By Abayomi Azikiwe
United States Federal District Court Judge Rita Lin of San Francisco ruled that the ongoing suspension of grant funding from the National Science Foundation to the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) violated an earlier injunction.
This ruling was a response to the attacks launched by President Donald Trump against higher educational institutions across the country.
Some of the most elite universities have come under full-scale attack by the White House and its backers in both Houses of the U.S. Congress. Students, staff and faculty members at these higher educational institutions during the 2023-24 school year engaged in debates, petition campaigns, rallies, demonstrations and encampments demanding the full disclosure and divestment from corporations and governments which have financial links with the settler State of Israel.
These demands are similar to those made between the 1960s and early 1990s regarding the struggle against settler-colonialism and apartheid in Southern Africa. During the mid-1980s, students held rallies, marches and building occupations exposing the ties between higher education and systematic racism centered in white minority rule in South Africa which underpinned the settler-colonial systems in regional states such as Zimbabwe (formerly Rhodesia), Namibia (labelled Southwest Africa by the Germans and the Boers) along with Mozambique and Angola (which were colonized for centuries by the Portuguese).
A combination of internal mass pressure, armed struggle and international solidarity led to the liberation of the Southern Africa region. In the same fashion, conscious people, even within the imperialist states, have taken a position in support of the oppressed people of Palestine and West Asia. Since the beginning of the Al-Aqsa Flood on October 7, 2023, the solidarity with Palestine has reached unprecedented levels particularly in the U.S. and Western Europe.
Activities on the college and university campuses in the U.S. have contributed immensely by highlighting the genocidal character of the Zionist regime in Occupied Palestine. Consequently, both the Trump administration and the former President Joe Biden, rather than cutting off assistance to the settler-colonial regime in Palestine, have launched attacks against the higher educational institutions accusing solidarity activists of “antisemitism” while saying that the officials at the universities were not doing enough to curb the demonstrations through police repression, the banning of student organizations such as the Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), Palestinian Youth Movement (PYM), Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), and spreading false accusations related to support for “terrorism” and “antisemitism.”
Nonetheless, the reality is that it is the U.S. government and multinational corporations which are propping up the regime in Occupied Palestine as the apartheid state carries out a process of ethnic cleansing and genocide in Gaza. In other areas of Palestine, such as the West Bank and Jerusalem, the indigenous people are also subjected to forced removals, violent assaults by Zionist settler gangs and unjust imprisonment.
The existence of the Israeli regime in West Asia has resulted in regional instability. Other states such as Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Iran and Yemen have been targeted for destabilization, mass killings and regime-change.
In Gaza there have been more than 61,000 officially reported deaths since October 7, 2023 and the injuring of approximately 150,000. The 2.3 million Palestinians living in Gaza are told on a daily basis that their presence in certain areas is potentially hazardous.
Since the collapse of the latest pause in the fighting in Gaza, a total blockade has been enacted by Tel Aviv which disallows food, medicines, water and other assistance to enter the Gaza Strip where people are in a desperate condition. Famine has already begun in various areas of Gaza with children and adults being systematically starved to death by the Israeli regime.
The airdrops of food into Gaza represent an inadequate response to the starvation of millions of people. The United Nations agencies which had been responsible for delivering hundreds of truckloads of assistance daily, has openly criticized what the U.S.-backed so-called “Gaza Humanitarian Foundation” (GHF) is doing. This supposed assistance grouping has helped facilitate the massacre of hundreds of people queuing outside GHF distribution areas where they are routinely gunned down by the snipers deployed by the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF).
Trump Administration Regularly Ignores Court Orders Contravening its Capricious Actions
There have been several rulings handed down by the Federal District and Supreme Courts which declared that the erratic behavior of the administration violated the U.S. Constitution. Many of the cuts in funding to the universities and colleges were for programs already approved by the Congress.
An article from an Indian publication, based upon reporting from the Reuters Press Agency, said of the current situation:
“U.S. District Judge Rita Lin in San Francisco ruled that the grant funding suspensions violated an earlier June preliminary injunction where she ordered the National Science Foundation to restore dozens of grants that it had terminated at the University of California at Los Angeles. That order had blocked the agency from cancelling other grants at the University of California system, of which UCLA is a part. ‘NSF’s actions violate the Preliminary Injunction,’ Lin, an appointee of Democratic former President Joe Biden, wrote. The White House and the university had no immediate comment on the ruling. UCLA said last week the government froze $584 million in funding. Trump has threatened to cut federal funds for universities over pro-Palestinian student protests against U.S. ally Israel’s military assault on Gaza. It was not immediately clear how much funding the judge ruled to restore.”
Although Judge Lin’s ruling specifically related to UCLA, many other campuses across the U.S. are facing the same problems. The administration has ordered the detention of students for merely writing editorials in defense of the Palestinians.
Mahmoud Khalil of Columbia University was arrested after serving as spokesperson for the students and faculty members demanding the divestment from Israel. Khalil was held for months on false charges as the Palestine solidarity movement worked assiduously for his release.
The same above-mentioned report on the UCLA ruling notes:
“The University of California said last week it was reviewing a settlement offer by the Trump administration for UCLA in which the university will pay $1 billion. It said such a large payment would ‘devastate’ the institution. The government alleges universities, including UCLA, allowed antisemitism during the protests. Protesters, including some Jewish groups, say the government wrongly equates their criticism of Israel with antisemitism.”
California Governor Gavin Newsom described the $1 billion fine as “extortion” and said he will file a lawsuit to overturn the White House decision. Newsom also accused the Trump administration of attempting to silence academic freedom.
Al Jazeera reported on the fines levelled against universities and recent executive orders targeting campuses saying:
“The order required the Department of Education to expand university reporting requirements for admissions within 120 days. Trump has long sought to exert greater control over the country’s higher education system, which he and other prominent Republicans consider ideologically skewed. At the same time, Trump has also sought to dismantle initiatives to promote diversity, equity and inclusion — goals known collectively by the acronym DEI — on the basis that such efforts are inherently discriminatory.”
The attacks on higher educational institutions are also clearly aimed at fulfilling the administration’s anti-science agenda. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr, recently abolished hundreds of millions of dollars in funding for mRNA research on vaccine development.
A New York Times article published on August 5 says of the funding cuts for vaccine research that:
“Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has canceled nearly $500 million of grants and contracts for developing mRNA vaccines, the Department of Health and Human Services announced on Tuesday. It is the latest blow to research on this technology. In May, the Department of Health and Human Services revoked a nearly $600 million contract to the drugmaker Moderna to develop a vaccine against bird flu. The new cancellations dismayed scientists, many of whom regard mRNA shots as the best option for protecting Americans in a pandemic. ‘This is a bad day for science,’ said Scott Hensley, an immunologist at the University of Pennsylvania who has been working to develop an mRNA vaccine against influenza.”
The Trump administration and its supporters say that the measures being taken will strengthen the U.S. economically and politically. However, such policy shifts will only weaken the U.S. and its imperialist standing in the world.
Other states such as the People’s Republic of China, Republic of India and the Russian Federation have made enormous advances in the areas of science and technology. The present course of U.S. domestic and foreign policy will only cause the leading imperialist state to move even more rapidly into social and economic decline.
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