Assalamualaikum warahmatullahi wabarakatuh, welcome back to Yaqeen Institute's weekly live stream. We've been off since Ramadan. I hope everybody had a blessed Ramadan. May Allah accept your worship and had a happy Eid. And now we're back at it. I'm your host Imam Tom. Obviously, a lot has been going on across the nation and across the world. Gaza still bleeds. And we're here right across from Columbia University, perhaps the hotspot or the epicenter of the student encampment movement. Now, as it so happens, we were actually planning on going live from inside of one of the encampments today. We had planned to set up at just up the road to the City College of New York. However, the context that we had on the inside stopped responding. And by the time that we realized that they had been arrested, that the cops had moved in and cleared the encampment and arrested, I believe, over 100 students. And a very similar thing happened right here at Columbia University last night as well. So we had to move on the fly. And we're here across the street in the cold with some of the student organizers of the encampment at Columbia University who can tell us a little bit about what's been going on, especially what's been going. What happened last night? Yeah. So what we've seen over the past two weeks, honestly, from our side and on the encampment side has been nothing short of beautiful, in my opinion. I think we've seen a great coming together of a lot of different people of different backgrounds, different faiths. And at the same time, we've seen a contrasting reaction and contrasting response from the university, from administration, from the people in power. And I think last night what we saw was the maximum of this. We've seen the peak of all of this when hundreds of, I would say around 500 to 800 NYPD officers came in and moved everyone out from the encampment, which was a completely peaceful demonstration, moved people out from the Hamilton Hall, which
was also a peaceful demonstration, and essentially brutally and very, very roughly attacked and arrested many of our personal friends, our personal brothers and sisters within the Muslim community, and just peaceful demonstrators with one common goal, which was to speak out against the injustices that have been happening in Palestine, happening in Gaza. And I think that's quite atrocious, yeah. So yeah, so that's one really important thing, because some of the mainstream media is painting it as, you know, these are sort of hate speech, or this is, you know, the encampment movement or the protests that are going on is anti-Semitic. And you're saying it wasn't like that at all? No, in my opinion, I think it was quite beautiful what we've seen out of the encampment. I think that in honesty, it's probably had the opposite effect from what I've seen people in the encampment are coming together, Jewish students, Muslim students, Christian students. I think we had all three of these different faith backgrounds come and hold different forms of worship on the very same ground. So I think from that perspective, it's actually had the opposite effect, where it's brought together different people from different faiths in a setting that, quite frankly, never existed on this campus prior to this encampment. I learned more about the Judaism, about the Jewish religion from this encampment than I had ever previously. I've talked to more Jewish students than I had previously. So I think this had an opposite effect, where I actually go closer to the Jewish community. And actually within the Jewish community itself, a lot of the Jewish students that I've spoken to actually say that they face more anti-Semitism and more hateful rhetoric from people within their own community, where they say that people within their own community are attacking them as saying they're not Jewish, and they're not from this community. So I think it's actually had an opposite effect, where we actually have gotten closer as faith backgrounds in different faiths, and it's actually shown who is really on whose side. So despite the sort of protesting encampments being not just peaceful, but also multi-faith, also with people of the Jewish faith, Christians, other people, along with Muslims, that the
response that has been garnered by the universities and Columbia University sort of at the head of them has been particularly brutal. Like, you know, for people who don't understand, universities and colleges, they have their own sort of security forces. And then the cities in which they reside also have more sort of stronger or more well-armed security forces. And for a university and a college to sort of skip over sort of the localized sort of security forces and go right to basically, you know, from what I understand, NYPD officers in riot gear and using sort of brute force to uproot their own students shows a major disconnect. I was wondering if you could give us a little bit more background on specifically the police reaction and the administration reaction to the encampments and the protests. Absolutely. So last night, we had video footage of police throwing protesters down the stairs. They used tear gas. They came up to Hamilton Hall with their guns drawn. They completely locked down the entire vicinity. That includes the surrounding streets. And people were not allowed to get back to their apartments. I was not allowed to get back to my dorm until maybe a little later when police were a little hesitant for me, probably because of either, like, a failure or because of my race. The police, obviously, Columbia also added private security. Private security are sexually harassing students. They're not trained. They don't know what they're doing. And that's a little bit of the response. What do you mean by sexually harassing students? Especially, you know, we've heard things about Muslim sisters who have been stripped from their hijabs and held in detention without their hijabs on for hours. Like, what exactly do you mean? Absolutely. So last night, many of our Muslim sisters have been released from prison. And they were saying that sisters, Muslim sisters were forced to go to their hijabs were forced off of their heads. And the sisters were chanting, let their hijab, put her hijab on, put her hijab on. And the police offered, I think,
the police threatened to, I guess, attack or beat up the sisters. And last two weeks ago, I was in jail and the police forced sisters to undress in front of other male officers. And a sister told me later that the police were staring at her while she was being undressed. So this is an issue for all Muslims. And this is one of the important things, because one thing that I've noticed is that different media crews have attempted to spin certain narratives that are going to basically try to prevent the broader American community and also the broader Muslim community from getting involved. Right. And so when we're talking about, you know, these sorts of things don't make the light of day or they only make the light of day on social media, then the picture that's being portrayed is, oh, it's a bunch of sort of radical youth. They're saying, like, very sort of problematic things. They're sort of tempting, like, the police presence to sort of intervene in a very brutal way. They got what was coming to them sort of thing. And really what you guys are saying and every single student activist that I've talked to is saying is the complete opposite. UCLA was a prime example where actually the police were allowing counter protesters to viciously attack pro-Palestinian students, Muslims, Jews and otherwise. Right. And so actually what we have is a situation in which universities and college are calling on law enforcement and basically using them as a shield to allow their own students to get pummeled and then sometimes actually be the ones themselves that are actually brutalizing students, arresting them, sexually harassing them, not protecting them. I think that probably everybody in the world can agree that a university has the responsibility to protect its students more than anything. And all we see is that universities use the language of protect our students in order to actually brutalize them. This is something we've seen over and over again the last six months with the Zionists, with other sorts of forces, using a word and completely emptying of its meaning, flipping upside down and basically
being guilty of the very thing that they're charging other people with. So maybe, I mean, we were talking off camera about sort of the history of the encampments, and you actually told me something that I hadn't known before was that at Columbia, there was actually two encampments. There was a first encampment and then a second encampment. Tell me about sort of how that happened and how this sort of thing sort of unfolded. Yeah. Essentially, there was an initial encampment which started on Wednesday, April 17th, I believe. So that was started in the early mornings of Wednesday, and that lasted for about a day until immediately Columbia called on NYPD to come and bring, to come and arrest these students. Zion was part of this. And that essentially they were arrested and taken to one police plaza. And at that same time, students then rushed to the second lawn on our campus and started an encampment there. So this was the second encampment that we saw where we saw kind of an increased Islamic presence, an increased presence of Muslims, where Muslims were praying together five times, establishing their Friday, Juma prayer. Sort of the double standard in which how the university immediately dealed with our initial peaceful protest with police versus how they deal with some other acts of violence within the campus. For example, at one of the protests earlier this year, several attackers on the pro-Zionist side actually attacked several of our students with chemicals. And this resulted in the hospitalization of like, I think, eight to 10 students. I don't know the exact number, but regardless, it was harmful and it led to their going to the hospital. No police was called for this. No investigation was really put to any effort or put to any established against these students. And even in the congressional hearing, we heard Manoush Shafiq justifying some of these actions, saying that there was only odorous chemicals. It wasn't really anything that harmful when 10 of our students were hospitalized and the administration never
reached out. And we saw no police reaction on these students. So the fact that the administration chooses to call on NYPD immediately on our peaceful demonstration, whereas they do not actually address public acts of violence, is quite concerning. And whether they're actually concerned about our safety or certain group safety is what I'm really asking. But our demonstration and our encampment was a very beautiful demonstration of how when people come together under one common goal, they put their political and religious differences and cultural differences aside and come under one common goal of justice. And for us as Muslims, this idea of justice is very clear. Allah SWT makes it very clear for us in the Quran what it means for us to be just. And Alhamdulillah, that gives us the clarity to act justly in this situation. And of course, all human beings have a natural fitrah. So this brought us together in this one common goal to act justly and act in a way that we are calling on our university to divest from this system of oppression, to divest from this, the role that they play in the slaughter of children within in Gaza, of our brothers and sisters in Gaza. And we did this peacefully, whereas other people have not done this peacefully, and they received a much softer response, in my opinion. Yeah, that's excellent. So let's talk about that specifically. So the demands are to have the university divest from sort of any investments that are going on to participate in the genocide. What are some of the other concrete things that the students are looking for from Columbia University? So Columbia University is holding a dual degree program with Tel Aviv University. And our argument is that this is discriminatory towards Arab and Palestinian students. Israel is an apartheid state. How are Palestinians supposed to live in Israel when there are discriminatory laws and the fact that their family is being killed across the border? Additionally, there's also going to be a new campus in Israel that Columbia will be funding
and our argument is the same. How can Palestinians attend that when there are checkpoints, borders, and the fact that Israel is very, very clearly violates people if they try to get into the state of Israel? Excellent. So what's next now that the encampments have been sort of removed? Like, where does the student movement go from here? Is there anything that you can sort of give us? Or if not, then at least how can people support? We've got a lot of people outside, you know, whether they're Muslim or non-Muslim that want to know how to help the student movements. What sort of support are you looking for? Yeah. I mean, at this stage, it's kind of like we're all in a state of shock after the events of yesterday. I think it's we mobilized so quickly, we mobilized and planned out and strategized for so long. And like, after the events of yesterday, we're all kind of, we never thought it would get to this point. We never thought it would come to the point where, not once, but twice, the university has called NYPD forces armed with the intention of arresting us and disrupting our organization, our peaceful organizations. So at this stage, we're not really sure what to do. But I think what's important for all student movements across the world, this is Alhamdulillah spread to many different countries, many different campuses across the country. I think it's for the Muslim community especially is to show up. I think numbers are incredibly important. I think it's important for us to come together under this one common goal of fighting this injustice. I was watching this lecture by Dr. Shadi Al-Masri. He mentioned, Ali al-Din said that if you want to see where the truth is, look where the sword of the disbeliever is pointed. So I think we all can agree that if all these administrators and all these people in positions of power, the systems of oppression are trying to attack us, are trying to smash us before we can even get running, we have to ask ourselves, why are they doing that? What is our crime? What was our crime that resulted in these arrests? What was our crime that resulted in these mass arrests of hundreds of
students? And I think when people ask this, I think that's one of the main goals of the encampment. One of the main things that the encampment has done is that it's made people ask this question. And once people start to ask this question, I think it's very important that they kind of come together under this common goal of answering, well, they're not actually doing anything wrong. It's actually that they're on the truth, that they're on the right path. And I think anytime you've seen a message of truth, people automatically just try to face it with some kind of violence or some kind of oppression. And I think that's what we're seeing here. So I think we're all on the truth. I think we need to come together on this truth and continue to mobilize. There's four or five other encampments across New York City. I think it's time we continue to support them while Columbia reorganizes and Columbia regroups and MSA and SGP kind of comes together and figures out what to do next. But I think there's many ways where people can show up, support, especially as Muslims, establish prayer, establish just a presence so that Muslims are not tossed to the side in these kinds of social movements where Muslims kind of have this presence where they can talk about these things with other people and have a real community within the community so that people know that Muslims are here to stay and Muslims are a part of this movement. Absolutely. And this is a crucial time, I think, in the history of the Muslim community in the United States of America and even across the world, but especially the United States of America, where this is an easy sort of opportunity, like get off your phones, get off your, you know, watching your television sets and actually try to reach out, try to find a way to contribute and show up, right? That if you're isolated or if there's your Muslim students are isolated at university, they are in danger, right? And that by showing up and, you know, demonstrating the amount of support that they have behind them, that this actually will keep them safe, right? This is something we've talked about for the last six months that being that, you know, the wolf preys on the lone sheep, right? If you've got just a couple people here,
it's very easy to intimidate, people are emboldened, people try things they might not be able or be willing to try if you have a large mass of people that are well organized and understand sort of what the objective is. So I want to, just a final thought, imagine that you're talking to the other youth across the country. You've got young people, young Muslims that are, on one hand, they're worried about their own personal safety. On the second, we live in a very historical moment and a moment where we're called to do something greater than just live for our own personal safety. What would you tell the other young Muslims across the country? I ask all Muslims across the country, young Muslims, to please engage in these encampments. Please assist your local SJPs. I understand that there may be some problems between MSA and SJPs, but I ask you to please work them out. I want you to ask yourselves truly, what will differentiate you on the Day of Judgment between you and other Zionists or other people who are silent, who are scared for their futures? What will differentiate from you, you from them, and how can you stand besides the Palestinian people on the Day of Judgment? Brothers, thank you so much for joining us tonight. May Allah be with you, and we'll be in touch. Thank you so much. So one of the things that we've seen, and what makes this particular moment different and special is that a lot of the religious leadership across the Muslim community has stepped up to lend their support. They're not necessarily leading the movement, but they are certainly supporting it, and they are giving guidance to Muslim students as they reach out. We've actually seen new connections that we've never seen before. We've seen imams showing up to campuses, giving speeches, leading prayers, taking questions, and trying to engage and support in the encampment movements in any way possible. Despite this, you've seen this sort of beautiful, organic movement. We've seen, again,
from campus to campus to campus, a brutal crackdown, an undemocratic crackdown, a vicious crackdown against basically what is a common-sense demand. Now, the claim is that these are outside agitators, and that's just completely false. In fact, again, this is something that often the other side is guilty of, of outside agitators showing up to try to make trouble with the students and attack the students that are showing up for Palestine. So again, we encourage people to reach out to your local college students, see what's going on, see what they need to do for help, and to know that Allah ﷻ has made us for moments like this, that when it comes to your safety and security, one of the reminders that Allah ﷻ often gives in the Qur'an is that these things are already written by Allah ﷻ. Remember the hadith of Ibn Abbas, where the Prophet ﷺ told him, he said that if the entire world were to gather together to help you with something, they would not be able to help you with anything other than what Allah ﷻ had already decreed. And the opposite is true. If the entire world, that means all the nations, all the groups, all the lobbies, all the everything, gathered together to harm you, that they would not be able to harm you with anything other than what Allah ﷻ already decreed. So if you think about, oh well, my personal safety, and I've got this job, and I don't want this to happen to me, I don't want to get doxxed, I don't want someone, people have been taking our pictures here in the last three hours, we've been sitting here on the street corner, right? It's like these things are all in the hands of Allah ﷻ. He's already decreed what's going to happen. He's already decreed how long your life is going to be. He's decreed, you know, your safety and your risk and everything else. So really, it's just a test of how are you going to react? Are you going to be a moral actor? Are you going to do something that you're going to be proud of, that you can look back on the day of judgment and say, yes, I did what I could. And another beautiful thing, and another important aspect to this that we can't forget, is that this is actually what the people of Gaza are asking for.
That we have some images, I'm sure Studio can bring them up, where the people in Gaza themselves have been supporting this movement, and the movement of the students in the United States, and the movement of the encampments. Or you have people who have written messages of solidarity in English, in Arabic, in other language, basically saying that we've received your message, that we know that we're not alone, that we know that the people, the Muslims of the United States, and their allies, the people are doing what they can in this horrible dark moment that we live through. And so, if for nothing else, know that the people of Gaza are also hoping that you step up, and you're able to lend support to this movement, and do whatever it is that you possibly can. That being said, it's getting late, and it's getting cold, and there's other sort of things going on we're probably going to head to tonight, so this was a very, very special and different live stream. I think we're going to sign off here, and we'll come back again next week, same time, insha'Allah ta'ala, 8 p.m. Eastern Time, that's New York Time, 8 p.m., and we'll see you there. SubhanakAllahumma wa bihamdaka sharaa wa in la ilaha illa Allah wa astaghfiru wa atubu ilayk. Until next time, salamu alaykum wa rahmatullah.