Historic events are unfolding on U.S. campuses as more than 2,100 pro-Palestinian protesters have been arrested across the country in recent days with many protests turning violent, either due to police intervention or counter-protests.
In Columbia, where a motion of impeachment has been filed against the president for calling the police, a new scandal erupts with the revelation that a professor was hired who supported Hamas, Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad and other extreme Islamist and terrorist organisations.
Meanwhile, Manhattan police are investigating a shooting incident that occurred yesterday in Columbia. The officer fired inside Columbia University’s Hamilton Hall and the incident is being investigated by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg. No one was injured, according to Doug Cohen, a spokesman for Bragg’s office, who said there were no students near the area of the shooting.
Already, however, Columbia is reeling from the revelation that in the Modern Arab Studies position, he had preempted Professor Mohammed Abdou, who had publicly praised (!) the massacre carried out by Hamas terrorists on October 7 in southern Israel, a few days after the attack.
Meanwhile, the Columbia University chapter of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) has called for a vote of no confidence against Columbia’s president, Minutche Shafiq, for her decision to call in the police and for the handling of protests in general at the university, which has a “tradition” of activism by its students.
The NYPD, meanwhile, issued a statement vindicating claims by New York City Mayor Eric Adams that “outside agitators” were responsible for the escalation of protests that led to a brutal crackdown. According to figures released by the NYPD, a third of those arrested in Columbia were not students.
The press release issued yesterday by the NYPD said that among those arrested at Columbia, “approximately 29% of those arrested were not affiliated” with the school, while 60% of those arrested in the CCNY protests were not affiliated with the school.
At the same time, in Texas, the attorney general’s office said there was no evidence to corroborate claims by the University of Texas at Austin that individuals among the pro-Palestinian protesters on campus had “weapons, buckets of large rocks, bricks, wooden planks reinforced with irons, hammers and chains.” The attorney general said the large number of arrests of protesters for misdemeanors could not be substantiated.
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US President Joe Biden, in his intervention on the phenomenon that has spread to all US universities (with pro-Palestinian protesters calling for divestment of universities from Israel), condemned the violent protests, including vandalism, trespassing and cancellation of classes, during statements from the White House.
“We are not an authoritarian nation where we silence people and stifle dissent … but neither are we a lawless country,” he said.
He further clarified – addressing the related pleas from Republican members of Congress – that he did not believe the National Guard should have intervened in the protests, and that the campus riots had not caused him to reconsider any Middle East policy.
