Last week at more
than 200 colleges and high schools across the nation, students came together to
arrange memorials on campus featuring thousands of flags representing each victim
of Islamic terrorism on that date. Who could find that gesture offensive? Five
student protesters at Middlebury College in Vermont, brainwashed by
multiculturalist nonsense, that’s who.
“The 9/11:
Never Forget Project has been an annual nonpartisan event at
Middlebury College for the past ten years,” writes Hillary Cherry, Program Officer of Public Relations there. The
flags have been posted at Middlebury annually in a joint effort between the
College Republicans and Democrats. “By participating in the 9/11: Never Forget Project, students
honor the victims of the attacks, as well as honor the American principles for
which they died.”
There had never before
been a problem until Ben Kinney, president of the campus conservative club, caught
five vandals last week in the act of ripping up the flags and bagging them like
trash. They refused to stop and told him they were “confiscating” the flags in
protest of “America's imperialism.” They also claimed that the flags were desecrating
an Indian burial ground.
Two of the students,
Amanda Lickers (who admitted instigating the vandalism) and Anna
Shireman-Grabowski, later published statements proudly taking responsibility for their
despicable action. I encourage you to read them in their entirety to get
the full impact of the intolerant, multiculturalist lunacy that inspired them,
but here are some revealing excerpts. First, from Lickers, complete with grammatical errors:
i am a young onkwehon:we, a woman, a member of the turtle clan and
the onondowa'ga nation of the haudenosaunee confederacy…
for over 500 years our people have been under attack. the theft of
our territories, the devastation of our waters; the poisoning of our
people through the poisoning of our lands; the theft of our people from
our families; the rape of our children; the murder of our women;
the sterilization of our communities; the abuse of our generations; the
uprooting of our
ancestors and the occupation of our sacred sites; the silencing of our songs; the erasure of our
languages and memories of our traditions
i have had enough.
So had I, but I kept reading anyway.
i was invited to middlebury college to facilitate a workshop on
settler responsibility and decolonization. i walked across this campus
whose stone wall structures weigh heavy on the landscape. the history of
eugenics, genocide and colonial violence permeate that space so fully like
a ghost everywhere descending. it was my understanding that this site is
occupying an abenaki burial ground; a sacred site.
i saw thousands of small american flags. tho my natural disdain for
the occupying colonial state came to surface, in the quickest moment of
decision making, in my heart, i understood that lands where our dead lay
must not be desecrated…
we have all survived so much - and as a visitor on their territories i
took action to respect them and began pulling up all of the flags.
i was with 4 non-natives who supported me in this action... i
was confronted by a nationalistic-settler, a young white boy who attends
the college demanding i relinquish the flags to him. i held my ground and
confiscated them.
i did not want to cave to his support of the occupying, settler-colonial, imperalist
state, and the endorsing of the genocide of indigenous peoples across the world.
So by objecting to a disrespectful, unlawful act of vandalism, the
“nationalistic-settler white boy,” as the racist Lickers put it, must obviously
endorse the genocide of non-whites. This is more evidence of the irrational and
historically ignorant hate that multiculturalism hath wrought.
From the statement of her accomplice Shireman-Grabowski:
My intention was not to cause pain but to visibilize [sic] the
necessity of honoring all human life and to help a friend heal from the
violence of genocide that she carries with her on a daily basis as an
indigenous person.
She honors all life by desecrating a memorial to thousands of American
victims of Islamic terrorism. This is the perverse logic of multiculturalism,
which romanticizes all cultures but our own as noble and peaceful, and elevates
them above that of the resource-raping, genocidal white occupiers.
While the American flags on the Middlebury hillside symbolize to some the
loss of innocent lives in New York, to others they represent centuries of
bloody conquest and mass murder.
So she and her cohorts take the same stance toward America as al Qaeda.
As a settler on stolen land, I do not have the luxury of grieving without
an eye to power… Please
understand that I am grappling with my complicity in the overwhelming legacy of
settler colonialism. Part of this process for me is honoring the feelings and
wishes of people who find themselves on the other side of this history…
This reeks of so much liberal white guilt, Shireman-Grabowski should be on suicide watch.
I don't pretend to know if every action I take is right or justified-this
process is painful and complicated.
Let me uncomplicate it for you. Your action was neither right nor
justified, and you need professional help after paying a fine for vandalism and
suspension from Middlebury College. One student, Sasha Schell, saw the vandalism and later said, “It is really disrespectful to our community. It is
disrespectful to the firefighters who went into the towers to save people. Most
of all, it is disrespectful to anybody who lost somebody on that day. It was
completely out of line for anybody to come remove those flags. This is a
travesty.”
Amanda Lickers is
described elsewhere as “an anarchaqueer Onkwehon:we
cis-woman” [I had to look this one up; it’s a term among leftists obsessed with
gender identity that means “a woman who identifies as a woman”] who focuses “on
combating ecocide, hating the police, and harvesting medicines.” She “hopes to
work towards dismantling all systems of oppression, slashing at their social,
cultural and material infrastructures.”
There you have
it. An “anarchaqueer” who “hates the police” and whose goal is to “dismantle
all systems of oppression,” decided to respect the massacred dead by dismantling
a 9/11 memorial respectful of massacred Americans.
Remember, this is
a woman who was invited to facilitate a workshop on settler
responsibility and decolonization on campus, so there are students at
Middlebury supportive enough of her radical multiculturalism to attend a
workshop and at least one person there – a professor or administrator – with
the authority to invite her. Hopefully her vandalism and subsequent unhinged
statement will give them second thoughts about asking her back.
(This article originally appeared here on FrontPage Mag, 9/17/13)
