"Shame on those with the power to act who choose silence instead"
“What do we want? Justice. When do we want it? Now. If we don't get it? Shut it down.”
The council surrenders the chamber—I’ve been human my whole life—Chaos and hate—It isn’t all trash—Past writing on Palestine
(This is a long one, best read in a browser.)
The city council voted 5-6 on a resolution to demand a ceasefire in Gaza, then they ran away from the council chambers, ceding it to ceasefire organizers.
That’s what happened on Tuesday, and any different portrayal is an attempt, willing or otherwise, to obfuscate. And we’ve seen a whole hell of a lot of it in the days since.
Of course, this being Worcester, there was no formal vote—the political establishment conspired as best it could to keep the resolution off the agenda and the conversation from entering the public record.
But they simply couldn’t. Hundreds of people came to city hall Tuesday in support of the ceasefire resolution filed by a coalition of local Jewish, Muslim, and Christian organizations. It didn’t matter to this group that the clerk kept it off the agenda. It didn’t matter that the mayor prevented anyone from speaking on it. They were not going to be silenced.
The effort to silence them, principally executed by Mayor Joe Petty, only laid bare the necrotic underbelly of a political culture wholly unprepared and outflanked in the arena the organizers dragged them into—one requiring spine, conviction, and balls. They proved they have none of the three.
And make no mistake about it: this was an act of silencing. The rules of the council were selectively enforced to keep this one particular petition, which just happened to voice support for the Palestinian people, off the agenda, and then more selective enforcement to prevent any discussion of it on Tuesday night. Last October, the city clerk’s office allowed a petition to condemn the “barbaric and inhuman” actions of Hamas. The city council voted on 8-2. Rule 11 was not invoked. Last week, the city clerk’s office allowed a petition targeting immigrants in public life by way of making them show their naturalization papers. The council voted on it. In neither case did city hall conspire the way it did here to suppress public discourse. And, in the course of doing so, made hypocrites of themselves. (For more on this, read my post from Monday, City hall says no to Gaza ceasefire petition.)
They were comfortable voting in support of Israel, but, when asked to show support for Palestinians, amid an atrocity many magnitudes greater than Oct. 7, they re-summoned their critical faculties and said hey wait a minute we need to stick to city business. Thousands of Worcester residents watched this transparent cowardice play out, and are now watching the powers that be attempt to portray the demonstrators as the problem—as agents of “chaos and hate,” as Mayor Joe Petty put it, and not citizens who simply wanted their voices heard.
A formal 5-6 vote would have been better than the 5-6 vote we got: to “suspend the rules” to allow the organizers of the demonstration to speak. Five councilors voted to do so (Nguyen, King, Haxhiaj, Pacillo, Ojeda). Five voted against (Toomey, Mero-Carlson, Colorio, Russell, Bergman). Petty, voting last, was the swing—made, in that moment, either to rise to the occasion or run from it. He voted no. He ran. 5-6.
A 5-6 vote against a ceasefire in Gaza is evil. This de facto 5-6 vote is evil and pathetic.
But the “suspend the rules” vote wasn’t the only one they took. It gets worse. They took a 7-4 vote to recess for 15 minutes. Then they came back from that recess and took a 7-4 vote to adjourn the meeting—a remarkable move, unprecedented in recent memory. It amounted to a surrender. They couldn’t absorb and deflect the public will via the usual diversionary tactics because the organizers simply refused to leave. Their standard playbook having failed, Petty et al. simply gave up. They ceded the territory of the council chamber, some leaving with literal police escorts, as the protestors stayed in the room.
“I think everyone sees that they’re weaponizing bureaucracy to shut people down to silence them,” said demonstrator Mohammed Xhemali after the abrupt adjournment that ended the 40-minute meeting.
“What are these people so afraid of? They don't want to be on the record voting against the ceasefire. I don’t know what their quota is for enough dead babies. I don't know what they’re really, like, looking for. But they haven’t hit their quota yet. So I'm profoundly disappointed that a city like this has such hypocrites at its helm. It’s really quite disconcerting.”
What follows is a minute-to-minute narrative chronicling how the council meeting went down. Then, after that, a dispatch from the rally held before the meeting, then a look at the way the powers that be and the media have tried to portray this monumental surrender.
The council surrenders the chamber
Right at the beginning of the meeting, Mayor Joe Petty made it clear he knew what was coming. “You need to speak on items appearing on the agenda tonight,” he told the crowd, knowing full well the city clerk, his former intern, made the last-minute “decision” to block the resolution that the crowd had planned for weeks to speak on that evening.
The first demonstrator at the mic was Aula, a Palestinian-American in a green hijab. To appease Petty, she said was speaking on an item that was on the agenda—9m, concerning the law department’s assessment of what does and doesn’t make it on the agenda.
“The clerk denied our petition for a ceasefire on the agenda, just minutes before the agenda was set.”
In the back of the room a Zionist counter-demonstrator yelled “Wait a minute!” indignantly.
“Alright, hang on, hang on, hang on,” Petty said, picking up where the Zionist left off in trying to stop Aula from speaking.
Aula: Allow me to explain the importance of this resolution.
The Zionist: It’s not on the agenda!
Petty: Nah. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.
Aula: I am the granddaughter—
Petty: It's not on the agenda. I’m gonna have to rule you out of order.
Aula: I am the granddaughter of—
Petty: I... I understand.
Aula: —of Nakba survivors.
Petty: I’m gunna ask you to—
Aula: My grandparents were forced out of—
Petty: I’m going to ask you to stop, please.
Aula: Yafo, now Tel Aviv, in 1948—
The cop standing next to her—highly unusual to begin with—called over to the mayor: “Do you want me to get her to stop?” Petty said yes and he took a step forward, forcing Aula off the mic. Protesters chanted “Let her speak let her speak let her speak.”
Aula was speaking on an agenda item, and it was relevant. Item 9m was a petition from resident David Webb regarding the law department’s decision last week to allow the “show me your papers” petition onto the agenda. Given that was allowed on, and the ceasefire petition wasn’t, Aula’s comments were very much related. But Petty chose to censor her because she mentioned Palestine, and Palestine wasn’t on the agenda.
Councilor Thu Nguyen made a motion to suspend the rules to allow Aula to speak. On the city feed you can very noticeably hear a classic Kate Toomey sigh hit her microphone.
Petty called for a roll call on the motion. It failed, because he made it fail. Bergman, Colorio, Mero-Carlson, Russell, and Toomey voted against. Haxhiaj, Nguyen, Ojeda, King, and Pacillo voted for. Five votes to five votes. Petty was the tie breaker and he voted no.
“That motion fails,” said the clerk as the crowd chanted “shame, shame, shame, shame.”
Petty banged the gavel but it didn’t quiet the crowd.
Another chant: “Let her speak let her speak let her speak.”
The chanting went on for a minute or so before the cable access mics were cut. The mics went off for a full minute as the chanting continued.
Once able to reclaim the floor, Mayor Petty gave it to Councilor Candy Mero-Carlson, though Khrystian King clearly had his hand raised first. When King protested, Petty ignored him. Carlson made a motion to recess. Seven councilors voted in favor. Four councilors voted against. Haxhiaj, King, Nguyen, and, to his credit, Ojeda. Pacillo was the flip vote, a needless reversal that only served to show where her allegiance lies.
Petty: “OK, we’re going to take a few minute break.”
The cable access camera slid up and up and up to the ceiling so you can’t see what’s happening. Eventually it looked like this:
And, if you were watching at home, that’s all you saw—no audio—for about 15 minutes. But the protest in the gallery raged on, and tensions, as they say, flared.
On one side of the room, George Russell can be seen walking up to Etel Haxhiaj, wagging his finger in her face. She pointed back at him, forcefully yelling something. He walked away.
On the other side, demonstrator Mohammed Xhemali and Councilor Moe Bergman exchanged words for a brief moment over the fence that separates the councilors from the public. Bergman continued shouting as he left the room.
After the meeting, Xhemali relayed the nature of that conversation:
I kept telling him, what is he so afraid of? He’s not afraid of anything, he said. I just followed the rules when it happened.
Not even changed the rules. They ignored the rules. There was not even a suspension of the rules for that last resolution. That last resolution was proposed, voted, same day.
When they want political expediency it can happen. I don’t know what the problem is. You can vote no on the resolution. Why are you so afraid of it coming about? Vote no. Don’t be a coward. Let us know how you really feel. I kept asking him how many more people need to die for him to be satisfied to call for a ceasefire.
Once out of the council chamber, Bergman got into another fight, this time with resident David Webb. “You don’t stand up for a ceasefire?” Webb asked. “When you’re a city councilor, god forbid, I’ll speak to you,” Bergman said.
The recess ran for nearly 15 minutes. Most of the council went straight to the mayor’s office, a short way down the hall on the third floor. Though I can’t say for sure what they talked about, it would later become fairly obvious they had decided in the privacy of that office to make a motion to adjourn as soon as they came back. All of this constitutes a violation of the open meeting law, which Petty invoked several times as a reason for not allowing any of the demonstrators to speak.
Back in the chamber, it was clear the council had ceded the territory. Haxhiaj and Nguyen and King and Ojeda—coincidentally the four councilors to vote against every motion made to bar discussion of the Palestine resolution—stayed in the room.
Chanting of “ceasefire now” with Nguyen out in front shaking their fist, Haxhiaj clapping and watching on. The amount of cops kept increasing. They were in every part of the room then, and on the balcony.
“Free free free Palestine” in call and response. Activists were sitting on the floor of the chamber. They were singing “We shall not, we shall not be moved.” The majority of councilors trickled back in from their sojourn.
“What do we want? Justice. When do we want it? Now. If we don't get it? Shut it down.”
The camera came down from its ceiling shot, but the mics were still cut. Organizer Claire Schaeffer-Duffy got on the mic in the gallery and made a plea to the mayor. (Watch here).
“We are clearly quite vocal. Is there an opportunity for us to speak? This is a campaign of persuasion. We want you in your humanness to join many Americans who are calling for a ceasefire. As we speak, northern Gaza is being ethnically cleansed. We must add our voice for the cessation of this war.”
Petty responded: “We’re not in session on this matter.” He banged the gavel. Cries of “shame” from the gallery.
The mics came back on. Another chant: “No more weapons, no more wars, ceasefire is what we’re fighting for.” “Now listen,” Petty said, but that’s all he could get in. The chant changed over to “let us speak let us speak let us speak.”
“Okay,” Petty said, not intending to let them speak. He banged the gavel. It didn’t stop the chant. Another minute went by. “We’re back in session,” Petty said. And this was when the lying began in earnest.
“Nobody likes what’s going on in the Middle East and the loss of life,” said Petty. People were shouting at him. “I do care about you...” They kept shouting. “Can I finish?”
“My understanding is that the clerk gave the organizers a uhhhh what did you do, Mr. Clerk...”
He punted to City Clerk Niko Vangjeli, who said, “Basically the organizers were provided an option to suspend the rules at the next meeting to speak on this and present this to the city council.”
Petty, repeating Vangjeli inaccurately, said, “We gave an option to the organizers. The clerk gave an option to the organizers for how to put this on the calendar for the next meeting.”
That wasn’t what Vangjeli was saying. It will not be on the agenda for the next meeting. In an email to organizers Monday morning, Vangjeli wrote:
If you do not agree with my interpretation of Rule 11, Rule 56 allows for the City Council to suspend its rules.
If two-thirds of the City Council believe your petition to be within their purview, they may vote to suspend their Rules and review the item accordingly.
My recommendation to you is to file a second petition that requests City Council to suspend Rule 11 to take up your original item.
That vote had already happened. Nguyen made the motion to suspend the rules within the first few minutes of the meeting. Any future petition would see the same margin, failing to get two-thirds. This was not a good-faith deal.
Someone from the crowd was speaking on the mic, but the mic was cut. Petty said, “I gotta rule it out of order,” and he looked over at George Russell pointedly, “or we can adjourn the meeting.”
As was clearly planned in the mayor’s office, Councilor Russell made the motion to adjourn. “It’s become obvious that we’re not going to do any work this evening.”
Russell started talking about why he wanted to adjourn. “I’m a city councilor. I'm not the secretary of state, I'm not the president of the United States—
Petty cut him off. “You’re not going to speak on the item, you’re going to speak on the adjournment.” Russell happily obliged and sat back down.
He called for a roll call vote on the adjournment. But Nguyen interrupted him, “Mr. Chairman.” They said they wanted to speak on the adjournment. “We cannot continue business as usual during a genocide...”
Petty ruled Nguyen out of order.
Nguyen: I am speaking on the adjournment. We should not move business as usual when there’s a genocide. I do not believe this ruling is correct—silencing these folks here. When we talk about the adjournment, we have to talk about the silencing of these folks here. Our constituents are all here demanding an end to genocide. I trust that you will not silence me as well.
Toomey, cutting Nguyen off: Point of order, move to question. Point of order, move to question.
Earlier, Kate Toomey’s face dripped with contempt as she recorded the protestors in the gallery on her phone. When Nguyen spoke, she and Mero-Carlson turned their backs.
Toomey: Mr. Chairman, move to order please.
Nguyen: Let me speak. You have been silencing them. I believe I have the right to speak for my constituents as an at-large councilor—
Toomey: It is not in the agenda—
Petty: It is an open meeting law issue. There’s nothing on the agenda tonight.
Nguyen: Can you repeat that?
Petty: It’s not on the agenda, so to discuss it is a violation of the open meeting law.
Nguyen: Are you saying I cannot speak on the adjournment? That is what we’re speaking on. Are we clear? Are we clear that I am talking about the adjournment today? I am speaking on that we cannot—the fact that we cannot continue business as usual during a genocide of Palestinian folks in Gaza. I am looking at you. We cannot continue business as usual—
Russell, interrupting Nguyen as Toomey did: Move to question.
Nguyen pressed on.
Nguyen: Today over 1,500 people signed a petition to have this on, and this is why we’re having an adjournment—because we silenced them—that is why we’re moving toward an adjourn—and this to me is a clear intent to silence the folks and I won’t take too much time. Because I know we will have repercussions for silencing our folks—the shady selective bias this administration has—but, for those of us who believe and constantly fight for our collective liberation and justice, knows, this is the status quo of business-as-usual dealings of white supremacy and imperialism—I find this unacceptable. I condemn the ruling that led us here today. This didn't have to happen. This adjournment and this business as usual did not have to happen. Something our constituent said today during a speech, the humanitarian crisis in Gaza today has reached critical levels—
Petty: I’m ruling that out of order.
At this point Toomey was pacing around the chamber, grimmacing.
Nguyen: Mr. Chairman, back in October you initiated a resolution to condemn Hamas—which later became an item brought forth by Bergman and it arrived in October and we voted on it and today you are not letting our people speak, which once again is a reason why I am speaking on the adjournment. This is a political matter, silencing our people and silencing our pro-Palestinian folks.
Petty ruled Nguyen out of order for the last time. The council took the vote to adjourn. In favor: Petty, Russell, Bergman, Colorio, Mero-Carlson... and Pacillo. When Pacillo voted yes, jeers from the crowd: “Wow, Jenny” and “you should be ashamed.” Again, she showed where her loyalties really lie.
Opposed to adjournment: Ojeda, King, Haxhiaj, Nguyen. They, along with city manager Eric Batista, lingered in the gallery with the demonstrators as the rest took off as fast as they could, some with police escorts.
For the second time that night, they ceded their territory to the demonstration.
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And we’re not close to done yet by the way. Now, let’s look at the rally.
“I’ve been human my whole life”
Prior to the meeting, organizers held an hour-long rally on the third floor of City Hall. They unfurled a scroll of the names of all 1,500 people to sign onto the petition1 that stretched almost half of the hallway.
At the rally, Aula got to read what Mayor Joe Petty wouldn’t let her in the chamber.
I am the granddaughter of Nakba survivors. My grandparents were forced out of Yafo, now Tel Aviv, in 1948, just like 750,000 other Palestinians who were expelled. My parents were born in Gaza, but made their way to America, hoping to give me and my siblings a better life. That decision saved me from the fate of my 77 first cousins who remain in Gaza, who are enduring this genocide. I am their voice, the voice for my family.
Many of my relatives have been killed, including my childhood friend...
She choked down a sob.
God have mercy on them. Every single one of my family members has lost their home. My family in the north of Gaza are trapped, cut off from food, clean water, medical care. Since the beginning of this October, it has intensified.
A man wrapped in an American flag yelled “Not true, not true.” Aula continued:
Despite everything, my family remains resilient and they gave me the strength to be here tonight. And they continue to help those around them despite what they’re going through. And that is the spirit of the Palestinian people, unbroken and united.
But you don’t have to be Palestinian to stand for justice. You only need to be human.
As she spoke about city hall using rule 11 to block Palestinians from speaking, the Zionist counter-demonstrators tried to—you guessed it—block her from speaking. A roar of angry heckling, jeering, and shouting welled up at the notion that Palestinians deserve the right to express themselves. Jenn Gaskin shouted them back down into submission. Aula continued:
The hypocrisy is clear. The discrimination is clear. Tens of thousands of innocent Palestinian lives have been taken by Israel’s apartheid regime, fully funded by US tax dollars, and we’re using bureaucratic rules to ignore the humanity of an entire people.
Shame on those with the power to act who choose silence instead.
Watching the tape back, I find myself profoundly struck by Aula’s bravery and resolve, getting through her remarks while angry people waving the flag of the nation actively killing your family bark at you. Delivering that last line with an authority that came from her core. It was moving in a way you rarely see in this city. It makes it all the more embarrassing that our low-rent local political class performed a series of cold bureaucratic circus tricks to keep Aula and everyone else from entering the official record.
When the next speaker, Daoud, got up to speak, he was drowned out by a Zionist woman who repeatedly screamed that it was her time to speak. “How about some Israeli speaking time,” she yelled, as Daoud was trying to talk. Repeated chants of “let them speak” did nothing to stop her from heckling speaker after speaker.
When Ayeh took the mic after Daoud, her delivery was forceful enough that the incessant heckling faded to the background. She spoke with moral clarity, addressing Worcester city hall specifically.
“Worcester has claimed to be committed to promoting diversity, social justice, and humanity. For this commitment to be genuine, this needs to encompass all of humanity including the Palestinian people. We must hold ourselves accountable, hold our cities accountable. Our states, our country. Our tax dollars are literally funding this genocide.”
Noa Shaindlinger is a professor of history specializing in Palestine at Worcester State University. She’s also an Israeli Jew. That fact didn’t appear to afford her any more respect than the rest from the Zionist counter-demonstrators, who barked at her the entire way through her remarks as they did every other speaker. Two Zionists, one draped in an American flag, screamed “free the hostages” over and over and over as Shaindlinger spoke.
“The society where I grew up is unrecognizable to me today,” she said, the antagonistic chatter in the background proving her point.
“Every person that I know, including family members, completely mobilized to support the continued genocide in the Gaza strip and the invasion of Lebanon.”
The “free the hostages” screams continued as Shaindlinger warned of a war with Iran on the horizon if Israel is not stopped. Growing tired of the full phrase, the one draped in the American flag resigned to yelling, simply, “hostages.”
“There is a small minority of Israeli jews like me who want to see you calling on the U.S. government,” she said. “Please, please, please make this stop. Make this stop now.”
When Patricia Kirkpatrick took the mic, she neatly laid out what we like to call the boomerang of empire. Here in Worcester, she said, we have an ever increasing homeless population, approaching 2,000 by most recent counts with over 700 of those being children. She then cited a UN report from May showing that 79,000 homes in Gaza “have been blown off the map.”
“Why are our tax dollars supporting the annihilation of homes in Gaza instead of giving shelter to our unhoused children and their families?”
She drew the same parallels to our $22 million school funding shortfall and the 17 percent of Worcester residents deemed food insecure.
“We’re witnessing an evisceration of Palestinians and it’s bankrolled with our tax money. Why are we funding an ethnic cleansing instead of sheltering and feeding our children and their families?”
Shame on the city government, she said, for failing to even listen to the 1,500 residents who signed the ceasefire petition.
One of the last speakers, Hind, said that as a child she could have never anticipated that she wouldn’t be on her own, “that other people who are not Palestinian would stand with me. So thank you so much for being here tonight.”
Cheers from the crowd as she read a poem of hers titled “Palestinian.”
I've been human my entire life,
I've felt the blast of the bombs,
The tears of my father witnessing another subjugated generation,
He had hope it'd be over for my children.
I'm Palestinian.
“Chaos and hate”
For the past few days, city officials have been scrambling for a way to frame it. Petty told the Telegram the demonstration was “chaos and hate.” He said the same thing to Talk of the Commonwealth. He also told Talk of the Commonwealth this: "We've probably been inconsistent in the past, and I regret that.”
“Petty says, "probably a mistake" to allow Bergman's resolution a year ago,” Talk of the Commonwealth tweeted. But, as Nguyen pointed out Tuesday, Petty was the person who originally put that petition on the agenda, eventually handing it over to Bergman amid pushback. We have the receipts for that. It’s strange he’s never said it was originally his idea, isn’t it?
George Russell is in lockstep with Petty, also telling Talk of the Commonwealth it was a “mistake” to put the “barbaric and inhuman” order on the agenda last October.
Of course it’s only a mistake now, because it made it more difficult to suppress the Palestinian perspective and maintain appearances while doing so. It wasn’t a mistake any other time leading up to this.
Kate Toomey’s effort to put the onus on the protestors is more insipid still. In a Facebook post set to close friends, she wrote:
All of that is just factually wrong, and she wrote it despite being one of six councilors to vote against such a motion to suspend the rules on Tuesday night. The protestors could have asked for a suspension of the rules, she said, without acknowledging that’s exactly what they did and exactly what she voted against.
In the comments, someone asked her “Why did they decline?” and Toomey answered, “I suppose so they could do what they did.”
In her imagination, they were being unreasonable for the sake of it, simply trying to sow chaos. A bit of projection, I’d say. (I’d explore the psychology of centering oneself as the victim in a conversation about genocide due to a rude text, but I’m not giving that narrative any oxygen.)
In Inventing Reality, Michael Parenti writes about how the U.S. press tends to cover demonstrations:
Almost never do the media give us the arguments and motives behind a protest demonstration ... The event is depicted as something of a spectacle connected to little more than its own surface appearances and not as part of a democratic struggle over vital issues. Viewers might easily come away with the notion that the crowd is just a noisy bunch of malcontent or unpatriotic people, especially viewers who have been fed nothing but the official view of things.
He wrote that in 1986, back when the press was the only means of disseminating disinformation. Now, with social media, the powers that be don’t need the press to do this for them. As we see here with Toomey’s particularly dumb example, officials can use their own social media to do this dirty work more directly and less artfully.
Now let’s look at Toomey’s Twitter, where it gets even worse. On Wednesday morning, she tweeted:
Not for nothing, this tweet was “ratio’d” (when a reply gets more love than the original post) by Yenni Desroches, who wrote, “They treated you with the respect you gave them. You should have let the organizers speak. They are your constituents too.”
Toomey clearly doesn’t feel that way—doesn’t even bother to understand the issue. Just reflexively writes off the entire demonstration as chaos about to erupt. Someone who feels that way about her constituents should not be allowed to hold office. Target #1 in the next election as far as I’m concerned.
Nguyen posted a video yesterday depicting cops just standing around obviously unworried about any chaos. Personally, all I saw were a dozen guys happy to be collecting detail pay.
“There's a narrative about how chaotic and hateful the civil disobedience was at City Council on Tuesday, some councilors even worried for their safety,” Nguyen wrote. “The administration and city councilors will want to paint narratives that will wash them free from the mess they made and their active silencing of pro Palestinian voices and those demanding a ceasefire. We do not believe you.”
When the police officer politely escorted Aula off the mic, as we saw earlier in this post, that was the most direct police intervention of the evening, at least as far as I witnessed. And the cop who did that, Matt Early, came up to me after the event just to chat. Said he remembered me from a homeless encampment clearing some years ago. He asked me how I got into journalism and we talked about sanctioned encampments and he said something about how it’s good to have conversations with people you don’t agree with. We shook hands. It was fine.
All that to say this narrative from the local political class that the police were standing between order and chaos in a night that could have exploded into violence... it’s self serving, at best alarmist, at worst racist. You have to wonder who on the council looked out at the gallery and saw a room full of terrorists.
Russell is also on record praising the police department for how they “handled” the meeting. But the police didn’t do anything, and didn’t need to, and this effort to portray it otherwise is revealing. They’re using the “thank you WPD” line to tacitly say something else: that these people were animals and we were in danger.
So that’s how the old guard is going to play it, looks like. I don’t see it working out well for them. More than 1,500 people signed the ceasefire petition, and to them and countless others, these old guard councilors have made themselves obvious villains. If the bet is that people will forget this come next November, that’s a risky one.
The time is now, by the way, to start organizing for the electoral consequences.
It isn’t all trash
On a positive note, State Sen. Robyn Kennedy (who beat Joe Petty for the seat, remember) put out a statement in support of the demonstrators.
It’s unacceptable and frankly confusing that Worcester can elect Kennedy at the state level and McGovern at the federal but on the local level Kate Toomey gets the most votes every year. Like I said, the time is now.
We do have good councilors though. Khrystian King on Talk Of The Commonwealth this morning said the resolution should have been on the agenda. “Unequal application of rules is unacceptable," he said.
And two of my favorite local writers, Jenn Gaskin and Giselle Rivera Flores, put out great essays on the matter.
Giselle’s: “An Open Letter: A personal reflection on the impacts of silencing”
The silencing of the Palestinian people, much like the historical and ongoing silencing of marginalized Latino communities, reflects a broader pattern of oppression where voices are deliberately diminished or excluded to maintain power structures. Palestinians have faced decades of systemic marginalization through displacement, military occupation, and restricted access to political and legal systems. This silencing extends beyond physical boundaries, as their narratives are often overshadowed or dismissed in global discussions about the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
The black-and-white shots she took are also tremendous.
Jenn’s: “Silenced in Worcester: The City's Failure to Stand for Justice.”
The meeting highlighted, once more, that when marginalized communities—those of us who have historically been oppressed, overlooked, or disregarded—seek justice, our words fall on ears unwilling to hear. You are welcome if you bring forward an agenda rooted in power, privilege, or control. But when we raise issues that affect our communities, you shut down. Last night, when pro-Palestinian voices tried to be heard, the council adjourned, and the administration took no accountability for silencing the very people it claims to represent.
Gaskin included a quote from Maurice Bishop, a revolutionary leader in Grenada, that I think is an appropriate note to end on.
“I could say that Palestine is not in my backyard. But my spirit will not let me. My blood memory will not let me.”
Past writing on Palestine in Worcester Sucks
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In lieu of the normal odds and ends today I’m just going to collect my past writing on Palestine.
Oct. 21, 2024 | City hall says no to Gaza ceasefire petition, a week after saying yes to the local micro-birthers and a year after the "barbaric" resolution.
Oct. 8, 2024 | Some smoldering war over meaning, on Ta-Nehisi Coates’ new book and the consent factory.
July 14, 2024 | The exponential curve of dumb days. Steve Schimmel bullies student group out of meeting at the library.
June 2, 2024 | Can you find the wolves in this picture?, on the state Democratic convention and the demonstrations outside.
May 19, 2024 | Every day every day every day, a middle aged white man, witnessing that something, felt compelled to stick his head out the window. On a small standout and the vitriol it elicited.
May 12, 2024 | There’s no Ministry of Truth here, The American machine recognizes apathy is useful. On the local press and rape atrocity propaganda.
April 7, 2024 | Jim McGovern calls for an end to Israeli aid. Let's hope he means it!
Ok, talk to ya Sunday!
The first version of this story described the scroll as a list of Palestinians who’ve died in the conflict. That was wrong.
It was around a month ago that Councilor Bergman put an item on the agenda concerning security at City Hall. We spoke in the "lobby" before the meeting and had a frank exchange about the open nature of the building. He asked me what I planned to say with my 2 minutes, and I told him that I thought it was a nearly impossible Bad Idea to set up checkpoints at the entrances. I also let him know that I had been a town appointed official in New Hampshire, and that I knew that things could get hairy real quick, but making your place of business a hard target just made for a harder attack. Anyway, the proposal is out for study, and seems to have taken on new significance in light of current events.
Another word-hanger. I mean I was there and missed a lot. I so appreciate your detail. I had to stop, think through, and picture your words. I am grateful for this record of the event. Thanks Bill. Amazing work!