A Statement Distributed at An-Najah University Against Abdul-Sattar Kassem

by Dr. Abdul-Sattar Kassem

I am distributing the text of the statement issued against me at An-Najah National University and various media outlets on 23/August/2011, signed by:

The Workers’ Union of An-Najah National University

The Student Council of An-Najah National University

The Movement Office at An-Najah National University

This is the text exactly as it appears in the original, and even the errors found here appear in the original text. I am distributing it to people so that they may see the caliber of this statement, and the difference between it and my article, which spoke of the university president’s failure to comply with the ruling of the High Court of Justice.

In the name of God, the Most Gracious, the Most Merciful

Important Statement

An-Najah National University is considered a shining beacon in the march of the Palestinian people and its determined journey toward freedom, excellence, and creativity. Since its founding in 1918 until today, it has succeeded in being a national, intellectual, and scholarly incubator. It has managed to plant its roots and its presence across the reaches and expanses of the homeland, until its existence and its success became a shining proof of this people’s capacity for giving and struggle, despite the difficulty and darkness of the path.

Bound up with its birth are the names and words of resistance, siege, victory, struggle, youth, and national unity. All its people — administration, staff, and students — together painted the seven colors of the rainbow: success, distinction, authenticity, love, solidarity, dignity, and pride. It became the home of all Palestinians, until the martyr Yasser Arafat gave it the title of Palestine’s First University.

Throughout its march of success and its story of struggle, some meddlers have sought to obstruct its confident steps forward, driven in this by their grudges, their delusions, their private interests, and their bank accounts, and by their relentless attempts to score failed victories before microphones and satellite television screens.

…and belongs to it. He has cast doubt on the scholarly standard and academic competence of its professors, and hurled balls of his malice at their dignity when he described them, in more than one place, as slaves, serfs, and lackeys. He has branded their research and academic harvests and awards a farce, casting aside the reports of the world’s leading scholarly institutions.

He has set about portraying the university’s students as a fifth column working in the service of collaborationist agencies (God forbid): Preventive Security and Palestinian Intelligence, who take part in squeezing him and confiscating his ambition to become the sole leader of the Palestinian people. He is the “struggler” who has drifted through and belonged to every faction and party across the Palestinian spectrum, from right to left, from Sunni to Shia, and who has fought with nothing but the swords of insult and accusations of treason.

A conspiratorial mentality has taken root in his mind, so he has divided his students, according to their closeness to him, into patriots and agents, and organized his relations and his grading of them on that basis. He has come to believe that their pens are recording microphones and their notebooks are cameras, and he has divided their origins into refugee camps, villages, towns, and the countryside, thereby planting the seeds of sedition in the university’s grounds and lecture halls.

The silence of the union and student institutions at An-Najah National University in the face of Dr. Abdul-Sattar Kassem’s transgressions has reached its very limit. His branding of the university community as traitors and his abuse of them, in the service of the stock exchange of his own financial and political gains, must be brought to an end. And his attempt to tamper with the fortunes and future of the most important scholarly and educational institution in Palestine must stop immediately and forever.

On this basis, we call on the administration of An-Najah National University, foremost among them the Board of Trustees, the deans, and likewise the university presidency, to take up their historic role and put an immediate end to the transgressions of Dr. Abdul-Sattar Kassem.

As soon as the new academic year begins, we will hold a civilized sit-in wherever he is present, surrounding him and preventing him from delivering lectures full of insults and abuse. We will also organize mass marches to the institutions of the Authority in Nablus and Ramallah under the slogan “No to insults, accusations of treason, and takfir.” The time has come for anyone who brands his own state as treacherous, his people’s institutions as brothels, his universities as pens, his judges and courts as a farce, and his security services as agents, to be held accountable under the law. The time has also come for everyone to know that Palestine stands above all, and that An-Najah National University, and the future and reputation of its students and staff, is a red line that cannot be crossed.

O God, we have delivered our message — O God, bear witness

Source: Translated from the original Arabic, “بيان وُزع في جامعة النجاح ضد عبد الستار قاسم” by Dr. Abdul-Sattar Kassem.