New York University professor Amin Husain is allegedly the leader of the city-wide subway protest that took place in New York last month which resulted in damaged equipment and vandalism.
Husain is an adjunct professor at New York University’s Center for Experiment Humanities, and urged his followers to “fuck shit up” during the subway protest on Jan. 31, the New York Post reports. Hundreds of protestors stormed the subway stations, pouring glue and or honey into turnstiles and chaining doors open.
Husain is co-founder of Decolonize This Place, which created a social media campaign to urge its followers to violently assault the city’s transit system, resulting in 13 arrests and $100,000 in damages. “You can’t have a situation in New York City where people are putting up on social media intending what they’re going to do. ‘Knives, aim for their neck, blind police officers,’” Police Commissioner Dermot Shea said, according to the New York Post. (RELATED: Professor Says Students Who Cite Jordan Peterson Will Fail His Class)
“We aim to cultivate a politics of autonomy, solidarity, and mutual aid within a long-term, multi-generational horizon of decolonial, anti-capitalist, and feminist liberation that is animated by Grace Lee Boggs’ question: ‘What time is it on the clock of the world?’ For us, decolonization necessitates abolition,” the Decolonize This Place website says.
The streets are ours. The trains our ours. The walls are ours. This moment is ours. How will you and your crew build and fuck shit up for #FTP3 on #J31 (THIS FRIDAY)? Issa mothafuckin’ movement. pic.twitter.com/CoEjRSvmDX
— DecolonizeThisPlace (@decolonize_this) January 28, 2020
“But what does abolition demand? Not only does it demand the abolition of prisons and police, bosses and borders, but as Fred Moten and Stefano Harney write, it’s ‘the abolition of a society that could have prisons, that could have slavery, that could have the wage, and therefore not abolition as the elimination of anything but abolition as the founding of a new society,’” the website reads.
Husain, 44, was born in Palestine and was a teenager during the first Intifada, a four-year-long uprising against Israeli occupation that began in 1987. He is a former lawyer who went to Columbia University, and worked at multinational law firm King & Spalding before becoming a part-time instructor at NYU in 2014. At a pro-Palestine rally in 2016 at Times Square, Husain was on video said he “was throwing rocks, Molotov cocktails, the like,” according to the New York Post.
Husain taught a class in the Spring 2016 semester at NYU called “Art, Activism, and Beyond,” and he describes the class in his syllabus as one that will “explore the role of art after Occupy Wall Street. Weaving in and out of Surrealism politics and poetics and Situationists cities, as we collectively consider what time is it on the clock of the world, and imagining what follows.”
NYU spokesman John Beckman told Daily Caller that NYU opposes the views that have been reported and has “longstanding ties to Israel,” but that “among the thousands of part-time faculty we hire each year, some will disagree with NYU’s positions.”
Husain’s contact information is no longer available on NYU’S web site, according to the New York Post.
This post has been updated to reflect comments from NYU.