After police from the University of Pennsylvania and the city of Philadelphia “disbanded” Penn’s pro-Hamas encampment Friday morning, assorted faculty and students later gathered at the city’s famous LOVE Statue to express their grief.
The Daily Pennsylvanian reports “several speakers and audience members” broke down in tears while describing scuffles with law enforcement.
Sukaina Hirji, who teaches Ancient Greek, contemporary moral, and feminist philosophy, said she was “pretty shaken” and “very f**king angry” at the encampment’s dismantlement at which nine Penn students (33 protesters in total) were arrested.
English professor Chi-ming Yang, who specializes in “the literary and visual culture of race and empire,” said she “had made a pledge” that if law enforcement “touched any [Penn] students” she would “be there with them.”
Yang and other faculty had tried to block police vans that held arrested students.
Professor Huda Fakhreddine alleged that students were “brutalized” by the combined police forces and compared the situation to when Israeli forces had “invaded” her village in Lebanon when she was a child.
Hirji (pictured), Yang, and Fakhreddine all are members of Penn Faculty for Justice in Palestine. Yang also is a member of Police Free Penn.
MORE: Penn faculty ‘die-in’ blocks building entrance in ‘solidarity with civilians in Gaza’
A Penn pro-Hamas encampment organizer told the LOVE Statue gathering that their protest is “the dawn of something much greater, much larger,” and added Penn is wrong to think it could thwart activists with “police brutality.”
Friday evening, about 150 pro-Hamas demonstrators took their cause to Penn Interim President Larry Jameson’s residence where “at least” a quartet of activists holding Palestinian flags breached the gates around the property with one actually knocking on the front door.
Demonstrators shouted “Larry, Larry you’re a liar, the students set the world on fire” all while setting off red, green, and black smoke. Penn professor Tamim Khaddash chimed in with “You are complicit in apartheid, you are complicit in genocide, f**k you Larry.”
Like Fakhreddine, Khaddash also compared Penn’s protesters to students in Gaza, and claimed “every university in Gaza has been destroyed over the course of Israel’s war.”
The activists also engaged in a 30-second “primal scream” at Jameson’s house, and then turned towards adjacent police vehicles where they ranted against the Philadelphia PD’s “alleged ties to Israel.”
Read the Daily Pennsylvanian articles.
MORE: Penn anti-Israel activists demand to be allowed to protest as they wish
IMAGES: STUDIO GRAND OUEST/Shutterstock.com; U. Pennsylvania
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