BAP NYC/NJ Stands in Solidarity with the CUNY 8
On April 30, 2024, at the City University of New York’s Harlem campus, over 170 students and community members were battered, arrested, and inhumanely detained for protesting CUNY’s complacency toward and financial support for the relentless massacre of the Palestinian people of Gaza. Right now, Alvin Bragg and the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office continue to pursue felony charges against eight protestors who were targeted and terrorized by a hyper-militarized New York Police Department. The New York City/New Jersey Citywide Alliance of the Black Alliance for Peace (BAP-NYC/NJ) stands in resolute, unapologetic solidarity with the CUNY 8 and condemns the City of New York’s blatant attempts to criminalize dissent to justify a genocide against the Palestinian people of Gaza. We see these felony charges against the CUNY 8 for what they really are: naked acts of repression and, most importantly, the sanctioning of the genocidal white supremacist settler-colonial project of the state of Israel.
As a formation seeking to recapture and redevelop the historic anti-war, anti-imperialist, and pro-peace positions of the radical African/Black movement, BAP-NYC/NJ defines WAR as the strategic invasion, destabilization, dispossession, and, as in the case of Palestine, elimination of a community, its people, land, resources, culture, customs, and its agency by ideological, armed, economic, and psychological means. We see WAR as executed by the U.S./EU/NATO Axis of Domination as an ongoing counterrevolution aimed at suppressing African and colonized people who are seeking to acquire power and win their own liberation.
In addition to the state’s felony charges, the brutal arrests of students and community members on April 30, 2024, represent domestic expressions of this ongoing WAR. We will not be intimidated by these psychological WAR tactics. We will continue to stand with the CUNY 8 and all those fighting for Palestinian liberation from within the heart of the imperial core. We recognize the zionist colonial outpost known as “Israel” to be merely an extension of white supremacy, settler colonialism, and European expansionism in West Asia. The fact that the NYPD has had a headquarters in “Tel Aviv” since 2003 shows how the City of New York acted as an extension of the genocidal Israeli state. Mayor Eric Adams and NYPD also demonstrate this through their consistent communication, plotting and executing joint strategies on students, Palestinians, Muslims, and others coming together to denounce the genocide. This has forced Palestinian students to watch their tuition dollars be used to carry out this coordinated carnage against their own people. The permanent NYPD zionist outpost not only reflects the settler colonial status of the state of “Israel” itself but also elucidates how the U.S. state functions as the ongoing institutional expression of settler colonialism. These entities continue to co-develop the same tactics used to surveil, repress, infiltrate, and abuse those who are opposed to and resist their violent regimes. This is why this historic partnership is soaked in the blood of Africans here in NYC and our Palestinian kin in Gaza. This is why we continue to demand an immediate end to the Israeli training of U.S. police forces. This is why the masses of our peoples have historically stood side by side. As the late Yahya Sinwar, chairman of the Hamas Political Bureau, said in his last interview about the racist murder of George Floyd, “George Floyd was killed as a result of a racist ideology held by some. The same kind of racism that killed George Floyd is being used by Israel against Palestinians.”
Despite the longstanding solidarity between the African/Black and Palestinian masses, BAP-NYC/NJ understands that the face of imperialism and imperialist violence here in New York can also be Black. We are under no delusions about the neocolonial function of the Black Misleadership Class here in New York. The Black Misleadership Class, which Glen Ford described as “a class that sees its own personal, financial, and social interests as being synonymous with the progress of Black people as a whole,” continues to sell out the masses of Africans in New York City and in this particularly egregious case, is complicit in literal genocide. To add insult to injury, Adams now has his charges dropped while the CUNY 8 face years in prison. We need look no further than Hakeem “the white man’s dream” Jeffries, who said, “Jerusalem is the 6th Borough of NY” while taking nearly one million dollars from AIPAC for 2023-24 to see who the Black puppets are and whose interests they advance. It is not the typical African family in NYCHA housing in Canarsie.
In solidarity with the CUNY 8 and all anti-imperialist forces here and abroad, we reject the neocolonial puppetry of the Black Misleadership Class.
BAP-NYC/NJ demands all charges be dropped in this case, and we stand in unequivocal, steadfast solidarity with the CUNY 8, as with the Palestinian people and cause. Onward to victory, until a fully liberated Palestine and a People’s CUNY!
Justice for the CUNY 8!
No Compromise.
No Retreat.