For a group of people who routinely rail against “the occupation,” student radicals at Columbia and Barnard love to play occupier. Last week, they sent a security guard to the hospital and caused $30,000 in damages while storming a campus building. On Wednesday they occupied the library, disseminating propaganda pamphlets from Hamas and hoisting an effigy of Barnard’s president.
That president, Laura Rosenbury, offered to hold a private meeting with the spoiled brats later this week. You’ll be shocked to hear that didn’t put an end to the sordid affair. Shortly thereafter, a Barnard official announced an active bomb threat. That didn’t do it either. The NYPD arrived after that, though they arrested just a handful of protesters, pushing the rest outside.
“The latest building storming comes as the Trump administration reviews Columbia’s federal funding over the university’s ‘apparent failure’ to protect Jewish students,” our Jessica Costescu and Lexi Boccuzzi report. Donald Trump, meanwhile, has promised to end all federal funding for universities that allow illegal protests and send foreign agitators “back to the country from which they came.” In the near future, members of his administration’s anti-Semitism task force will visit Columbia. It remains to be seen whether they will have free access to campus buildings when they do.
The verdict is in: Americans loved Trump’s joint address to Congress—and hated Al Green’s disruption. That’s according to a CBS News poll released Wednesday morning, which found that 76 percent of viewers approved of the speech and the same number backed Mike Johnson’s decision to expel Green from the chamber.
It’s bad news for congressional Democrats, who sat for the duration of the address and engaged in disjointed protests. Green expressed no regrets over his tantrum and pleaded guilty to a censure resolution Republicans unveiled Wednesday citing his “breach of proper conduct.” Green’s performative petulance caused him to miss the best part of the night, when Trump made special guest DJ Daniel, a 13-year-old battling brain cancer who happens to be Green’s constituent, an honorary member of the U.S. Secret Service.
“It wasn’t entirely clear how this was supposed to help Democrats win back young and working-class voters,” writes the Free Beacon‘s Andrew Stiles. According to another poll, this time from CNN, “80 percent of Americans who watched Trump’s speech found Green’s behavior to be inappropriate.”
“Binyamin Appelbaum, an Ivy League graduate and member of the New York Times editorial board, disagreed with the majority. The professional journalist argued Green’s act of ‘civil disobedience’ was the best moment of Trump’s entire speech. ‘Why did he stand alone?’ Appelbaum wondered.”
Hamas terrorists have long praised the anti-Semitic unrest that’s festered on U.S. college campuses in the wake of Oct. 7. A new lawsuit, however, alleges that those terrorists haven’t just admired their student supporters in America but actively coordinated with them.
The suit stems from three Israeli hostages freed in a raid last year: Almog Meir Jan, Shlomi Ziv, and Andrey Kozlov. Their captor, Abdallah Aljamal, contributed to Al Jazeera and published frequent missives in the Palestine Chronicle, a pro-Hamas website that’s operated by a nonprofit in Washington state.
During their time in captivity in Aljamal’s home, Jan, Ziv, and Kozlov “witnessed Aljamal file dispatches for the Palestine Chronicle and brag about Hamas’s ability to orchestrate violent campus protests across America.” Aljamal, the lawsuit reveals, “repeatedly expressed his hatred for the State of Israel and the United States of America and informed the [hostages] that Hamas was in contact and actively coordinating with its affiliates in the media and on college campuses.”
“While it has long been known that Hamas-linked entities are fuelling the campus unrest, the hostage testimony confirms for the first time that the terror group itself is playing a role,” our Adam Kredo reports. “Aljamal informed his hostages that ‘Hamas was going to ensure that the United States, as well as Jews and Israelis, are hated everywhere,’ according to the lawsuit. To achieve this goal, the terror group ‘was coordinating with its allies, including its allies in the media and on college campuses, to foment hatred against Israel and Jews.'”
The case is on pace to go to trial early next year. We’ll keep you posted.
Away from the Beacon:
- After meeting with a group of released Israeli hostages, Donald Trump sent this message to their former captors: “‘Shalom Hamas’ means Hello and Goodbye – You can choose. Release all of the Hostages now, not later, and immediately return all of the dead bodies of the people you murdered, or it is OVER for you. Only sick and twisted people keep bodies, and you are sick and twisted!”
- D.C. mayor Muriel Bowser will reportedly remove the giant Black Lives Matter mural painted on a two-block stretch of 16th Street (formally known as Black Lives Matter Plaza) in 2020. Nature is healing.
- Kamala Harris protege Lateefah Simon condemned Republicans for shouting down Al Green as he shouted down Donald Trump. “It felt like I was watching something in a history class of racists yelling at an elderly black man,” she said.
