Pro-Hamas protesters at Columbia University called for the destruction of the state of Israel this week as school leaders have struggled to enforce their own deadline for the protesters to leave.
“We don’t want no two state! We want all of it!” the encampment of protesters chanted. “From the river to the sea! Palestine is all you’ll see!”
“We don’t want no two state. We want all of it.”
“From the river to the sea. Palestine is all you’ll see.” pic.twitter.com/jr8F6xuDZh
— Jessica Costescu (@JessicaCostescu) April 29, 2024
The school claimed that it had started to suspend students who failed to leave the encampment, while at other universities students have faced expulsion and arrest.
“We have begun suspending students as part of the next phase of our efforts to ensure the safety of our campus,” a spokesperson for the school claimed.
Reports of anti-Semitic harassment led a campus rabbi to warn Jewish students to go home for safety. As efforts to uproot tents and detain protesters failed to quell the demonstrations, Columbia shifted to remote learning and hybrid classes at the main campus.
Columbia University President Minouche Shafik has faced intense backlash throughout the two-week ordeal as numerous critics view her lack of action as not only a sign of weakness but a tacit endorsement of what has happened.
Just two months after the September 11 terrorist attack on the United States, Shafik remarked that terrorism was a “form of protesting against a system,” according to a video unearthed by The Daily Wire.
Shafik, who was a vice president at the World Bank at the time, was asked about the economic roots of terrorism in developing countries during an event with the University of California-Berkeley’s Institute of International Studies. While she condemned “extreme views” held by terrorist groups, she said the reason they are popular is because terrorism is a “protest.”
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“You’ll always have individuals who will have extreme views,” Shafik said at the November 2001 event, “but what’s really troubling in the region is that there’s actually quite a broad base of society which has some sympathy for the terrorists, not so much because they approve of their methods, but it’s a form of protesting against a system which is not delivering for them on the economic or the political front.”
Brent Scher and Daniel Chaitin contributed to this report.
Related: Speaker Johnson Calls On Columbia President Shafik To Resign: ‘Very Weak, Inept Leader’
