KCL Action:
Email to management 18/5/2024:
Dear 'Funmi, Ellen, Robin, Shiti
We hope this email finds you well.
Ahead of the meeting on May 30th, we pledged to provide you with further clarifications on definitions and further details pertaining to our demands, which would ensure that this meeting can be as productive as possible.
In terms of our demands of demilitarisation, divestment and the severing of academic ties, we propose that we use the extensive definitions provided by Demilitarise Education.
These definitions can be accessed here: <ded1.co/how-we-do-it/definitions>
We request that the attendees of the meeting on May 30th come well-versed in these agreed upon definitions to mitigate pedantry, semantics or misunderstanding.
The definitions are also included in the text of
"The Demilitarise Education Treaty"
<ded1.co/how-we-do-it/treaty> which we have demanded KCL become a signatory of, as it is in line with KCL's proclaimed values. The demand of demilitarisation, as Robin Mclver concurred in the 25/04 meeting is certainly a"feasible" demand, but most importantly, is a morally imperative demand considering KCL's ethical investment policy.
We are currently working on the assumption that
KCL has £52,809,661.22 worth of arms investments and partnerships over the past five years, as ascertained by a Demilitarise Education FOl. The specific partnerships can be found here:
<https:/|ded1.co/data/university/91>
If any of the current financial data outlined by Demilitarise Education on their website is inaccurate or outdated, we request that we are provided an updated list of arms investments and partnerships ahead of the meeting.
Onto the topic of academic partnerships with "Israeli" universities, we were pleased to be assured in the 25/04 meeting that KCL currently has no current institutional ties. We understand that the university can not legally interfere with individual academic-academic ties. Nevertheless, we can discuss in the meeting the prospect of a codified assurance that there will be no institutional ties with "Israeli" universities in the future either.
Further, to show our mutual good-faith and trust, we also ask for you to disclose all of KCL's current institutional partnerships with Columbia University ahead of the meeting. This is in light of the shocking and abhorrent repression of free-speech, students and faculty that has occurred at that university.
Our broad base of student and faculty supporters have urged us to take up a further demand - as an extension of demand no. 3 - for the suspension of all institutional ties with Columbia University until further notice. By maintaining institutional ties with Columbia University, the King's Community of students and faculty are left feeling unsafe; by maintaining ties, KCL is essentially broadcasting that it condones the rampant oppression, violence and surveillance that students and faculty have been subjected to; by maintaining ties, KCL would be compromising its expressed aim of creating an institution where academic ideas can be dispersed freely, where students and faculty have a right of conscience, free from the threat of physical and institutional violence.
As our fourth demand endeavours for KCL to rightly classify Zionism as a form of racism akin to Nazism or white-supremacy, we also ask the attendees of the meeting to familiarise themselves, as have we, with the sordid history of Zionist colonisation and genocide in Palestine. We ask the attendees to familiarise themselves with Zionism's innate anti-arab racism and islamophobia, as well as Zionism's innate and historical anti-semitism something which should be eminently discussed following Rishi Sunak's anti-semitism roundtable with University vice-chancellors on Thursday. Since then, Zionist thugs targeted a pro-Palestinian encampment in Oxford, particularly targeting anti-Zionist Jewish students and using anti-Semitic language against them <cherwell.org/2024/05/14/oxford-vice-cha…>.
Hence, we ask that if the meeting attendees are serious in their commitment to engendering safety and tolerance at KCL - where there is no room for anti-Semitism, islamophobia and anti-Arab racism - that you will have pre-prepared work on an action-plan in classifying Zionism as a racist and intolerant position, and will have prepared work on the revocation of the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism so that the meeting can be as efficient as possible.
If you would like to maintain more correspondence before the meeting for preparation on this point, we would be happy to do so. For instance, it may be beneficial if we agreed upon a common definition of Zionism before the meeting to avoid semantics and miscommunication - perhaps the Oxford dictionary or Merriam-Webster definition.
We will agree upon any definition that outlines Zionism's essential advocacy for a "nation-building project" (settler-colonial project) on the land of Palestine.
We can assure you that we have also held up our end of the preparations for the meeting on the 30th; we have conducted a thorough reading and analysis of the KCL values-based impartiality guidance as you all suggested. We have concluded there is clear evidence of a breach in this case as KCL offers far more material, discursive and institutional support to the illegal Zionist occupation of Palestine than it does to resistance against such oppression.
For instance, many students are deeply concerned with the email that was circulated by the vice-president of operations, Stephan Large, which frames the ongoing genocide as a "conflict" and refuses to use the word "Palestine" which contributes to historic erasure of the Palestinian people. This erasure is something KCL students and staff have been fighting vociferously against.
This strategy to equivocate the oppressed and the oppressor in addition to failing to even mention the word Palestine six months in is but a stark reminder for us of where the administration's allegiance lies with British imperialism, white supremacy, and zionism. Which is core to the suppression, demoralisation, dehumanisation of Muslim, Black, Brown, Arab and LGBTQ+ students -unfortunately this is what you nurture with statements which you tactically posit as neutral.
Perhaps this should have been reminder to you when the KCLSU and one of your 'representatives' of the student body Steven Suresh, suspended three of Muslim student officers for merely condemning the genocide- in an act of pure bigotry of course with open approval of KCLSU Denis Shukur and your silent approval distancing yourself from SU when we asked you in person, but inviting Suresh to all council meetings and dinners. Yet in an act of divine justice through the popular will of the masses, with the endorsement of all societies, students and staff, we elected one of the suspended students Hassan Ali as president - and all the collectively endorsed candidates were elected to the SU.
So thus, we adamantly challenge KCL's assertion of its “neutrality" and "impartiality" on the genocide in Palestine.
Finally, we are extremely concerned too with the denial of access of basic human necessities for the peaceful encampment going on currently at the Strand - having security deny marginalised, disabled students toilet access at any time of the day and night and forcing them to scan their cards multiple times is a petty form of intimidation that we ask must cease. Ahead of the meeting, we ask KCL for a public guarantee for the safety and privacy of the peaceful student protestors in the face of the anti-human, anti-student rhetoric of the Downing Street extremists and the violent Zionist thugs that have been attacking other student encampments.
We await your response eagerly and hope for further correspondence in preparation for an extremely productive meeting on the 30th.
Kind regards,
KCL Palestine Action