Tuesday, May 7, 2024
Year : 2, Issue : 19
A Palestinian-American professor who was injured while being held to the ground by police officers during his arrest at a pro-Palestine campus protest Wednesday thinks his detention is racially motivated.
“There were three faculty that were detained, and violently a little bit, and three of us were people of color,” Samer Alatout, an associate professor of community and environmental sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, whose image of violent arrest went viral, told Anadolu in a video interview.
Alatout said he thought the police were targeting him, adding he was trying to hold his position between the police and the students.
Alatout said that he and other faculty members and staff decided to support the students on Monday and try to protect them from any deployment of police as they joined nationwide pro-Palestine protests across US campuses.
“I as a faculty member, I take really seriously the notion that I am there, for the most part, to protect the students’ rights academically, socially, emotionally, and even physically if it comes to that,” he said.
“I stood with them, trying to protect them,” he said.
“Of course, people here didn’t really recognize that, and they didn’t necessarily know about the degree of violence that Israeli genocide and Israeli apartheid and Israeli settler colonialism has been doing for the last 75 years,” he said, blaming the coverage of the US media.
He said people in the US started to question the “ethical frameworks” of US foreign policy and why their country provides Israel $3.3 billion every year.
Nearly 2,500 people, including students, have been arrested by US authorities during the pro-Palestine demonstrations, with protesters demanding universities divest from Israel and condemning the war on Gaza, where more than 34,700 people have been killed.
Nationwide demonstrations gained momentum last month after Columbia University asked the New York Police Department to forcibly evict a group of students who staged an encampment on a campus lawn. Over 100 people were arrested, but the protesters quickly adapted and formed another sit-in before they were forcibly removed last Tuesday night by police from that site, as well as a building they occupied.
Students in other countries including Canada, Australia, France, and Egypt have also organized demonstrations at universities in solidarity with Palestine.
Source: Anadolu Agency
