Israel’s War Against Palestine: Documenting the Military Occupation of Palestinian and Arab Lands

USACBI: Scholars in solidarity with Khader Adnan (please add your name)

21 February 2012

Distributed by email 20 Feb 2012

US Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel

www.usacbi.org +  +  Facebook + Twitter @usacbi

Sign On: Scholars in Solidarity with Khader Adnan

Please distribute widely to colleagues and sign on… 

http://www.usacbi.org/2012/02/sign-on-scholars-in-solidarity-with-khader-adnan/

The following statement will be distributed to the International Committee of the Red Cross, Israeli officials, and the US State Department urging immediate action for the freedom of Khader Adnan.

Please click here to sign on or email :We, the undersigned, write as concerned scholars and academics to demand the immediate release of Palestinian baker and political prisoner Khader Adnan. Adnan has been engaged in a hunger strike for 65 days, since his arrest on December 17, 2011. As academics we are signing to express our commitment to principles of freedom from repression and arbitrary detention, as well as our responsibility to highlight situations of injustice.

During that time, he has not been charged with any crime. He has been instead held under ‘administrative detention’, a procedure in which Palestinian detainees are held without charge or trial for up to six months, which can be renewed indefinitely.

On January 8, 2012, Khader Adnan was given a four-month administrative detention order signed by a military commander. Neither he nor his lawyers have been presented with any evidence, nor any accusations or charges of wrongdoing. Adnan began his hunger strike after suffering physical and psychological abuse at the hands of his interrogators, and was placed in solitary confinement. (For details, please see Addameer’s report.) This is the eighth time Adnan has been detained, and he has served a total of six years in Israeli prisons – mostly without charge or trial under the administrative detention scheme.

We are deeply concerned that Khader Adnan, like thousands of other Palestinians, has been jailed for his political beliefs and his activism to free Palestine from occupation. There are 309 other Palestinians currently held in administrative detentionwithout charge or trial, including 24 members of the Palestinian Legislative Council, and nearly 4,500 Palestinians in Israeli prisons subject to military courts or ‘security’ trials. Over 40 percent of Palestinian men from the West Bank have been imprisoned or detained by the Israeli occupation at some point in their lives. 20 Palestinian prisoners are held in solitary confinement and isolation, a practice that United Nations Special Rapporteur on torture Juan E. Mendez has urged be banned.

Khader Adnan has lost eighty pounds during his hunger strike. He is unable to walk. Despite this, he is shackled hand and foot to his hospital bed and under armed guard at all times. After fifty days, hunger strikers are at severe risk of death or organ failure; multiple physicians who have examined Adnan have spoken to his precarious physical state. Hundreds of Palestinian prisoners have joined his hunger strike, and international organizations have joined the call for his release, including Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and the Carter Center. Amnesty International has also issued a call to end the use of administrative detention.

Khader Adnan’s hunger strike is a call to the conscience of the world, that requires our urgent international attention and solidarity. He carries with him the voices and the dignity of the Irish hunger strikers of 1981, of Bhaghat Singh and Mohandas Gandhi, and of Palestinian political prisoners over the decades demanding their rights and their freedom, from jail and from occupation.

We demand:

  • the immediate freedom of Khader Adnan
  • an immediate end to the practice of administrative detention
  • an immediate end to the use of solitary confinement and isolation

Khader Adnan has become an international symbol of freedom and dignity in the face of grave injustice. Immediate action must be taken to bring this injustice to an end.

click here to sign on!

Signatories:
Tithi Bhattacharya, Purdue University
Nada Elia, Antioch University
Richard Falk, University of California, Santa Barbara
Bill Fletcher, Jr., past president TransAfrica Forum
Cynthia Franklin, University of Hawai’i
Jess Ghannam, University of California, San Francisco
Sherna Berger Gluck, Emerita Faculty, California State University, Long Beach (CA)
Salah D. Hassan, Michigan State University
Annemarie Jacir, filmmaker
J Kehaulani Kauanui, Wesleyan University
Robin D.G. Kelley, University of California, Los Angeles
David Klein, Professor of Mathematics, California State University – Northridge
Dennis Kortheuer, California State University, Long Beach
Jacob Kuhn, Research Assistant, Joyce & Edward E. Brewer Chair in Applied Ethics, Purdue University
Maivan Clech Lam, Professor emeritus, City University of New York Graduate Center
David Lloyd, University of Southern California
Alex Lubin, American University of Beirut
Laura Lyons, University of Hawai’i
David May, Purdue University
Marcy Newman, independent scholar
Ismail Ouraich, Purdue University
Vijay Prashad, author Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World
David Shorter, University of California
Tatiana Young, University of Washington – Seattle
US Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel

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