Hundreds of faculty, students and Brown community members attended a vigil Monday evening for a Brown junior who was wounded over the weekend, one of three young men of Palestinian descent who were shot while wearing keffiyehs and speaking Arabic in Vermont. Authorities said it was likely a hate crime. The student may not walk again after the bullet hit his spine in the shooting.
Though the vigil for math and archeology double major Hisham Awartani began quietly with cello music, it crescendoed into rallying cries when student protestors interrupted President Christina Paxson as she spoke.
“Sadly, we can’t control what happens around the world and across the country. We’re powerless to do everything we’d like to do but there’s so much that we are doing and continue to do,” she said, cut off by dozens of protestors who began yelling “you’re a hypocrite!”
Frustration against Paxson has grown on campus as students say her reactions have been too little and too late.
Talia Sawiris is the president of the Arab Society at Brown. She said it took a student getting shot for the school to publicly recognize the growing anti-Arab hatred on campus.
“While we welcome those condemnations, it came too late,” Sawris said. “That was the first time, and that was after weeks and weeks of students meeting with the administration, recounting different incidents of harassment of discrimination on this campus.”
Hundreds of faculty members and students attended the vigil, and many joined in the chants of “Brown divest.”
Paxson shot back at the protestors, saying “we’re having a vigil for your friend,” and “this is how you want to honor your friend?”
Protestors allowed other speakers to speak, including several campus spiritual leaders and friends of Awartani.
In an interview with Awartani’s friend and fellow Brown junior, Aboud Ashhab, he said it was part of what Awartani would have wanted.
“Hisham wants divestment. And he recognizes that the horrible hate crime that happened to him, Kinnan and Tahseen, is not separated from the ongoing genocide in Palestine,” he said, referring to the two other young men wounded in the shooting.
Just ahead of the vigil, the school also made the announcement that criminal charges would be dropped against 20 Jewish students who were arrested in early November for trespassing while protesting the university’s stance on Israel and Palestine. Asking the university to drop the charges has been a recent rallying cry for student activists and almost 200 faculty members, who are also asking the university to call for a ceasefire and to divest companies profiting off the violence in Israel and the Palestinian territories.
But it wasn’t enough to satisfy protestors.
“It’s the bare minimum. And also, it was very clear that it was a PR move, because it was announced literally moments before the vigil. Didn’t do her very much good anyway,” said Beckett Warzer, a 29-year-old graduate student and one of the protesters at the vigil.
Warzer said the one thing that would satisfy him?
“Divest!”
Brown has invested its endowment in companies invested in aerospace and defense contractors, including: American Century, Blue Owl Capital Inc, and Owl Rock Capital Corp. It also owns stock in ISHARES, which is invested in Hyundai, a company that the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement says has contributed to Israeli settlement growth in the West Bank.
Metro Reporter Olivia Ebertz can be reached at olivia@thepublicsradio.org.
