Shahid Bolsen Message to Student Protesters

If you could address the student protesters in America, what would be your message to them? These aren't students. They're teachers. They're using those campuses for what they are truly supposed to be used for, education, refinement, upliftment, intellectual, cultural, and moral excellence for taking people out of ignorance into understanding. No one's doing that on those campuses more than those young people today, those protesters.

They're teaching their own professors. They're teaching their own faculty. They're teaching their own, administration. And they're teaching their whole society, their whole so called civilization. And no, this isn't a civics class.

It's not a, political science class. It's not an economics class. It's not a class about international affairs or about history. No. They're teaching an anatomy class, and they are dissecting American empire.

They're dissecting colonization, and they're showing you, the human biology of racist colonialist oppression and the tumor, the malignant tumor of Zionism. And they're teaching you how to remove it. They're teaching you how to remove that tumor. They're teaching a class, on the surgical extraction of an ideology that has metastasized in the American body politic for over seventy five years and that has been steadily destroying that country for decades. Little by little, but faster and faster with each passing year, moving even more rapidly, spreading even more rapidly in the past six months.

And yes, they're teaching you, that this tumor developed because the body was susceptible to it, because it was unhealthy to begin with. And they're trying to teach you, how to cure yourself. They're trying to teach America how to cure itself because the cells, in the American body politic that mutated into the cancerous support for Zionism that's devouring that country's legitimacy, its credibility, and its viability today, they've been exposed to dangerous, elements all along, carcinogenic elements like white supremacy and bigotry, radioactive global hegemony, Islamophobia, and the parasitic military industrial complex. Oh, you've been unhealthy for a very long time now. And now that tumor is eating you alive.

And those students, those students, who are the real teachers of Columbia University, of Harvard, of Berkeley, the Ivy League, and every other university campus that's involved in the protests, they're trying to teach you how to finally save yourselves. But we all know you're gonna fight it. We all know that you're too arrogant and too stubborn and too sick to cooperate with your own treatment. Zionism and the neocons have become like a a cancer in the American political brain, so no one expects you to think clearly. So I would tell the protesters, you need to understand where you are right now, what space you have entered, because you've entered the arena of testing, and this isn't the kind of exam that you may be used to.

Now this is the arena where your conviction is going to be tested, your resolve is going to be tested, your commitment is going to be tested, your determination is going to be tested. And as is appropriate for the prestige of your universities, this test is going to be rigorous. They're gonna try to make you do one of two things. They're either gonna try to make you give up, or they're gonna try to make you sabotage yourselves. And they'll do this by violence.

They'll do it by punishing rejecting your demands, by threatening you, by vilifying you, by misrepresenting you, by lying about you, by trying to make you think, that they have the power to steal your future from you. Basically, they're gonna do this by treating you the way the Zionists treat the Palestinians. But I'm telling you, what you're doing is transformative. And I'm not just talking about how what you're doing is something that will transform your country. No.

I'm talking about how what you are doing has already transformed you. Once you've decided to do what you are doing, you're more than what you were before. You're more than what you were before. You're more than yourselves. What you're doing is bigger than you, and that makes you bigger than your own selves.

I'm telling you, you are an instrument collectively. You're an instrument for justice. You're an instrument for humanity. You're an instrument for peace. And yes, I'll say it.

You're an instrument of God. Your protests are an instrument of God, of Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala, the God of the Muslims and, yes, the God of the Jews. The God you may or may not even believe in, but he's using you nonetheless. You and your movement are in part an answer to the millions of prayers that countless families in Gaza offered, not just for the last six months, but for the last seventy five years. And This is how Allah keeps the unjust in check by means of the just.

This is how he helps the oppressed by raising up people who will defend them. So if you understand that, then you can understand that you are not actually the ones being tested. You're the ones administering this test. America is not testing you. You're testing America because that's what you are for your country.

You're a test for your country. You're a test for your society. You're a test for your people. They're being tested with you, and truly, their future depends on whether they pass this test or not. Their future depends on whether or not they cooperate with you in the cure that you're trying to offer them.

The remedy that you're trying to get them to accept so that they might finally purge their system and their society and their culture from the lethal toxins of colonization, Zionism, apartheid, genocide. I know that they're telling you, that you're gonna be suspended. You're gonna throw away your education. You're throw away your opportunities. Throw away your future career, your freedom, your privilege, so on.

But believe me, that's delusional. They're in no position to threaten you. Well, how are they gonna, threaten to take away your future when you're the one who's offering them a future? Because there is no future in Zionism. There is no future in, American or Western colonization in The Middle East or anywhere else.

It's bad enough that their history is full of that, but there's no place for it in the future. No. You're their successors. They're not your successors. Tell me, when did an older generation, oppose their own successors and when?

No. Time's not on their side. They think that they're fighting you from the top of the hill, but they're already over the hill, And there's no going back up. It's only downhill from here for Zionism. So you just keep pushing, and watch them just roll down that hill into discredit, disgrace, and infamy.

And as for your education, if you're worried, if you're actually worried about your future, your education, your opportunities, and so on, then believe me, you will be welcomed with open arms like heroes in any Muslim country in the world and any country in the global south. And you know and I know that that's where the future really is anyway.