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Columbia Threatens to Suspend Anti-Israel Protesters After Talks Fail
Solidarity encampment at Columbia University, located in the Manhattan borough of New York City. Photo:
Columbia University’s president said on Monday that talks with anti-Israel protesters over the dismantling of an encampment on the Ivy League campus had failed and urged them to voluntarily disperse or face suspension from school.
President Nemat Minouche Shafik said days of talks between student organizers and academic leaders had failed to break a stalemate over the tent encampment set up to protest Israel’s war in Gaza.
Shafik in a statement said Columbia would not divest assets that support Israel’s military, a key demand of the protesters, but offered to invest in health and education in Gaza, and make Columbia’s direct investment holdings more transparent.
Protesters have vowed to keep their encampment on the Manhattan campus until Columbia meets three demands: divestment, transparency in Columbia’s finances and amnesty for students and faculty disciplined for their part in the protests.
The university sent protesters a letter on Monday morning, warning that students who did not vacate the encampment by 2 p.m. ET (1800 GMT) and sign a form acknowledging their participation would face suspension and become ineligible to complete the semester in good standing.
Even students who signed the form and left the area on Monday would still go on “disciplinary probation” until June 2025 or their graduation, whichever came first, according to the letter, which a Columbia spokesperson confirmed was authentic.
“These repulsive scare tactics mean nothing compared to the deaths of over 34,000 Palestinians. We will not move until Columbia meets our demands or we are moved by force,” the Columbia Student Apartheid Divest coalition said in a joint statement on Monday.
A university spokesperson said administrators would have no further comment.
Shafik faced an outcry from many students, faculty and outside observers for summoning New York City police two weeks ago to dismantle the encampment, resulting in more than 100 arrests.
Efforts to remove the encampment, which students set up again within days of the April 18 police action, have triggered dozens of similar protests at schools from California to Boston.
Last week, Columbia took no action when two deadlines it had imposed on protesters to reach an agreement slipped by without a deal. It had cited progress in the talks.
DEMONSTRATIONS AT FRANCE’S SORBONNE, CANADA’S MCGILL
Protests at Columbia and other U.S. universities continued at full force over the weekend, with more arrests around the country and skirmishes between pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian demonstrators at UCLA on Sunday.
Civil rights groups have criticized police violence at campuses such as Atlanta’s Emory University and the University of Texas at Austin, where police in riot gear and on horseback moved against the protesters last week, taking dozens into custody before charges against them were dropped for lacking probable cause.
Dozens of people at Virginia Tech were arrested overnight on Sunday at a student-led encampment, according to local media reports. A video posted on social media showed protesters chanting, “Shame on you,” as some were detained.
A spokesman for university did not immediately respond to a request for comment or give details on those detained.
The school in a post on its website said officials had told the protesters to leave, but they refused to comply. “The university recognized that the situation had the increasing potential to become unsafe,” the statement said, adding that those who refused to leave were charged with trespassing.
Similar demonstrations have sprung up at universities in other countries. Students at McGill University in Montreal set up about 20 anti-Israel protest camps on Saturday demanding the university divest from companies with links to Israel.
By Monday, the number of encampments on the downtown campus had tripled, but many were not set up by members of the McGill community, according to a statement by the university.
McGill also said it was investigating what it said was video evidence of some people using “unequivocally antisemitic language and intimidating behavior.” Students denied the allegation.
In Paris, days after protests at the elite Sciences Po school, police evacuated dozens of protesters who had set up tents in the yard of the Sorbonne University on Monday to mark their anger with the war in Gaza, one of the students told Reuters.
The post Columbia Threatens to Suspend Anti-Israel Protesters After Talks Fail first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Jewish organizations react to a judge denying McGill’s initial request to remove an encampment as the trend spreads to other university campuses in Montreal
A superior court in Quebec has denied an injunction filed by McGill University that would have ordered the removal of a pro-Palestinian encampment that has been occupying its downtown Montreal campus since April 27. Justice Marc St-Pierre said in his decision that the university failed to justify the urgent need to dismantle the camp and […]
The post Jewish organizations react to a judge denying McGill’s initial request to remove an encampment as the trend spreads to other university campuses in Montreal appeared first on The Canadian Jewish News.
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Fredericton police call in the Major Crimes Unit two weeks after an Israeli teen was the victim of an antisemitic beating near her high school
Attacker took it as revenge for what’s going on in Gaza, victim says.
The post Fredericton police call in the Major Crimes Unit two weeks after an Israeli teen was the victim of an antisemitic beating near her high school appeared first on The Canadian Jewish News.
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Anti-Israel Group Leading Pro-Hamas Protests Under Fire for False Claim About Israel’s Independence Day
Pro-Hamas activists gather in Washington Square Park for a rally following a protest march held in response to an NYPD sweep of an anti-Israel encampment at New York University in Manhattan, May 3, 2024. Photo: Matthew Rodier/Sipa USA via Reuters Connect
A prominent anti-Israel group that has helped organize widespread demonstrations against the Jewish state during the war in Gaza falsely claimed that Israel’s Independence Day was intentionally placed to “obscure” a Palestinian day of remembrance, sparking outrage and criticism.
Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), which wrote the statement, is a fringe anti-Israel organization that did not condemn Hamas’ Oct. 7 massacre across southern Israel and has long celebrated terrorism against Israelis.
“Yesterday [Monday], the Israeli government ended its yearly cycle of state holidays that sequentially commemorates the Holocaust, Israeli militarism, and the creation of the state of Israel,” the statement read.
“The sequencing of these holidays,” it argued, “was intentionally designed to conclude and obscure May 15, the day Palestinians mark the ongoing Nakba.” The tweet has garnered more than 7,700 likes.
Yesterday, the Israeli government ended its yearly cycle of state holidays that sequentially commemorates the Holocaust, Israeli militarism, and the creation of the state of Israel.
The sequencing of these holidays was intentionally designed to conclude and obscure May 15, the…
— Jewish Voice for Peace (@jvplive) May 14, 2024
However, critics quickly noted that Nakba Day — meant to commemorate the Palestinian “Nakba,” or “catastrophe,” of the establishment of the modern state of Israel in 1948 — was inaugurated about 35 years after Independence Day and the other major Israeli national holidays near it, making it impossible for the latter to be intentionally established to desecrate the former.
Yom Haatzmaut and Yom Hazikaron — Israel’s Independence Day and Memorial Day, respectively — were each established by law in 1963. Meanwhile, Yom Hashoah, Israel’s Holocaust Memorial Day, was established in 1959.
In contrast, Nakba Day was officially established by Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat in 1998. However, local commemorations and protests were held for years before that.
The term “Nakba” was initially coined by Arab intellectual Constantin Zureiq in his 1948 book, The Meaning of the Nakba. He used the term to refer to the humiliation caused by many Arab armies losing to a small Jewish one in the 1948 war for Israel’s independence. Over time, however, it has come to refer to the fact that about 750,000 Palestinians became refugees as a result of the war, fleeing amid the Arab invasion.
At the same time, a similar number of Jews became refugees as they were expelled from countries in the Middle East and North Africa.
David May, research manager at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, rebuked JVP’s tweet, arguing, “Nakba Day was placed there specifically as a rejection of Jewish independence in their ancestral land. Its timing marks a continued rejection of the Jewish right to independence and self-rule that the Palestinians desire for themselves. So, the Palestinians placed their holiday around the Israeli ones, not the other way around.”
“A basic knowledge of the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict or the thought process of Israelis,” he continued, “would have prevented a tweet assuming that everything Israel does is a callous attempt to erase Palestinians rather than an internal decision based on collective memory.”
“But JVP and their ilk see Israel as an irredeemable evil in a binary world composed of victims and oppressors,” he explained. “Everything they do stems from this basic perception.”
The post Anti-Israel Group Leading Pro-Hamas Protests Under Fire for False Claim About Israel’s Independence Day first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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