Students try to prevent a lecture by a Jew at a federal university

Students linked to the Central Directory of Students (DCE) of the Federal University of Amazonas (Ufam) tried to prevent the holding of a lecture on entrepreneurship in Israel with the chief executive of StandWithUsBrasil, the political scientist specialist in the Middle East and National Security, André Lajst.

The demonstration did not prevent the lecture from being held, but ended up with a university employee injured and a student arrested.

The students gathered outside the place where the lecture was taking place, last Thursday (10th), with posters, megaphones and Palestinian flags. Screaming, dozens of pro-Palestinian militants accused Lajst of making “apology for the genocide of the Palestinian people”.

Federal Police from the Tactical Operations Command were called in to contain the confusion. The speaker had to be escorted in and out of the venue.

On social media, André Lajst said that his presence at the university was opposed only because he was an Israeli Jew, regardless of the topic of the lecture.

“If that’s not anti-Semitism, Judeophobia, Jew-hatred, I don’t know what is,” Lajst said in a video shared on Twitter.

A Ufam employee was injured after trying to talk to students. The servant’s daughter was also attacked by the militants.

In videos that circulate on social networks, it is possible to see the moment when the servant reacts to the group after her daughter says she was attacked by one of the demonstrators. The server retaliates against the aggression with pushes, but is surrounded and knocked down by the students.

According to the local press, the Ufam employee had her nose broken.

After the confusion, the server registered a police report against the aggressors.

During the demonstrations, the president of the Socialist Youth Union (UJS) of Amazonas, history student Christopher Rocha, was arrested by the Federal Police (PF) for contempt. Christopher appears in videos on social networks shouting at the police and refusing to comply with the agents’ orders.

According to the dean of Ufam, Siylvio Pulga, the student was released after providing clarifications at the headquarters of the PF Superintendence.

At the Superintendency, the dean recorded a video alongside the student. Christopher criticized the PF’s action and said that the group “wasn’t doing anything wrong”. Even after trying to prevent the holding of an event within a public university, the student also stated that he “continues in the fight for democracy to be respected”.

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another case

This is not the first time that André Lajst has been harassed at Ufam. In 2018, the professor was the target of protesters when lecturing to law school students. In a message published on his social networks at the time, Lajst said that the event was interrupted by “radical students” who “started screaming and interrupted the lecture with a sign written ‘genocide’”.