The Potomac Worker Editorial Board has republished a post from the organization Penn Against the Occupation.


On Friday, October 18th, at 6am, 12 Penn Police officers and one Philadelphia Police officer raider the home of pro-Palestine Penn student organizers.

After threatening to break down the door with a battering ram and pointing a gun at a neighbor, they stormed the house in full tactical gear.

The police banged on each door as students were sleeping, pointing rifles and handguns at their heads as they exited their rooms with their hands raised.

Officers refused to show a warrant to the residents of the house, and refused to provide their names and badge numbers. While the students were corralled by police in a room, one student was separated and taken in for questioning. Police also seized this student’s personal device on suspicion of vandalism. This student was released shortly after: no charges were given. No arrests were made.

THIS RAID IS PENN’S MOST EGREGIOUS ESCALATION IN ITS CAMPAIGN TO SILENCE ANTI-GENOCIDE ACTIVISTS CALLING OUT PENN’S INSTITUTIONAL TIES TO THE GENOCIDE OF PALESTINIANS.

Penn’s Police raid was a deliberate choice made by Penn to instill fear and traumatize their own students.

We are reminded of Philadelphia’s dark history of surveilling, infiltrating, raiding, and violently suppressing countless liberation movements in recent memory. This includes the PPD’s assault on MOVE, which infamously culminated in the City of Philadelphia’s decision to drop a bomb on a West Philadelphia block, murdering 11 people.

Penn is continuing a long, dark legacy of state sponsored violence enacted upon organizers fighting against genocide, racism, and imperialism.

The University allowing their PRIVATE POLICE FORCE to point RIFLES at the faces of their students of color is an unjustifiable act of terror.

The tactics that Penn uses to supress dissent parallel the tactics the IOF uses to inspire fear throughout their occupied territories, by violently raiding and destroying their homes as well as interrogating, assaulting, and terrorizing residents as a way of advancing the Zionist entity’s ethnic cleansing of Palestine.

The PPD is well versed in the IOF’s tactics, sponsoring trips to Israel for training, participating in programs like the ADL’s National Counter-Terrorism Seminar, and bringing IOF officials to the US to train officers.

Penn continues to prove that they are eager to brutalize students and Philadelphia community members to protect their financial interests. Over the past few months, Penn unleashed over 300 riot police to violently arrest people and destroy our encampment; the police have dislocated shoulders, caused head traumas, and brutalized students and community members alike. They have sent Penn Police to kettle participants of a peaceful vigil and sent officers to follow 2 hijabi students home afterward. They have flexed their political reach to intimidate university students across the city. They’ve done this in the name of “maintaining order.”

The militarization of Penn’s campus is NOT ORDER.

The systematic brutalization and hyperpolicing of West Philadelphians is NOT ORDER.

Suspending students, evicting them, banning them from campus out of false “concern” for their “safety” is NOT ORDER.

RAIDING STUDENTS HOMES IS NOT ORDER.
As Penn ramps up its assault on students and community members, the genocide in Gaza only worsens. The Gaza Health Ministry has reported that Israel has murdered over 186,000 Palestinians. Over 90 percent of Gazans have been displaced from their homes. For the past twenty-one days, the IOF has prevented food, medicine, and other relief supplies from entering the Jabalia camp and the northern Gaza Strip. The occupation forces have continued to target hospitals, schools, and other institutions of Palestinian life, with it most recently setting fire to the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital.

Penns’ actions are proof that they are afraid of the growing power of the Student Intifada. Rather than scaring us into submission, these fear tactics only serve to make us stronger. Repression breeds resistance.

We will not stop until Penn divests from the Palestinian genocide, and we will not rest until Palestine is free.

THE MORE THEY TRY TO SILENCE US THE LOUDER WE WILL BE.

LONG LIVE THE STUDENT INTIFADA.