Palestinian student leader reacts to new Indiana University protest policy
INDIANAPOLIS (WISH) — A Hoosier Palestinian activist said Sunday that a new protest policy at Indiana University is too restrictive.
The policy that began this month bans camping unless it’s specifically for a university event, and mandates protestors get approval before erecting temporary structures.
Yaqoub Saadeh is the co-founder and former president of the Middle Eastern Student Association at IU Indianapolis. He said he didn’t like how the university handled protestors who encamped in Dunn Meadow on the Bloomington IU campus over the spring and summer months.
“IU has been censoring students throughout this entire experience, with everything that’s happening, myself as a previous student who was advocating on behalf of the Palestinian human rights, I felt there was always censorship that I was facing,” he said.
“I was being silenced in any way shape or form, so these new policies kind of feel the same as that. It feels like another way to kind of censor what students are doing, and violate their freedom of speech as well as their academic freedom.”
In April, police arrested 23 protestors and forcibly removed dozens of others from Dunn Meadow. At the time, IU cited a statue from 1969 that prohibited tens on campus after 11:00 pm.
“I was at Bloomington a few days after they started the encampment, I saw the police force there. There was obviously snipers on top of the IMU which is obviously what a lot of people saw. It was weird energy. I’ve never seen that much negative energy toward student protesters, people were protesting for something peaceful,” said Saadeh.
Saadeh said he was saddened to see state police use force to remove the protestors rather than handle the situation peacefully.