Solidarity Statement against the Politically Motivated Charges

Detroit Branch of Solidarity

Posted January 23, 2025

Open letter to demand that MI Attorney General Nessel drop criminal charges against the U-M Encampment 11. TAHRIR Coalition

Solidarity-Detroit is concerned about the politically motivated felony charges that Attorney General Dana Nessel has leveled against 11 University of Michigan community. Several of our members visited the encampment during its month-long existence and found it well organized. Students were clear that they were responding to Israel’s war against a civilian population. Their call was for a ceasefire and an immediate end to U.S. involvement in that brutal war. We believe their activism is to be honored, not mischaracterized and vilified. (See Palestine Exception at U-M: https://againstthecurrent.org/atc234/palestine-exception-at-u-m/)

Further, since the University of Michigan has investments in the war industry, students were demanding that those ties be severed. They were exercising their democratic rights and responsibly responding to a situation that has been labeled by human rights organization as a genocide particularly aimed on women and children.

Instead of protecting the students, faculty and community members who came to the encampment to participate, the University chose to call on police to violently shut down the encampment. Subsequently the University sought to charge several students with felonies, even when the local district attorney declined to do so. This seems to us as a violation of the University’s educational mission. It is particularly shocking given that the University now acknowledges that it played a shameful role in the 1950s by firing faculty during the McCarthyite purges.

Throughout the years University of Michigan students, staff and faculty have protested U.S. policy in many countries. This includes the responses to role the U.S. played in the Chilean coup, its prosecution of the dirty war in Vietnam, its involvement in the contra war in Nicaragua, or the U.S. invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan.

The repression the University has unleashed today undermines the educational role that should be at the heart of the University’s mission. We urge you to withdraw the felony charges and begin the work of repairing the harm this repressive approach has caused. Drop the charges now!