A notorious professional protester with past ties to multiple controversial anti-Israel efforts was spotted among the rioters who broke into a Columbia University building and occupied it this week, according to police.
Lisa Fithian, 63, was captured in footage taken outside Hamilton Hall — an academic building on the Ivy League’s Morningside Heights campus that protesters, some of them masked, stormed the around 12:30 a.m. on Tuesday.
A lifelong agitator, Fithian in the mid-2010s was raking in $300 per day training unions and other activist groups in the basics of demonstration and disruption, Mother Jones reported in 2012.
She has frequently thrown her energies behind pro-Palestinian causes — and even celebrated her birthday earlier this month in Istanbul, Turkey, where she was “training the participants on the next Flotilla to Gaza in the coming week,” according to an Instagram post.
“It is long past time for this violent Israeli Occupation to end,” Fithian said in a 2018 profile for the Freedom Flotilla Coalition.
“This hateful Israeli occupation of Palestine is not only doing harm and causing death for the Palestinians, it is harming the water, the land and the soul of the Israelis,” she insisted, adding that a “global wave rising for justice will not cease until Palestine is free.”
Fithian boasted about serving on the organizing committee for the 2011 Freedom Flotilla II, an unrealized plan to break Israel’s maritime blockade of the Gaza Strip that was endorsed by Hamas, the NGO Monitor reported at the time.
She also gave “nonviolence training” to the participants in the 2016 Women’s Boat to Gaza, which publicly endorsed the goals of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement.
BDS demands the end of “Israeli Occupation and colonization of all Arab lands” and the movement is considered by many to be antisemitic as it also calls for the complete destruction of Israel.
But while Fithian flaunted her connections to the anti-Israel efforts, she also insisted that her activism was grounded in nonviolence and peace – values she touted while hawking her 2019 book, “Shut It Down: Stories from a Fierce, Loving Resistance.”
”When people ask me, ‘What do you do?’ I say I create crisis,” she says, ”because crisis is that edge where change is possible,” Fithian told the New York Times in 2003.
By that time, Fithian already had about 30 arrests under her belt, the newspaper reported.
Fithian was featured in a video released by the NYPD Tuesday night — just a few hours before hundreds of cops stormed the campus to clear the pro-terror mob and arrested at least 109 people, though it’s not believed she was among those busted during the raid.
Fithian got her start in activism when she founded an underground newspaper called “The Free Thinker” when she was just a high school sophomore, according to Mother Jones, an experience that kicked off a career in various protest movements.
She’s also been known to advocate for labor rights, peace, and environmental issues.
As of Wednesday morning, it was not clear how exactly Fithian was connected with the student protesters who stormed the Columbia academic building to cries for “intifada.”
Mayor Eric Adams told reporters the Hamilton Hall occupiers included troublemakers not affiliated with Columbia who descended on the elite institution’s campus “to serve their own agenda.”
“They’re not here to promote peace, unity, allow a peaceful display in one voice, but they are here to create discord and divisiveness,” Adams said.
