[News] Columbia divest statement - the people will continue to disrupt Columbia's profits and legitimacy

[Anti-Imperialist News]

https://open.substack.com/pub/cuapartheiddivest/p/flood-butler-now-disruption-until?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web 
<https://open.substack.com/pub/cuapartheiddivest/p/flood-butler-now-disruption-until?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web>


  [🚨FLOOD BUTLER NOW] DISRUPTION UNTIL DIVESTMENT


      FLOOD BUTLER LIBRARY RIGHT NOW, RECLAIMED AS THE BASEL AL-ARAJ
      POPULAR UNIVERSITY!!

<https://substack.com/@cuad>
CUAD <https://substack.com/@cuad>
May 07, 2025

Over 100 people have just flooded Butler Library and renamed it the 
*Basel Al-Araj Popular University*. The flood shows that as long as 
Columbia funds and profits from imperialist violence, the people will 
continue to disrupt Columbia's profits and legitimacy. Repression breeds 
resistance - if Columbia escalates repression, the people will continue 
to escalate disruptions on this campus.

Today, the people refuse the name “Butler Library,” which honors 
Nicholas Murray Butler, a shameless Nazi sympathizer and president of 
Columbia University from 1902 to 1945. During his presidency, Butler 
welcomed Nazi ambassadors to campus with open arms, limited the number 
of Jewish people who could attend Columbia, and expelled students who 
protested against Columbia's ties with the Nazis. As an institution 
embedded in US imperialism, Columbia has always been propped up by 
genocidal profits as it is now with its mass investments in the killings 
of hundreds of thousands of Palestinian people.

The people renamed the library today to honor the martyred Palestinian 
revolutionary Basel al-Araj, whose writings on the Palestinian 
resistance and on the nature of war guide revolutionaries around the 
world today. Al-Araj teaches us that anti-imperialist struggles are 
protracted, and victory is facilitated by our patience and endurance. We 
may not win our demands quickly, but our victory is inevitable when we 
patiently learn from each action, improving our security and tactics and 
incorporating more people into the struggle through them. Al-Araj also 
reminds us that intellectuals must directly engage in the struggle 
against oppression - study alone will render the role of intellectuals 
obsolete. Finally, he teaches us the importance of combating the 
defeatism spread by imperialist propaganda, which obscures the 
effectiveness of armed struggles carried out by oppressed peoples and 
maintains the illusion of imperialism’s immunity against them. We must 
oppose this by continuing to propagate the successes of the heroic 
Palestinian armed resistance in weakening Israel and US imperialism and 
inspiring anti-imperialist struggles around the world.

The Popular University for Gaza is a radical transformation of the 
university from a site of elite knowledge production into a base for 
struggle, collective education, and resistance against the institutions 
that fund, legitimize, and profit from genocide. Through sit-ins, 
encampments, and the disruption of daily operations, it exerts sustained 
pressure on university administrations to divest from the Zionist entity 
and forces the reality of genocide in Gaza into public consciousness. At 
the original Popular University project in the West Bank, Basel al-Araj 
taught about the Palestinian resistance and insisted that knowledge must 
serve liberation, not empire. Today, the people at the Basel Al-Araj 
Popular University teach each other the stories our universities refuse 
to tell. They feed each other, protect each other, learn with and from 
each other. The Popular University is not only a demand for divestment. 
It is a living counter-institution, a revolutionary pedagogy in 
practice, and a declaration that another university—and another world—is 
already in formation.

The people demand:

 1.

    FULL FINANCIAL DIVESTMENT FROM ZIONIST OCCUPATION, APARTHEID, AND
    GENOCIDE

 2.

    ACADEMIC BOYCOTT OF ALL COMPLICIT INSTITUTIONS, INCLUDING THE
    CANCELLATION OF THE TEL AVIV GLOBAL CENTER

 3.

    COPS AND ICE OFF OUR CAMPUS

 4.

    END COLUMBIA’S OCCUPATION OF HARLEM; RETURN LAND TO HARLEMITES AND
    OPEN THE GATES!

 5.

    AMNESTY FOR ALL STUDENTS, STAFF, FACULTY, AND WORKERS TARGETED BY
    COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY’S DISCIPLINE
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