By Ryan Grewal, city editor
When Cayman Macdonald heard the news of the U.S. missile strikes on Syria Thursday night, she knew she would hit the streets the next day. What she did not know was that she would be organizing the protest.
“Last night, when I was listening to the news reports, I was so overwhelmed,” said Macdonald, a senior international affairs and political science combined major. “I was going to wait until I saw a Facebook event [for a protest], but I didn’t see one, so I said ‘[expletive] it’ and made my own. I reached out some activists I know and here we are.”
At 5 p.m. Friday – less than 24 hours after U.S. cruise missiles struck a Syrian airbase in response to the use of chemical weapons by President Bashar al-Assad against civilians – nearly 100 protesters filled the area outside of Park Street Station on the Boston Common. The “NO WAR on Syria!” rally organized by Macdonald and Northeastern student Martha Durkee-Neuman.
Many of the protesters held signs, emblazoned with slogans such as, “Hands off Syria,” “Stop American imperialists,” “No war, no ban, no wall” and “Down with imperial intervention, down with capitalist pigs.” One protester held a rainbow pride flag, while another waved the red banner of the communist movement.
Durkee-Neuman, a third-year human services and international affairs combined major, led the impassioned crowd in anti-war chants.
“One, two, three, four – we don’t want your racist wars,” Durkee-Neuman said through a megaphone. “Five, six, seven, eight – stop the killing, stop the hate.”
Speakers at the rally criticized Thursday’s bombing campaign as well as the United States’ policy toward the Middle East. Valentine Moghadam, the director of Northeastern’s international affairs and Middle East studies programs, decried the funding and training of anti-Assad militants and the war’s effects on women.
“What has the support of an armed rebellion gotten in the past six years? Death, destruction […] and a refugee crisis,” Moghadam said to the crowd. “Syrian refugee women are subjected to all kinds of violence […] That’s what war does.”
Jace Ritchey, a third-year justice, rhetoric and society studies major at Northeastern, attended the protest to denounce what he called the hypocrisy of President Donald J. Trump’s policies.
“Bombs don’t solve any problems,” he said. “It doesn’t make any sense, particularly because the U.S. hasn’t paid our dues in accepting refugees.”
Macdonald and Durkee-Neuman led the chanting protesters through the streets of downtown Boston, followed by three Boston Police Department squad cars. They marched up Washington Street to Government Center, where the protesters dispersed – but not before one last chant.
“There ain’t no power like the power of the people because the power of the people don’t stop,” they chanted from the steps of City Hall.
