The Green Party has denounced the treatment of campus students and Green presidential candidate Dr. Jill Stein, who were arrested during a pro-Palestinian demonstration at Washington University in St. Louis over the past weekend.
In a press release on Tuesday, the party expressed its outrage over the behavior of the police, who broke-up and arrested students and supporters during a pro-Palestinian demonstration the previous Saturday, April 27. Stein, who is running for the Green Party’s presidential nomination, was among those arrested, along with members of her campaign team.
Stein, originally in Missouri to collect signatures to qualify for the general election ballot, was invited to join the demonstration in a show of solidarity. Video evidence before Stein’s arrest shows her an others being physically confronted by police after the group of protesters had linked arms with each other. Stein, since released, has said that she and her campaign team were okay and otherwise undeterred.
“The police basically attacked us and assaulted us as well as arrested us… Zionism is something that needs to be debated and anti-Zionism is not the same as anti-Semitism,” Stein later said about the experience.
Gloria Mattera, co-chair of the Media Committee of the Green Party, expressed the party’s appall at the level of brutality employed in breaking up the recent protests. Mattera states that the Green Party views it as a violation of students’ First Amendment Rights to protest what they regard as a genocide by Israel in Gaza.
“We see yet again that free speech rights are perfectly okay in America, until someone advocates a position that runs afoul of the agenda of the two parties of war and Wall Street,” Mattera said. “When that happens, the state will respond with illegal violence and unconstitutional repression, and candidates for rival parties will not be spared.”
Green Party co-chair Margaret Elisabeth also criticized the media for prioritizing coverage of campus protests and allegations of threats to Zionist Jewish students over the broader issue of war crimes committed in Gaza, arguing that the focus obscures the larger humanitarian crisis and implies a bias in favor of certain narratives. Readers of Independent Political Report can access the full press release here.
Michael Gilson, the demonstrators are chanting we are all Hamas, ten thousand more October 7s, go back to Poland, go back to gas chambers, death to Israel, death to Jews, death to America and more. Flying Hamas and Hezbollah flags…
I’ve seen videos of all this crap, interviews with Jewish students who have been harassed, threatened and assaulted. Even an interview with a former Trump administration official who is Irish American and LDS and was harassed and yelled at and cussed because the protesters wrongly thought he was Jewish because he had a yarmulke on from a prior event. He forgot he had it on until later and only then realized why he was reviled and threatened, not because he had been recognized.
These are pro Hamas demonstrations , not pro Palestinian. They are terrorist sympathizers and junior league terrorists in training.
I suspect many are confusing pro-Palestine with pro-Hamas.