One of these pukes, Snehal Shingavi, is the English Department instructor who taught a class on "The Politics and Poetry of Palestinian Resistance" for which the official course description declared, "This class takes as its starting point the right of Palestinians to fight for their own self-determination. Conservative thinkers are encouraged to seek other sections." It also refered to the "brutal Israeli military occupation of Palestine" as having "been ongoing since 1948".
These perps were also involved with "Students for Justice in Palestine," which had forcibly occupied an adminstration building a year prior to the similar incident for which they are currently being disciplined.
Actually, punishment yet to be decided, but the prosecution could only convict on (the least serious) one out of three charges even though no defence was presented! Only in la-la-lefty-land.
Defend the Berkeley 3!
UC administrators target antiwar activists
By Sid Patel | October 24, 2003 | Page 2 THREE activists at the University of California-Berkeley have been convicted of student conduct violations for participating in a demonstration on the day after the U.S. war on Iraq began. UC administrators singled out these the three--from among the 119 people arrested at the protest--because they were leading members of the Berkeley Stop the War coalition.
Some 4,000 people joined the March 20 protest at the Sproul Hall administration building to call on the school to take a stand against the war--by naming Baghdad University a sister school, refusing to cooperate with FBI investigations of students and promising to not raise tuition or lay off faculty and staff because of budget cuts caused by military spending. More than 400 students entered Sproul Hall and began a peaceful sit-in. But campus police moved in, eventually arresting 119 people.
The Alameda County District Attorney’s office quickly dropped criminal charges against all the protesters. But UC administrators have pursued student conduct charges against Rachel Odes, Snehal Shingavi and Michael Smith to send a message--that protest isn’t welcome on this campus, and organizers will be targeted for special punishment. Nor can it be a coincidence that the three antiwar activists targeted by school authorities are also members of the International Socialist Organization chapter on campus.
In fact, administrators stacked the deck by assigning a full-time, professionally trained prosecutor to spend months preparing a case against the activists. The three students, on the other hand, were given less than a week’s notice to prepare for a hearing conducted last week. In fact, one of the three--Rachel Odes--wasn’t even informed about the hearing. She only showed up because other activists told her it was happening.
Administrators flatly dismissed criticism that they violated any form of due process. At the hearing, when it became clear that the committee was intent on railroading the activists, the three students decided to make a statement rejecting the legitimacy of the hearing and led their supporters out of the room. Committee members continued with the hearing and convicted the students in absentia--making UC the only university in the U.S. to prosecute students for protesting the start of the war.
The three are due to be sentenced at another hearing on October 28. They could be suspended from school--or given probation or community service, which would mean that they would face more serious punishments if they participated in future protests.
Activists at Berkeley--and around the country--are speaking out against this injustice. After the hearing last week, a letter of protest circulated on the Internet--and had gained hundreds of sponsors in a matter of hours, including Howard Zinn, Noam Chomsky, Peter Camejo and other well-known writers and activists. The letter will appear as a full-page advertisement in the Daily Californian--the campus newspaper, which has come out in defense of the three students.
The fight to defend the three Berkeley activists goes beyond these students and this school. It is part of the struggle to defend our right to protest and use civil disobedience to challenge injustice.
There has been nothing subtle about the backlash aimed at Snehal Shingavi. It has been direct, and it has been chilling.
“I’ve been spat at,” he says, “and yelled at on the street…I’ve received over 20 death threats and an enormous [amount] of hate mail - 100 pieces between October 2001 and January 2002. I’ve been the victim of an Internet smear campaign.”
Snehal has altered the way he lives his life. He changed his phone number. The manager of his apartment installed security cameras. “I think twice before opening my mailbox every single day,” he says.
Some of this, he understands, is to be expected. Snehal is a leader in Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) at UC Berkeley. He has a high profile on an unpopular issue at a time when tensions are high. Snehal himself is Texan, of Indian descent.
Student protest is not new for the 26-year-old, although he didn’t plunge into it fully until he arrived at Berkeley, where he is seeking a Ph.D. in English. At high school in Houston and college in San Antonio he gravitated to a host of social issues, among them rape crisis and anti-sweatshop campaigns. Then, during the Palestinian Intifada, he became involved with the SJP. He has struggled ever since to get the Palestinian point of view into the public arena.
It was at a protest on campus on April 9, 2002, that things turned sour. With violence mounting in the Middle East, pro-Palestinian and pro-Israeli students held dueling rallies on campus. Then SJP members moved the protest inside to conduct civil disobedience. The University responded by threatening to suspend for up to a year the 41 students who were arrested for trespass, and issued an interim ban on SJP (which it rescinded days later).
This crackdown was disproportionately harsh, according to the ACLU, which wrote to Chancellor Robert M. Berdahl to question the response. “The university’s reaction to the April 9 sit-in has a chilling effect on the students’ right to free speech, especially at a time when freedom of expression is so critical to our democracy,” the letter said. “The right to express ideas that are controversial and unpopular must be vigilantly protected.”
Snehal believes that the university is using technicalities to silence the Palestinian point of view – a view that must be expressed now more than ever, he says, because of a “rightward shift” of politics on campus. American flags have become ubiquitous, “patriotic” groups have sprung up, and anti-Palestinian sentiment is growing.
Snehal has every reason to be afraid. He was recently singled out by the controversial Campus Watch website, which listed contact details for college professors with pro-Arab leanings. The site sparked a new spate of obscene and threatening e-mails - as well as widespread protests about blacklisting and the chilling of academic freedom.
But Snehal says he is neither afraid, nor discouraged. “You measure victory in different ways,” he says. “Change will find expression down the road.”
Anti-War Protesters Make Last-Ditch Effort to Open Hearings to ...
The Berkeley Daily Californian, CA - Oct 14, 2003
... Berkeley Stop the War Coalition organizers Michael Smith, Rachel Odes and Snehal
Shingavi are the only students facing charges out of the 119 arrested at the ...
Three Student Protesters Face Hearings Next Week
The Berkeley Daily Californian, CA - Oct 8, 2003
... Michael Smith, Rachel Odes and Snehal Shingavi, all active members of the Berkeley
Stop the War Coalition, were charged in May with four breaches of the ...
And the Berkeley Daily Planet (the "New Support" touted is actually the same old: Greens and other socialists):
‘ Convicted ’ UC Students Win New Support
Berkeley Daily Planet, CA - Oct 21, 2003
By JAKOB SCHILLER (10-21-03). Rachel Odes, Michael Smith and Snehal
Shingavi—the three UC Berkeley students found responsible Oct. ...
City Vote Totals Reported
Berkeley Daily Planet, CA - Oct 17, 2003
... Rachel Odes, Snehal Shingavi and Michael Smith were arrested March 20 along with
119 others from a crowd of 400 who were staging a sit-in at Sproul Hall as ...
Excerpts:
On April 9 the UC Berkeley chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) staged a large and boisterous protest against the recent Israeli military incursions into the West Bank. One of the group’s leaders, fifth-year graduate student Snehal Shingavi, helped to lead the protest and claimed that the protestors were using ‘critical thinking tools’ to bring attention the recent trouble in the Middle East. The administration warned the SJP prior to the planned protest that it was under no circumstances to seize control of any campus building, and that, if it did, the administration would take severe disciplinary action. The SJP ignored the threat, and instead ended their protest with a four-hour takeover of Wheeler Hall, a prominent academic building, causing disruptions for hundreds of students attempting to take exams. The administration followed through with their previous statements, and police were summoned to deal with the protestors. Seventy-nine protesters, forty-one of which were students, were arrested. All seventy-nine were charged with unlawful occupation, which carries the possibility of a ninety-day jail sentence, seven were charged with resisting arrest, and one student was charged with assaulting a police officer (he bit the officer). Also, Berkeley administration barred the Students for Justice in Palestine from organizing on campus and seeks to suspend the forty-one students for a year.
The arrested students say their right to free speech has been violated. Their attorney, Osha Neumann, is ‘asking the [District Attorney] to drop all the charges.’ Neumann said, ‘What [the protestors] did was in fact a service to the community.’ Neumann also felt that the arrests were a direct attack on the free speech movement, which made the campus famous during the Sixties.
An arrested graduate student, Raymond Costantino, said that the administration is simply attempting to squash dissent on campus, calling the charges against him ‘appalling.’ Snehal Shingavi further claims that the administration is seeking to silence the voice of Palestinians on campus.
[...]
For Snehal Shingavi, courting bad press and controversy is nothing new. At an event billed as a ‘memorial vigil’ just days after September 11, Snehal Shingavi extolled the Arab terrorists for making the ‘first blow against American capitalism,’ and wished that President Bush had been in the towers. He then booed and laughed at students who called for a military response or expressed grief over friends whom they had lost in the attacks. Last October, a student claims that he saw Snehal and another student steal an entire press run of 23,000 issues of The Daily California. This student claims to be an eyewitness to this crime and took photographs of theft. The photographs, however, were ‘conveniently lost’ when he handed in the film as evidence.