News about York PSC branch meetings

Discussion topics at 4th Thursday meetings

Usually at our meetings on the 4th Thursday in the month we have a discussion about a topic relevant to Palestine. Here’s the programme for the next few months:

April 27th – The impact of President Trump on the Israel/Palestine conflict

May 25th – Providing information to visitors to our stall (Parliament St, most Saturday afternoons)

July 27th – Disability amongst Palestinians, and what voluntary groups are doing to help (Anthony)

 

Important notice about the venue for our meetings

From May 27th we will no longer be meeting at the Priory St centre as they have put room hire prices up to a level that we cannot afford. More information will be posted when we have found a new home.

 

York PSC Parliament St stall

From March we’ve returned to weekly stalls in Parliament St, providing we have enough volunteers, and we’re usually outside Marks and Spencers.

Together Against Prevent

York PSC have signed up in support of this organisation as we share their concerns about the Prevent campaign, which are shown below. See their website for more details.

“This is an important and timely initiative which recognises the dangers and pitfalls of the Prevent policy and rightly calls for people to withdraw their support and involvement with it. Whilst history teaches us that policies introduced in the name of countering terrorism are quickly extended to dissenters and political activists more generally, it also teaches us that by standing together and united, we can resist unjust power and create a better and stronger society for all people and communities”Dr Rizwaan Sabir, Lecturer in Criminology, Liverpool John Moores University

Organisations supporting ‘Together Against Prevent’ have agreed and are promoting the following statement:

We recognise and condemn the damage that Prevent’s “spot the potential terrorist” approach has made primarily in stigmatising and criminalising entire Muslim communities, but also to a growing number of political activists and campaigners labelled with ill-defined terms like “non-violent extremist” or “domestic extremist”.

• We view Prevent as a policy that is based on insufficient evidence to support the flawed assumption that ‘extremist’ ideology opposed to subjective ‘British values’ is the single most important cause of terrorism. We therefore support closer collaboration between different campaigning, religious and community organisations to call on the government to end its Prevent strategy.

• We support and encourage more political debate in schools, colleges and universities and reject attempts to close down and censor dissenting voices. We welcome open discussion with all young people about potentially radical ideas and call on all educational institutions to vigorously defend the right to free academic inquiry on issues considered ‘controversial’.

• We pledge to take no Prevent funds and support non-cooperation, wherever possible, with local Prevent programmes.

York PSC stall, Parliament St, Saturdays 1-3pm

On most Saturdays there are three or four volunteers providing information and an opportunity for discussion about Palestinian matters at our stall in Parliament St. The cold doesn’t usually stop us, but occasionally rain and wind, or one of York’s various festivals, do. We are usually just outside Marks and Spencers or at the Parliament St/Pavement junction.

Please drop in to say hello, find out about what’s happening in Palestine at the moment, sign the petition that we usually have running or perhaps pick up some new Palestine campaigning material.

We are also very keen to have additional volunteers on the stall, so if you feel you’d like to do a bit more for Palestine, please contact us at info@yorkpsc.com. We will make sure that you have some training if you need it, and that you join the stall team on a day when there are experienced PSC members present.

How to keep in touch with York PSC news

If you would like to hear from us about Palestine-related events occurring locally we can email you about them. Just send a blank email to yorkpscinfo-subscribe@yahoogroups.co.uk You should then get an email back with instructions as to either click on a link or reply to that email.  Once that is done,  you should be in the group and on the mailing list – and get another email confirming this. (If you don’t see the email reply the first time, the email might have arrived in your spam folder which should be checked).