Feb 07 Noam Chomsky calls out UA today for potential role in Human Rights abuses - Tucson Citizen

NYTimes-hailed Writer to Testify in Tucson This Week over what he claims is UA’s Potential Legal Liability in Human Rights Violations by US, Israel

Tucson AZ — The Latino-led student group, University of Arizona (UA) No Más Muertes/No More Deaths (UANMD), is holding a special press conference to showcase a new chapter in their 3-year divestment battle with the University.

In a bold – and likely controversial – move by the UA’s special guest this week, world-renowned and New York Times-acclaimed author, Professor Noam Chomsky, will speak about possible criminal liability impending over the University for its corporate partnerships with known human rights violators, Caterpillar (CAT) and Motorola.

UANMD’s testimony event opens a new chapter to their dynamic 3-year struggle urging UA divestment from Caterpillar and Motorola due to their role in human rights abuses along the US/Mexico border and in Israeli-occupied Palestine.

To precede his testimony, Professor Chomsky sent an advance statement from his office in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology:

“For the University of Arizona, as an institution, to obey US law and international agreements—not to speak of university policies—is certainly appropriate. It is the right, in fact responsibility, of the students to publicize any possible violations committed by the UA in its corporate partnership with CAT and Motorola in order to expose US crimes taking place in Israeli-occupied Palestine and along the US/Mexico border.”

Chomsky is hailed by the New York Times as “the most widely read voice on foreign policy on the planet” and “arguably the most important intellectual alive…”

Amnesty International and the New England Conference of the United Methodist Church Divestment Task Force are just two of the many conscientious voices that have provided documentation to UA officials of CAT and Motorola’s equipment used, with company knowledge, in human rights violations. To date, UA officials have more than once acknowledged the “compelling international evidence” of CAT and Motorola’s “wrongdoing”, and in the case of CAT, even expressed regret over the business contract in light of documentation provided to them by religious and human rights groups.

Former Arizona Daily Wildcat reporter and columnist, Gabriel Matthew Schivone, will testify alongside Chomsky and other students. Schivone, who currently writes for the “Latino Voices” section of Huffington Post, first publicized the UA’s business relationships with the Caterpillar and Motorola corporations in an April 2009 article for the Wildcat, the official newspaper of the University.

A number of UA Mexican-American Studies (MAS) freshmen (last year’s UNIDOS class) will also be in attendance, along with a number of UA faculty and alumni supporters.

The MAS students’ role in the struggle to defend besieged Ethnic Studies programs (dismantled by the TUSD board last month under threat of state economic sanctions) is a credit to Cornel West’s April 2011 letter to the UA which connected Ethnic Studies and the UA divestment campaign against CAT and Motorola.

In his letter, the eminent Princeton historian and author traced the “origins of this treachery targeting our youth’s future” by asserting that

“[a]ttacks on education are big business….U.S. corporations like Caterpillar and Motorola—and others especially in the prison-Industrial complex—continue to profit from the suffering of peoples who seek dignity and self-determination in Arizona,”

he wrote. Adding:

“Similar corporations profit from the misery of occupied and distressed peoples in Palestine. These corporations should not be profiting from Palestinian suffering under occupation; they should not be profiting from immigrant and indigenous suffering and youth cultural censorship in Arizona and nationwide.”

In a similar letter addressed to the UA community in March 2011, South African Archbishop and Nobel peace prize winner Desmond Tutu also endorsed the students’ cross-border divestment campaign in the wake of the group’s 1200-ft (or four football fields’ length) mock wall erected across the UA campus in Mar. 2011.

Late last week, the students invited President Sander to tomorrow’s press event with Professor Chomsky. Sander has yet to RSVP.

www.uanomoredeaths.org
Twitter: @uaNMD

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