Ithaca, NY: Antifascists Confronts Nazi Activity on Cornell’s Campus

Report from antifascist action at Cornell University. Submitted anonymously to It’s Going Down.

In the dead of night on December 4th, autonomous anti-fascists plastered Cornell University’s campus with propaganda declaring: “No Pasarán! No Platform for Fascists and Racists on Cornell Campus.” Targets included prominent campus fixtures, ranging from the 103-year-old statue of the university’s first president to the fabled pillars of Goldwin Smith Hall—a building named after a prominent eugencist who called Jews “parasites” and “enemies of civilization.” This action came on the heels of resurgent Nazi activity on a campus that has become increasingly unsafe for marginalized peoples.

A rural Ivy League university situated on stolen Cayuga lands in Upstate New York, Cornell has been a hotbed for fascist activity in 2018. A year after posters urging students to “Say No to Jewish Lies!” were plastered across campus, a freshman residential community was marred by three swastika markings in nine days. In a pathetic turn of events, the hate crimes were met with vague proclamations of concern by the same university administrators who planned event-planning talks with the far-Right provocateur group TP-USA a few weeks earlier.

A choir of reactionary voices called for increased police patrols as a means of combating racist attacks, emboldening a violent campus police force whose chief was trained in surveillance and population control tactics by the genocidal Israeli Defense Forces. Yet with the rallying cry of “No Pasarán!” (They Shall Not Pass!), antifascists condemned attempts to answer Nazi organizing with “friendly fascism”—the fascism of a militarized police department that has no interest in protecting targeted communities.

Campus Insurrection released a statement regarding this action:

We condemn the recent fascist and anti-Semitic activities on Cornell‘s campus. It’s become clear that resurgent racist activity here is being enabled by public Nazi organizing in the Central New York region and across Turtle Island. Nazi cowards wage propaganda wars on college campuses, with the national alt-right movement recruiting conservative students as a means of advancing their reactionary agenda of extermination. The place and time for counter-struggle are here and now.

We reject calls for increased police militarization to combat fascist activity. The police imperil the safety of targeted communities and will not protect us.

We reject attempts by the local far-right to pin the blame on multi-racial, multi-religious Palestine solidarity organizing. This serves only to dis-inform the public, intensify Islamophobia, and obscure the capitalist, white supremacist, and settler-colonial foundations of resurgent American fascism.

We call for community solidarity against current and potential future spates of fascist and racist action on campus, rejecting pathetic lip service of “concern” from university administrators. There shall be no platform for fascists, racists, and anti-Semites on this campus.