Democracy in Kenya?

The New York Times reports on allegations that the US government-funded International Republican Institute deliberately withheld poll results that the US disliked in Kenya in late 2007. The poll suggested that Raila Odinga, who was disfavored by the U.S., may have had more support than the announced victor, Mwai Kibaki. This alleged suppression of information would have obstructed the accountability of the electoral process to the Kenyan people. This, in turn, may have contributed to widespread post-election violence.

The US State Department immediately recongized Kibaki after the Electoral Commission announced this result, although there remained serious allegations of fraud, including some charges by the US envoy.

The article quotes the IRI East Africa Director, Kenneth Flottman, as saying:

“It was clear, in my opinion, that the ambassador was trying to influence the perceptions of the Kenyan electorate, and thus the campaign.”

Obviously needs further research, but this is an interesting and disturbing prospect.

BBC Refuses to Air Humanitarian Appeal for Palestine

A recent article discussed vociferous criticism of the BBC for "its decision not to broadcast a television appeal by aid agencies for victims of Israel's recent military actions in Gaza."

The article continued, "The decision has met with angry criticism from Church of England archbishops, editorial writers and senior British government ministers, as well as sit-ins at the BBC’s London headquarters and its broadcast center in Glasgow."

While, "the BBC was joined in its refusal to carry the appeal by Sky News, an independent broadcaster with a widely watched news channel. But three other broadcasters — the publicly owned Channel 4 and two private broadcasters, ITV and Channel 5 — accepted the appeal."

During this crisis, the BBC has sought to maintain an air of "objectivity." But how can the BBC maintain a stance of "objectivity" when it so plainly refuses to air even the most apolitical humanitarian appeals? Maybe we should take up the example of Mohamed El-Baradei, Nobel Peace Prize winner and current head of the UN's IAEA, and boycott the BBC. Check out the story about El-Baradei's boycott, as well as the actual humanitarian appeal, here.

Opening a New Frontier in the "Good War"?

Thought it useful to mention a few quotes from a recent New York Times article on the U.S.'s ongoing involvement in airstrikes and raids into Pakistan.

Less than a week ago, on January 23, "two missile attacks launched from remotely piloted American aircraft killed at least 15 people in western Pakistan on Friday. The strikes suggested that the use of drones to kill militants within Pakistan’s borders would continue under President Obama."

"In the second attack, missiles struck a house near the village of Wana in South Waziristan, killing seven people, according to local accounts and Pakistani news reports. The reports said three of the dead were children."

"A senior Pakistani official estimated that the attacks might have killed as many as 100 civilians; it was not possible to verify the estimate."

Escalating the "Good War"

An article in today's New York Times indicates that, "President Obama intends to adopt a tougher line toward Hamid Karzai, the Afghan president, as part of a new American approach to Afghanistan that will put more emphasis on waging war than on development, senior administration officials said Tuesday. "

Furthermore, the article noted that this approach was "a departure from that of President Bush, who held videoconferences with Mr. Karzai every two weeks and sought to emphasize the American role in rebuilding Afghanistan and its civil institutions."

Join Duke Against War at 7 p.m. February 17th at the Duke Coffeehouse to discuss what these policies mean and where antiwar activists can go from here.

Students for a Democratic Society at UNC are holding an event of interest tonight. I know at least one Duke Against War member is going to check it out ...

The War on Gaza and A Strategy for the Liberation of Palestine

Discussion at Internationalist Books
Wednesday, January 28, 6:00 - 7:30pm

RSVP: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=44306211383&ref=mf

Please join us for a study group & discussion of the war on Gaza and its significance in the context of the broader struggle for the liberation of Palestine. We will discuss the aims of the Palestinian war of liberation, some historical background, the role of U.S. imperialism in the oppression of Palestine, the latest murderous assault by Israel in Gaza, the current 'ceasefire', and what we can do as solidarity activists to support the people of Palestine.

The main readings are from "A Strategy for the Liberation of Palestine," an important work from 1969 by the revolutionary organization, Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP).

The readings are available here: http://www.scribd.com/doc/10991932/

Folks are encouraged to read the excerpts in the attached study guide, however, please feel free to come to the discussion even if you have not read the documents and no matter what level of understanding you have of the struggle. We can all learn from and teach one another.

The discussion will take place Wednesday, January 28 at Internationalist Books (405 W. Franklin St, across the street from Med Deli) from 6:00 - 7:30 PM. Please emailkostajh@gmail.com with questions.

Academics & Activists are signing onto an Academic Boycott of Israel

International Writers and Scholars Endorse Academic Boycott of Israel

We stand in support of the indigenous Palestinian people in Gaza, who are fighting for their survival against one of the most brutal uses of state power in both this century and the last.

We condemn Israel's recent (December 2008/ January 2009) breaches of international law in the Gaza Strip, which include the bombing of densely-populated neighborhoods, illegal deployment of the chemical white phosphorous, and attacks on schools, ambulances, relief agencies, hospitals, universities, and places of worship. We condemn Israel's restriction of access to media and aid workers.

We reject as false Israel's characterization of its military attacks on Gaza as retaliation. Israel's latest assault on Gaza is part of its longtime racist jurisprudence against its indigenous Palestinian population, during which the Israeli state has systematically dispossessed, starved, tortured, and economically exploited the Palestinian people.

We reject as untrue the Israeli government's claims that the Palestinians use civilians as human shields, and that Hamas is an irredeemable terrorist organization. Without endorsing its platforms or philosophy, we recognize Hamas as a democratically elected ruling party. We do not endorse the regime of any existing Arab state, and call for the upholding of internationally mandated human rights and democratic elections in all Arab states.

We call upon our fellow writers and academics in the United States to question discourses that justify and rationalize injustice, and to address Israeli assaults on civilians in Gaza as one of the most important moral issues of our time.

We call upon institutions of higher education in the U.S. to cut ties with Israeli academic institutions, dissolve study abroad programs in Israel, and divest institutional funds from Israeli companies, using the 1980s boycott against apartheid South Africa as a model.

We call on all people of conscience to join us in boycotting Israeli products and institutions until a just, democratic state for all residents of Palestine/Israel comes into existence.

Mohammed Abed
Elmaz Abinader
Diana Abu-Jaber
Ali Abunimah
Opal Palmer Adisa
Deborah Al-Najjar
Evelyn Azeeza Alsultany
Amina Baraka
Amiri Baraka
George Bisharat
Sherwin Bitsui
Breyten Breytenbach
Van Brock
Hayan Charara
Alison Hedge Coke
Lara Deeb
Vicente Diaz
Marilyn Hacker
Mechthild Hart
Sam Hamill
Randa Jarrar
Fady Joudah
Mohja Kahf
Rima Najjar Kapitan
Persis Karim
J. Kehaulani Kaunanui
Haunani Kay-Trask
David Lloyd
Sunaina Maira
Nur Masalha
Khaled Mattawa
Daniel AbdalHayy Moore
Aileen Moreton-Robinson
Nadine Naber
Marcy Newman
Viet Nguyen
Simon J. Ortiz
Vijay Prashad
Steven Salaita
Therese Saliba
Sarita See
Deema Shehabi
Matthew Shenoda
Naomi Shihab Nye
Magid Shihade
Vandana Shiva
Noenoe Silva
Andrea Smith
Ahdaf Soueif
Ghada Talhami
Frank X. Walker
Robert Warrior

Upcoming Events

"Anthropology in an Era of Permanent War" with Catherine Lutz

Catherine Lutz, an anthropology professor, gave a talk with tons of relevant information and raised some issues of interest to anti-war activists and scholars. I thought I'd share some of my notes:

After 9/11, the U.S military has increasingly brought anthropologists, and their cultural expertise, onto the pay role. Anthropologists are being employed in weapons labs, the CIA, the pentagon, and in the Department of Defense. One high profile project is the Human Terrain System, which is supposed to help the military understand better the culture of its enemies and the populations of countries it invades and occupies.

Lutz was highly critical of anthropologists being funded by, and working for military institutions. First, she made clear that the cultural knowledge anthropologists bring to the military is not being used to eliminate racism or promote respect for cultural difference. Instead, it is incorporated into the military to more effectively do its job and hit its targets. An example she used was training soldiers to understand Iraqi hand signals or signs of disrespect, so that they can effectively enter homes and make arrests. Cultural knowledge is understood and valued as a weapon. Soldiers are taught that "cultural awareness" as a "combat multiplier makes you more lethal on the front lines" (quote is from a training manual Lutz shared).

She laid out how employing anthropologists is performing a crucial public relations function for the military. The Human Terrain System employs a full time PR campaign to present its work as creating a "smarter war," a "PhD level of warfare," and to assure the public that professionals are waging a quick, effective, and humane war.

Lutz was openly critical of scholars working for the military, and cited earlier examples of disciplines led astray by dubious interests: physics as a discipline fundamentally shaped by the military, and biology as one increasingly beholden to pharmaceutical companies. She felt it was an ethical imperative to chose to write anthropology of the military rather than anthropology for the military. While some scholars claim that their aim is to change the institution of the military from the inside out, Lutz has no interest in reforming the military. She takes an ethical stance that war is not a functional human institution, rather it is fundamentally destructive of human life.

Catherine Lutz is the author of Homefront: A Military City and the American Twentieth Century, which profiles Fayetteville, North Carolina, home of the giant army post Fort Bragg, to gain insights into the impact of militarization on American society.

She a co-author of Local Democracy Under Siege.
What is the state of democracy at the turn of the twenty-first century? To answer this question, seven scholars lived for a year in five North Carolina communities. They observed public meetings of all sorts, had informal and formal interviews with people, and listened as people conversed with each other at bus stops and barbershops, soccer games and workplaces. Their collaborative ethnography allows us to understand how diverse members of a community not just the elite think about and experience "politics" in ways that include much more than merely voting.

Fighting Occupation with Occupation

The Guardian newspaper is reporting a wave of university occupations in solidarity with Gaza sweeping through the UK, as a sign of a "return to radicalism, fuelled by social networking and blogs." According to the article, the protests started "at the School of Oriental and African Studies, occupations in protest at events in Gaza spread to King's College London and the London School of Economics (LSE), then out of the capital to Sussex, Warwick, Newcastle, Oxford, Essex, Birmingham, Leeds, Manchester and Manchester Metropolitan, Bristol, Nottingham, Salford, and Kingston."

Below are links to some of the blogs students have started to inform people about their struggles. Check them out for info about demands the students have been raising, as well as victories they have achieved. And feel free to post comments in solidarity with their struggles!

School of Oriental and African Studies
Cambridge
Oxford
London School of Economics
Warwick
King's College
Manchester Metropolitan University
Sussex
Birmingham
Leeds

"Time for a new divestment campaign" talk at Duke

My name is Mike S. and I am a member of Duke Against War. I wanted to speak today about my experience as a Palestine solidarity activist. I’m going to talk about a few incidents in a campaign I was a part of from fall 2006 to spring 2008. But before that, I wanted to briefly address why we should consider launching a divestment campaign right now.

Just yesterday, an article appeared in the online journal Counterpunch by Kevin Alexander Gray, a civil rights organizer in South Carolina, contributing editor to Black News in South Carolina, former President of the SC ACLU, and Jesse Jackson's SC campaign manager in 1988. The article was called, “Time for a New Divestment Campaign,” and I couldn’t agree more. That is the decision we have before us – a new divestment campaign, like the one that helped bring down apartheid South Africa, this time aimed at one of the countries so instrumental in maintaining apartheid in South Africa for so long – Israel.

Why divest? Gray gives us a number of reasons. He says, “Zionism, the official ideology of Israel, is predicated on religious and ethnic separation or segregation. A self-described Jewish state -- that is, a state that operates of, by and on behalf of a single group of people -- cannot also be a secular, democratic state where persons of all religious and ethnic backgrounds are treated equally. A Jewish state that has never declared its borders, that has annexed and occupied territories, flouting international law and subjecting the indigenous population to poverty, indignity, theft, torture and death, is not only a colonialist outlaw state; it is also racist. ” The founding ideology of the state of Israel is racist, based on the rationale of colonialism extending back through the nineteenth century, underwriting the colonial domination of every Western European nation over every country in the so-called the third world.

But there are more reasons. “What’s happening in Palestine,” Gray continues, “is not fundamentally different from what occurred in apartheid South Africa. Kids are being killed. People have been herded into the (more deadly) equivalent of bantustans. Political leaders are targeted for assassination…The citizens of Gaza live in a virtual prison. They are surrounded by water, walls, fences and watch/gun towers.”

And furthermore, “even humanitarian aid is not allowed through,” and “citizens can get food, medicine and even goats, in addition to guns and weapons, only through tunnels. ”

In short, Israel is an apartheid state, and we should dedicate ourselves to fighting it, and demanding divestment.

But how do we go about fighting it? I’d like to discuss a few key moments in a divestment campaign I was a part of at Wayne State University from fall 2006 to spring 2008 as a way of beginning to answer that question.

A group of friends and I launched our Palestine solidarity campaign in the fall of 2006, shortly after Israel had invaded Lebanon. This was the direct impetus for our own struggle, and as many of you probably know, Israel’s invasion sparked a series of protests around the world against Israel, albeit nothing on the scale we’ve seen recently with Israel’s invasion of Gaza.

But that campaign, and that group of friends, didn’t just appear out of thin air. It had a pre-history that I think is relevant. It began with myself and a friend of mine doing talks on labor at Wayne State University in the fall of 2005. That winter, people began attacking mosques in our neighborhood. We were living in Hamtramck at the time. As the labor campaign wound down, we decided to put up some flyers calling people to a meeting to discuss what we might be able to do to counter these racist attacks happening in our community. A number of people showed up, and from there we found a handful of people, no more than four, willing to dedicate a serious amount of time to the campaign.

From there, we made some signs, talked to the imam at the mosque, and began picketing in front of the mosque around the time of the sunset prayer, which was when most of the attacks were taking place. Things went well for a while, but eventually the imam asked us to shut our picket down, because we were drawing attention to the mosque, and he wanted to ignore the attacks and hope they went away on their own. We disagreed, and told him so, but shut our picket line down. As an aside, I’ll note that one of the biggest disgraces of this campaign was that one of our comrades, a Somali Muslim woman named Asha, wasn’t allowed to pray in the mosque she was putting herself on the line defending, and had to pray in a dirty alleyway next to the building.

After this campaign, we began reading together. One of the books we read was Clayborne Carson’s In Struggle. I have read this book numerous times since then with people I’ve met who were thinking about becoming politically active. It is important because it shows how important young folks, from 15 and younger to 20, are in bringing about new forms of politics and social change. To this day, I have a special place in my heart for the young men and women of SNCC.

Soon, though, Israel invaded Lebanon, and we, a group of self-reflective young folks, began talking about what we could do to influence events that seemed so far away. Eventually, we decided we needed to launch a divestment campaign at the school that some of us attended and others had recently graduated from – Wayne State University, where Shemon and I had organized back in 2002-2003 against the run up to the war in Iraq.

That fall, we launched our divestment campaign which, over the course of 2 academic years us into sometimes very intimate contact with people like Daniel Pipes, Selma James, Irshad Manji, and Glenn Plummer, a Christian Zionist preacher in the Detroit area.

Our campaign was predicated on the idea that, since we were students and community members, we didn’t need to become a registered student group. The university was ours. We paid tuition and taxes that kept it afloat. Our first major confrontation with the university administration over this issue came in late September, 2006.

At that time, we hosted an event called “Why Christians should pray and struggle for the liberation of Palestine.” In this presentation, we sought to challenge a Christian Zionist perspective with a liberation theology perspective on the struggle for Palestine. But even more significant, we sought to challenge the administration over our right to use the public space of the university as a group of students and community members. We were taking a risk. We consisted of only a handful of people, and the university sent us an email before the event saying that we didn’t have permission to use the space and doing so was trespassing. Police cars were stationed at the exits to the building we were using. And then something remarkable happened – 40 people showed up. The administration was ready and willing to arrest the 6 of us by ourselves. They had prepared to do so. But they were unwilling to arrest 40 or more people who showed up to a talk about Christianity and its relationship to Palestine.

A second important moment in the campaign came only a couple of weeks later, on Thursday, October 12, 2006. That was the day we held our first rally on campus. We had submitted a divestment proposal to the university several weeks before, and declared October 12 as a reasonable deadline to expect a response by. If these administrators running the university were worth the salaries they got, surely they could respond to our demand in two weeks. Still, we didn’t hold our breath. Instead, we held our rally. At the rally, we got a taste of the importance of the militancy of young folks when, as our march began, young Arab and Muslim students spontaneously changed the route of the march. Rather than going out through the street open to us, they insisted that we march out THROUGH the Zionist counter protesters at the rally. We did, and the Zionists parted their ranks and let us through chanting, “Free, free Palestine!”

Eventually, our march arrived at the administration’s offices, and we found our way in barred by a cordon of police. We demanded a meeting with the head of the university, and refused to leave until we got a response. The administration sent out a lawyer, and promised to respond to our divestment proposal publicly. This was one of our finest achievements, because when he responded, saying, “Wayne State opposes divestiture and has no intention of divesting itself of stocks in companies doing business with Israel,” it caused an outrage in the Arab American community in metro Detroit, and one of the biggest Arab weeklies, the Arab American Forum and Link, published a front page article, with the president’s face and words superimposed over the apartheid wall snaking through Jerusalem and the words, “Divestment: It worked for South Africa, why not Israel?”

This rally, then, was a significant achievement for us and our divestment campaign, but it also had some important costs. One of them was that a good friend and comrade got a visit from Homeland Security at her home only a few days later. Luckily, she wasn’t there, but her roommate told her they were looking for her, and that they had a picture of her taken at the rally only days before. The dangers of this kind of work are very real, as people around the country and the world can attest.

The campaign continued throughout the fall and spring semesters, and at a certain point, tensions became very heated. The student newspaper became a site where both sites vented their animosity toward one another, causing the administration to disable comments on the website. The pro-Israel groups on campus even at one point threatened to campaign against me personally, and protest outside my work.

It took about a year for the local Zionist groups to wrap their heads around what was going on and get organized, and when they did, they brought none other than Daniel Pipes to Wayne State. When we heard he was coming, we immediately contacting the local chapters of SJP, MSA, and SDS, as well as community groups in Detroit and a Palestine solidarity group at the University of Michigan. Pipes was going to speak at WSU, and then U of M later the same day. We suggested a coalition that would make both campuses aware of who Pipes was and how important it was to combat his racist message. At Wayne State, we suggested a rally before his talk so that people would be made aware, would get information about Pipes, and could then confront him.

At this point, we experienced a number of disagreements with people over tactics. The folks at U of M simply refused to organize a confrontation. I think they opted for a silent walk-out instead. At Wayne State, we got help from SDS, but a number of other people stayed away. The community groups that seemed most interested in a collaboration flatly refused a confrontation and rally. Rather than hold an informative rally before Pipes’ speech, giving people the info they could then confront him with, they wanted to draw people away from a confrontation with Pipes, to a concert or other cultural event somewhere else at the same time as his talk. We suggested he hold the concert right outside where Pipes was speaking, to get as many people aware of who he was, what he was saying, and what they could do about it. They refused, and although many of them promised to speak at our rally, none of them showed up, and they left us to organize it on our own.

So we held our rally, and on that day, we went into the hall where Pipes was speaking. We listened to him say every racist thing under the sun about our people, and we denounced him mercilessly when the time came. Pipes was flabbergasted. He was genuinely upset that we didn’t bow down before all his PhDs and alleged knowledge and give him the respect he thought he deserved. The title of an initial write-up on the talk said it all, “Wayne State Univ. vs. Daniel Pipes.” I couldn’t have put it better myself. WSU opposed Pipes courageously, and made it known that we wouldn’t tolerate racism on our campus. Since then, that article has disappeared. Perhaps Pipes recognized that its title sounded too much like defeat. The only traces that now remain are an article called, “My disrupted talk at Wayne State.”

Those are some of the key events of our campaign. What I’d like to do now is briefly consider some of the lessons we can learn form each of these examples.

The mosque defense campaign taught us the importance of organization. It is because we began organizing ourselves in January 2006 as a mosque defense group, because we began seeking out sympathetic and like-minded folks, that we were able to make a significant intervention in the fall of 2006, following Israel’s invasion of Lebanon. Additionally, this campaign had unintended positive consequences. We later found out that while our campaign was shut down, a mosque in a different part of the city began its own campaign, completely independent of ours, but inspired by our example.

The event on Christianity and its relationship to Palestine was significant for different reasons. It taught us that with planning, discipline, courage, and numbers, we could win major concessions from authorities that we often seen as all-powerful. We are seeing similar things around the world today, with successful school occupations at the New School in New York City, and ongoing battles throughout the UK.

Our rally taught us a number of things. First, it concretely exposed the administration’s political allegiances. This was decisive, because it confirmed that the administration was not going to freely choose to do the right thing, it would have to be compelled through our actions and organizing. In addition, the rally showed us the real potential for student militancy that exists at certain times in the movement. We are seeing this today as well, with young folks around the world taking the lead. As a commentator on Counterpunch recently noted, invoking Fanon, “don’t be so rigid as to be outpaced by the masses in the street, and if you are, accept your obsolescence with grace.” That is an important lesson indeed. Finally, it taught us the real dangers of this work, with the threats of Homeland Security, and people targeting us in our personal lives.

Our rally against Daniel Pipes held still more lessons for us as we go about this work. First, we need to fight racist forces head on when they appear at our schools, in our workplaces, in our neighborhoods. When Pipes wrote up his experiences at the two universities, Wayne State and U of M, he stressed how “civilized” the Arab and Muslim folks at U of M were, in contrast to the barbarian hordes that faced him down at Wayne State. I consider this the highest possible compliment. Theodor Herzl, when he was trying to convince one imperial power after another to support the creation of a Jewish state, used the argument that the West could use “an outpost of civilization against barbarism.” If Herzl and Pipes posit opposition to their policies as a choice between civilization and barbarism, the last thing I want to be is civilized.

But today, in 2009, we might find ourselves in a slightly different place than we found ourselves in 2006. Last week, Duke Against War held an event called “Change Begins with Us,” where we tried to stress the important grassroots movements taking off throughout the world - working people and students, young queer folks and environmental activists, Palestine solidarity activists and even the grassroots nature of the Obama campaign. All point to “something new and serious” going on. At Wayne State, we were relatively isolated, but that may be different today.

And finally, I would like to stress the importance of seeing these campaigns as opportunities for us to grow and overcome obstacles we place on ourselves. I’ve talked a lot about the external enemies, but it is important to keep in mind that those external enemies are only confronted following a long process of liberation from the things we have learned should be obstacles to our growth and development, and to becoming politically active. I have known a number of people who have had to confront their families about their politics. I’ve known people who have ended relationships based on these campaigns. These things are not easy, but it’s also important to keep in mind the bonds we form during them, which are based on a shared vision of justice that often transcends the bonds of familiarity and routine.

Long Live Palestine! Event this Tuesday, January 20!

Join Duke Against War This Tuesday!

Vigil for Gaza

Duke Against War attended and sponsored the recent vigil for Gaza organized by Duke's Arab Students Organization (ASO) and Muslim Students Association (MSA). It was very well attended, and the audience enjoyed a nicely orchestrated slideshow presentation accompanied by a powerful song by the Black Eyed Peas.

The event also featured a number of powerful speeches by sisters from both the ASO and MSA, a talk by Laila El-Haddad, a local Palestinian journalist, a member of Duke Against War, and comments from people in attendance.

Coverage of the event appeared in the Duke Chronicle here early Friday.

Candlelight Vigil Tomorrow!

Duke Against War and Duke's Arab Students Organization (ASO) are sponsoring a candlelight vigil tomorrow, January 9, at 5:30 p.m. in front of the Duke Chapel. We encourage all who can make it to this important event to attend.

Statement from ASO:

On December 27, 2008, Israel broke a six-month cease-fire as they began air strikes into Gaza. Gaza, the world's most populous area, is home to 1.5 million people, and is also home to the world's largest refugee camp. The violence continues and has resulted in the death of 700 Palestinians and over 3,000 injured people. In an area as densely populated as Gaza, it goes without saying that women and children are over half of the victims. Amidst the violence, Israel is denying all media from entering the region. As a result, an event like this could proceed cloaked away from the eyes of the world. In order to raise awareness and show our support for the victims of Gaza, we would like to hold a candle vigil this Friday. We would greatly appreciate your support and participation. Support of the Palestinian voice is support of the plight of colonized and oppressed ethnic nations and racial populations against the muffle of historical colonization.

Duke Against War Protests Attacks on Gaza

Duke Against War gathered at Brightleaf Square in Durham on Saturday, January 3rd with about 300 other folks in the community to call for an immediate end to the attacks on Gaza. There were protesters crowded on all four corners of the intersection. We kept up lively chanting from about noon to 1pm and got a lot of honking in support from people driving by. The Durham Herald covered the Durham protest here.

After a meeting on Monday, we took a field trip to North Carolina State University in Raleigh to join the protest held along Hillsborough Street from 3-6pm. We were encouraged to see hundreds of young people come out. A brief video and article of the Raleigh protest can be found here.