[🚨FLOOD BUTLER NOW] DISRUPTION UNTIL DIVESTMENT
FLOOD BUTLER LIBRARY RIGHT NOW, RECLAIMED AS THE BASEL AL-ARAJ POPULAR UNIVERSITY!!
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:
FULL FINANCIAL DIVESTMENT FROM ZIONIST OCCUPATION, APARTHEID, AND GENOCIDE
ACADEMIC BOYCOTT OF ALL COMPLICIT INSTITUTIONS, INCLUDING THE CANCELLATION OF THE TEL AVIV GLOBAL CENTER
COPS AND ICE OFF OUR CAMPUS
END COLUMBIA’S OCCUPATION OF HARLEM; RETURN LAND TO HARLEMITES AND OPEN THE GATES!
AMNESTY FOR ALL STUDENTS, STAFF, FACULTY, AND WORKERS TARGETED BY COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY’S DISCIPLINE
Hamas is the oppressor- free Gaza!
We all understand that you need to feel important and significant because you know that, in reality, you are insignificant and mediocre, so protesting gives you that feeling. We know you're doing this for your own personal psychological satisfaction and not because of Palestine, imperialism, or anything else. You can't make it in the real world and have accomplishments in the real world so you manufacture "accomplishments" by protesting, to give yourself some simulacrum of power to distract from the reality of your impotence.