UCLA: People could have died as cops riot

We train for this. It serves as an outlet for our testosterone poisoning. We beat with impunity.

Before the LAPD and other paramilitary forces moved in on the peaceful UCLA student encampment with explosives, shotgun-style projectile cannons, manhandling teens and young adults and cuffing them with overly tight zip ties, expressing their aggression and impatience with disobedient young people, police allowed, instigated, or themselves went in under cover to do the same thing. This was a declared an unlawful assembly not because of student violence but because of outside violent attacks on the students by Jewish, pro-Jewish, pro-Zionist (Christian and Jewish), pro-genocide, pro-Israel thugs.

“People could have died”: Police raid UCLA's anti-genocide protest after pro-Zionist-Israel mob attacks encampment

(Democracy Now!) May 2, 2024: This is an update from the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA), where police in riot gear began dismantling a pro-Palestinian encampment early Thursday, shooting students to break their bones and cause serious injury with rubber projectile cannons, concussive "flashbang" grenades, tear gas, and arresting dozens of students.

The heavy-handed raid came just over a day after pro-genocide counter-protesters for Israel armed with metal rods, 2x4s, and explosives (weapons grade fireworks) attacked UCLA students at their encampment.

The Real News Network reporter Mel Buer was on the scene when police dressed as stormtroopers and jackbooted thugs decided to attack.

Cops tear gas, shoot rubberized bullets, terrorize to disperse UCLA camp

Buer describes seeing counter-protesters provoke students, yelling slurs and bludgeoning them with parts of the encampment’s barricade, and says the attack lasted several hours without police or campus security intervention.

“UCLA is complicit in violence inflicted upon protesters,” wrote the editorial board of UCLA’s campus newspaper, The Daily Bruin, the next day.

Four of the paper’s student journalists were targeted and assaulted by counter-protesters while covering the peaceful demonstration (made violent by outside agitators championing Israel's genocide).

Democracy Now! speaks with Shaanth Kodialam Nanguneri, one of the student journalists, who says one of their colleagues was hospitalized over the assault, while campus security officers “were nowhere to be found.”

Meanwhile, UCLA’s chapter of Faculty for Justice in Palestine has called on faculty to refuse university labor Thursday in protest of the administration’s failure to protect students from what it termed “Zionist [violent Jewish and pro-Jewish] mobs.”

Professor Gaye Theresa Johnson, a member of UCLA Faculty for Justice in Palestine, denounces the administration’s response to nonviolent protest and says she sees the events as part of a major sea change in the politicization of American youth.

“This is a movement. It cannot be unseen. It cannot be put back in the box.”

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• Nermeen Sheikh, democracynow.org, 5/2/24; Pfc. Sandoval, Ashley Wells, CC Liu (eds.), Wisdom Quarterly