What happens to Americans Peacefully Protesting against Israel

Smearing Tristan Anderson By JAMI TARN

In a hate-filled column in the San Francisco Chronicle (“Tree sitter is not in Berkeley any more” - March 18, 2009), Debra J. Saunders insinuated that Tristan Anderson, still lingering in a coma in Tel Aviv after taking an Israeli tear gas canister to the face, costing him part of his frontal lobe and possibly his right eye, deserves this comeuppance for daring to join Palestinians in protest against Israel’s illegal Apartheid wall, which divides farmers from their olive groves in the West Bank town of Ni’ilin. (He was taking pictures far from the wall, well after the protest had subsided.) Let Saunders look at bloody video of my friend Tristan, a former Berkeley Oak Grove tree-sitter, and say to his parents or his girlfriend that he “found out in the worst way that political protest outside the Bay Area isn’t all energy bars and catch-and-release.”

To be so angry, Saunders must have spent a lot of time sitting in traffic laying on the horn during the march in Tristan’s name, 500 strong by my count, which began at the Israeli Consulate on March 16 and wended through downtown San Francisco.

After the march for Tristan returned to the Israeli Consulate, SFPD officers charged up onto the sidewalk and viciously clubbed people without provocation, as video posted online plainly shows, sending one protester to the hospital for nine staples to his head. A few days later, on the same day four Oakland police officers were murdered, seething San Francisco cops again clubbed peaceful antiwar protesters, sending several women to the hospital with head and rib injuries.

"I pledge allegiance, to the flag, of the United States of Israel. And to the racism, hate and bigotry for which it stands, one cowed nation, under the Star of David..."