which workers have spent centuries fighting.

Let’s send Uber and its gig-lord allies a message: workers’ rights and democracy come before profit. #NoBanNoWall

LIST OF SPONSORS IN PROGRESS

32BJ SEIU
ALIGN New York
Black Lives Matter Greater New York
Center for Popular Democracy
DRUM – Desis Rising Up & Moving
Labor for Palestine
Make the Road New York
Muslim Democratic Club
National Lawyers Guild Labor and Employment Law Committee
New York Communities for Change
New York Immigrant Action Fund
New York Immigration Coalition
New York Progressive Action Committee
New York Taxi Workers Alliance
New York Worker Center Federation
New York Working Families Party
Strong Economy for All


Thursday 8-9pm EST:
Urgent Labor for Standing Rock Conference Call with Water Protectors
In recent days, Donald Trump has met with with pro-DAPL building trade leaders and AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka, and pressured the Army Corps of Engineers to grant a final easement for DAPL. Today, highly militarized police made mass arrests of 76 water protectors.

In response, Chase Iron Eyes of the Lakota People’s Law Project and Last Real Indians will speak about what those of us in organized labor can do at this point to support water protectors at Standing Rock.

Call times in US/Eastern: Thursday, Feb 02, 2017, 8pm (1 hour). To participate, please register here.

Resolution on the Freedom of Speech and Assembly for All Faculty, Staff and Students at the City University of New York (PSC-CUNY)

View in PDF format: resolution_on_academic_freedom
Adopted by the PSC-CUNY Delegate Assembly on October 13, 2016.

PSC

UAW 2865 Condemns Horowitz Posters, Climate of Islamophobia and Racism

Tikkun2May 2, 2016

UAW 2865 Condemns Horowitz Posters, Climate of Islamophobia and Racism

 

On Friday, April 15th, 2016, posters defaming individuals involved with Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), the Muslim Student Association (MSA), and campaigns for boycott, divestment and sanctions of Israel, more broadly were discovered at UCLA. Commissioned by conservative agitator David Horowitz and likely circulated by unknown individuals working in collaboration, similar posters have also been confirmed at UC Berkeley, UC Santa Barbara, and San Diego State University. While this is not the first time that Horowitz has circulated posters on university campuses attacking SJP and MSA, this latest round represents a serious escalation from Horowitz’s past efforts. In this most recent poster campaign, individual student and faculty names from each respective campus are prominently displayed beneath the charge of having “allied themselves with Palestinian terrorists to perpetrate BDS and Jew Hatred on campus” as a result of their supporting BDS and the broader Palestinian struggle for freedom and self-determination.

In addition to student activists in MSA and SJP, Horowitz also attacked two Black professors at UCLA as well as Angela Davis, a prominent activist combatting all forms of oppression in the US and abroad and Black professor from UC Santa Cruz, for their support of Palestinian rights. This is hardly unexpected from Horowitz, who in addition to his attacks on Muslims, has a long history of attacking the Black community. In 2001, Horowitz took out ads in campus newspapers including the Daily Californian which claimed that Black Americans should be “grateful” for slavery.

Horowitz’s poster campaign followed a recent incident at the University of California, Riverside which took place sometime over spring break in which graduate student offices and a faculty office were vandalized. The Chair of the department of Ethnic Studies, Dr. Dylan Rodriguez, identified the incident as “despicable acts of symbolic and cultural violence, threat and harassment.” He also said, “Women of color have been specifically targeted by these parties, and the available information makes it abundantly clear that these acts of violence are significantly motivated by anti-Muslim and Islamophobic sentiment and/or ideology.”

We in UAW 2865 condemn these posters as Islamophobic and racist fear-mongering tactics intended to chill and silence protected political speech. Though concerned by the woefully insufficient reaction of UC Berkeley administration as well as the complete lack of attention by officials at UC Santa Barbara, we are heartened by the swift administrative response from UCLA, whose Vice Chancellor for Equity, Diversity and Inclusion sent an email to the campus community denouncing the posters as intimidation and defending the integrity of SJP and MSA. Nevertheless, we hope that UC administrators will continue working to better implement SJP UCLA’s requests, which include a meeting between the Chancellor and Palestinian students on campus and training campus officials in recognizing, condemning and confronting Islamophobia and racism against people of Southwest Asian/North African background as they should any other form of institutional, ideological or interpersonal xenophobia and violence. We further hope that administrators on all other impacted campuses will take similar measures.

Although UCLA administrators have worked to address the needs of students there, UCSB administrators have been silent thus far. And Berkeley officials, though aware of the strong statement released at UCLA, opted to stop short of offering the same level of support. Instead they released an anemic statement that failed to provide the campus community with adequate context in understanding why these posters are so inaccurate, offensive, and dangerous. Horowitz has had a long history of surveilling college students on their very own campuses and his tactics of slander, intimidation and bullying have been experienced by multiple generations of student organizers. Yet even as some administrators in the UC have been quick to repudiate Horowitz’s actions, it is clear that they did not occur in a vacuum.

In May 2015, UC President and former Head of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano opined that the UC Regents should adopt the State Department Definition of anti-Semitism, which equates virtually any criticism of the state of Israel with anti-Semitism. In fact, the push for the UC Regents to adopt this definition was the result of years of effort by groups such as the AMCHA Initiative, the Zionist Organization of America, and the Brandeis Center to ensure that any and all  speech that advocates for Palestinian freedom through BDS and other non-violent educational activities on UC campuses are equated with anti-Semitism. This latest attempt to stifle support for Palestinian rights developed from various previously unsuccessful pursuits of Title VI complaints, each of which was dismissed by the Department of Education, alleging that BDS and pro-Palestine speech deprived Jewish students of equal access to a quality education. The clamor for the State Department Definition was only the most recent phase of this broader push to slow the growth of the BDS movements on UC campuses, and AMCHA founder and UC Santa Cruz lecturer Tammi Rossman-Benjamin (who was caught on video espousing repugnantly Islamophobic generalizations about Palestinian and Palestine solidarity student activists) admitted that enforcement of the State Department Definition would stigmatize BDS as anti-Semitic.

Despite the UC Regents’ claims to the contrary, the desire to abandon adoption of the State Department definition in favor of an ostensibly all-encompassing “Statement of Principles Against Intolerance” did not ultimately constitute a shift away from monitoring criticism of Israel on university campuses. This was made clear by the very selection of so-called “experts” who were to be consulted during the drafting process: all of them were men, one was a driving force for the racially exclusionary Proposition 209, and two are known to advocate for the suppression of speech critical of Israel. This panel represents a rather limited demographic of “experts” to weigh in on what is alleged to be an all-encompassing anti-oppression statement.

Accordingly, the struggles of various communities were superficially coopted in a cheap attempt to legitimize the statement’s direct and false equation between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism. Though the “Statement of Principles Against Intolerance” was ultimately amended before being passed to condemn instead “anti-Semitic forms of anti-Zionism,” and though it remains technically unenforceable on constitutional grounds, we condemn the process of drafting the “Statement of Principles” and find the finished product to be disastrously and offensively out of touch with the on-the-ground realities university students face today. Among other portions, this disconnect is evidenced by a section from the introductory “Contextual Statement” about Islamophobia.

According to page 5 of the “Contextual Statement”:

“Terrorist attacks by self-described religious fundamentalists have fueled Islamophobic attacks against peaceful members of our communities who are–or are perceived to be–followers of Islam. These attacks and counter-attacks generate fear on UC campuses as much as they do outside the UC community, and they sometimes generate policy positions or statements that are perceived to be personal attacks that reflect prejudice or intolerance based solely on religious belief.”

Despite the fact that the UC Regents repeatedly prided themselves on having drafted a statement that included Islamophobia at their March 23rd meeting, this language comes appallingly close to apologia for Islamophobia in centering not the reprehensibility of Islamophobia itself nor the danger to those directly impacted, but rather the “fear” of the general UC community, and implying a cyclical parity between vigilante violence and Islamophobic bigotry and aggression. Most distressingly, the statement’s conclusion that this “cycle” of attacks and Islamophobic “counter-attacks” “generate[s] policy positions or statements that are perceived to be personal attacks that reflect prejudice or intolerance based solely on religious belief” paints Islamophobia as a matter of misperception, rather than a dangerously escalating phenomenon. It also does not recognize that the culture wars taking place on University campuses are largely informed by, funded through and incited by the University of California’s ties to privatized business profiting from war and militarization in the South West Asia and North Africa (SWANA) region. The statement gives no mention to rhetorics of intolerance and bigotry in the current Presidential election or US policy and structural and institutional violations of civil liberties impacting Arab, Muslim and SWANA peoples in the US as being tied to the rise of Islamophobia.

This is hardly the statement one would expect in response to a domestic climate in which politicians and public figures have seriously proposed interment for Muslims in the U.S.; when leading presidential candidates campaign on banning Muslims from entering the U.S. and glorify Islamophobic violence; when half of polled American voters support this proposed Muslim ban; when individuals are assaulted simply for speaking Arabic or wearing hijab in public;when Muslims (and those perceived to be Muslim) are removed from flights without explanation,, or for speaking Arabic, as recently befell a UC Berkeley student of Iraqi origin; when Islamophobic sentiment in the U.S. is so pronounced that the Department of Education feels compelled to issue an open letter warning educators to be vigilant about the climate for Muslim students.

These toxic attitudes have also entered U.S. policy, evidenced by a law signed last December that subjects European citizens of Iranian, Iraqi, Syrian, and Sudanese descent to discriminatory screening and visa barriers to travel to the U.S. This law risks making U.S. citizens with national origins from those same countries into second-class citizens by causing the E.U. to reciprocate and subject them to visa discrimination as well. Even after the “Statement of Principles Against Intolerance” was passed, the UC Regents attempted to use their authority to intimidate the American Association of Anthropologists into voting against an academic boycott of Israeli institutions with a proven track record of perpetuating the occupation, discriminating against and denying Palestinians the very right to academic freedom on which the Regents claim to base their opposition, showing where their true priorities lie.

The statement’s take on other forms of racism and xenophobia, which are cheaply consolidated into a single paragraph and reduced to a matter of differences in “debates” on university campuses, is equally abysmal. Racism is transformed from a systemic issue to a matter of insensitive discourse, which is convenient given that it was the UC Regents who helped introduce structural inequality to the UC system by laying the groundwork for what would become proposition 209, which effectively decimated the enrollment rate and statistical and physical presence of students of color on UC campuses. Transmuting racism from a systemic issue to a matter of personal worldview and speech allows the UC Regents to deflect responsibility and complicity for the structural inequalities still inherent to the UC from both themselves as well as the administrators on each campus tasked with responding to student needs.

There is no denying that Horowitz’s posters are defamatory, racist, and Islamophobic. But when the UC Regents continue to prioritize the monitoring of discourse related to Palestine/Israel over acknowledging the clearly escalating levels of Islamophobia and racism on the national front, or when administrators on UC campuses remain glaringly uninformed about Islamophobia and racism, they are complicit in creating the very environment that leads to Horowitz’s incitement as well as the incident currently being investigated as a hate crime at UC Riverside.

Make no mistake, it is the repeated ignoring and delegitimization of Islamophobia, racism, and complicity in the routine suppression of pro-Palestine speech and activity on university campuses that allowed for the sort of escalation we have seen from David Horowitz and his followers, whose actions epitomize the often ignored intersection of Islamophobia, racism, and the demonization of pro-Palestine sentiment.

Whatever our demographic and/or political beliefs, all of us–students, faculty, and campus workers–deserve equal protection and an educational environment free from harassment and intimidation. But absent a genuine comprehension of the racism and harassment most directly affecting university students today, such a goal will be nothing more than a pipe dream to which UC officials can pretend to pay lip service through the denunciation of someone like Horowitz, who in fact is only capitalizing on an atmosphere that UC Regents and administrators have aided and abetted.

The full text and PDF of this statement, including relevant citations, can be found here.

2010.09.02: NYC Workers Stand with the Muslim, Arab, and South Asian Communities: Our Grief Is Not an Excuse for Racism, Islamophobia, Bigotry or War (NYCLAW)

NYC Workers Stand with the Muslim, Arab, and South Asian Communities- OCR.pdf

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NYC Workers Stand with the Muslim, Arab, and South Asian Communities: Our Grief Is Not an Excuse for Racism, Islamophobia, Bigotry or War

New York City Labor Against the War, September 2, 2010

As New York City workers and trade unionists, we deplore the attacks on Park51, desecration of mosques, violence and all other forms of racism, Islamophobia and anti-Muslim bigotry.

It is no accident that this hate campaign is taking place in the midst of deepening economic crisis.

In the 1930s, the Nazis scapegoated Jews, Roma people, gays and others to deflect workers’ attention from the banks and corporations responsible for the Great Depression. Ultimately, failure to oppose these policies led to destruction of unions, elimination of all other opposition, and horrific consequences for the entire world.

Today, Newt Gingrich, Sara Palin, and the ‘Tea Party’ similarly scapegoat Arabs, Muslims, immigrants and people of color in order to deflect workers’ fear and anger about record unemployment, foreclosures, homelessness, credit debt, police violence, and attacks on organized labor.

Although pretending to speak for workers, the Tea Party’s corporate puppets oppose our right to organize, collectively bargain or strike.

They attack Social Security, unemployment benefits, health care, workplace safety and environmental protections. They have even blocked compensation for Ground Zero first responders.

Their allies―including racist demagogue Pam Geller, the Anti-Defamation League, Rudolph Giuliani and prominent Neocons―promote bigotry to fuel increasingly unpopular U.S. wars against the Muslim world, while shielding Israeli apartheid from growing international isolation.

Workers, abroad and at home, have long paid the price for these disastrous policies. On 9/11, we suffered blowback from decades of U.S./Israeli war, occupation and colonialism.

9/11, in turn, has been the pretext for an endless bipartisan war of terror. This war has devastated Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Palestine, Lebanon, Somalia, Yemen and other countries.

It has left thousands of G.I.s dead or maimed. It has tortured prisoners and undermined civil liberties. It has squandered trillions of dollars.

Now it targets Iran.

For these reasons, it is essential for trade unionists and all workers to stand up in defense of the Muslim, Arab, and South Asian communities.

Moreover, to eliminate the conditions that breed racism and Islamophobia, we ask New Yorkers to join us in building an ongoing workers’ movement to fight for jobs, housing, schools, national health care, labor and immigrant rights, racial justice, clean environment, and an end to U.S. wars of conquest.

The time to act is now.

Initial Signers (List in formation―*For identification only)

Larry Adams, Former President, NPMHU L. 300*; Co-Convener, New York City Labor Against the War Ÿ Michael Letwin, Former President, ALAA/UAW L. 2325*; Co-Convener, New York City Labor Against the War; Labor for Palestine, Al-Awda NY; International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network-Labor Ÿ Brenda Stokely, Former President, AFSCME DC 1707*; Co-Convener, New York City Labor Against the War; Co-Chair, Million Worker March Movement Ÿ Noha Arafa, ALAA/UAW L. 2325* Ÿ Anthony Arnove, NWU/UAW L. 1981* Ÿ Tibby Brooks, NWU/UAW L. 1981* Ÿ Antonia Codling, Former EB Member, ALAA/UAW L. 2325* Ÿ Heather Cottin, La Guardia Community College, PSC-CUNY, AFT L. 2334* Ÿ Frank Couget, NALC Branch 36, AFL-CIO* Ÿ Gregory Dankel, Chapter Chair, PSC-CUNY, AFT L. 2334* Ÿ Mike Eilenfeldt, Union @ Cooper Union, AFT L. #6420 NYSUT L. #37-901*; Delegate, NYC Central Labor Council, AFL-CIO* Ÿ Shelley Ettinger, AFT L. 3882* Ÿ Leslie Feinberg, NWU/UAW L. 1981* Ÿ Julie Fry, Vice-President, ALAA/UAW L. 2325* Ÿ Mike Gimbel, Retired Executive Bd. Member, AFSCME DC 37 L. 375*; Delegate, NYC Central Labor Council, AFL-CIO* Ÿ Marvin Holland, Director, Community and Political Action, TWU L. 100* Ÿ Deepa Kumar, AAUP-AFT, Rutgers University, New Jersey* Ÿ Edwin Molina, IBEW L. 3* Ÿ Susan O. Morris, Health & Safety Committee & Past Officer, Executive Bd., ALAA/UAW L. 2325* Ÿ Anne Pruden, Retiree, SEIU L. 1199* Ÿ Nagesh Rao, AFT L. 2364* Ÿ Dominic Renda, Chief Shop Steward, CWA L. 1105* Ÿ Mimi Rosenberg, Producer Building Bridges, WBAI Radio; ALAA/UAW L. 2325* Ÿ Hank Sambach, Secretary, AFSCME DC 37, L. 1930* Ÿ Steve Terry, ALAA/UAW L. 2325* Ÿ Azalia Torres, Former EB Member, ALAA/UAW L. 2325* Ÿ Daniel Vila, Independent Workers Movement Ÿ Aminifu Williams, UAW L. 980* Ÿ Joyce Wilcox, AFSCME DC 37, L. 439* Ÿ Cindy Klumb, Shop Steward, OPEIU L. 153* Ÿ Gregory Butterfield, NOLSW/UAW L. 2320* Ÿ Peter Ranis, PSC-CUNY, AFT L. 2334* Ÿ Joseph B. Keady, Freelancers Union* Ÿ Jimmy Brash, UFCW L. 1262* Ÿ Garrett Wright, SAG* Ÿ Pooja Kothari, ALAA/UAW L. 2325* Ÿ Lucy Herschel, Delegate, 1199SEIU/UHWE* Ÿ Grace Oboma-Layat, ALAA/UAW L. 2325* Ÿ Alexander Ryley, ALAA/UAW L. 2325* Ÿ Basima Hafiz, ALAA/UAW L. 2325* Ÿ Aisha M. Richard, Alt. VP, ALAA/UAW L. 2325* Ÿ Nadine Griffin, 1199SEIU/UHWE* Ÿ Sumani Lanka, ALAA/UAW L. 2325

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New York City Labor Against the War
http://nyclaw01.wordpress.com/
nyclaw01@gmail.com

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