… Columbia University administrators called in the New York Police Department (NYPD) on Wednesday evening to violently suppress and shut down a pro-Palestinian student occupation of the campus’ Butler Library. Approximately 78 protesters were arrested just over a year after the police-state crackdown at Columbia last April, when the NYPD swarmed the campus to arrest over 100 students and break up the “Gaza Solidarity Encampment.”
On Wednesday afternoon, a group of around 100 anti-genocide student protesters took over Butler’s main reading room and renamed it the “Basel Al-Araj Popular University,” after the Palestinian activist and writer killed by Israeli forces in 2017.
The students’ demands include Columbia’s financial divestment from Zionist organizations, an academic boycott of complicit institutions, cops and ICE off campus and amnesty for all university members unfairly targeted and disciplined for pro-Palestinian actions.
Columbia’s Public Safety officers immediately responded and violently barred protesters from leaving unless they showed identification, which created a prolonged standoff…
I gotta say, Hong Kongers put up way more of a fight than Americans seem to be. Hong Kong Polytechnic University went through a full blown siege in 2019. Six years later, in the land of the free, student leaders get picked off and any protests that manage to get going are easily crushed by the police.
fwiw, Hong Kong protestors were protesting about their own home, rather than these universities protesting in international solidarity against their university’s investments and policies. I’d kinda expect the Hong Kong ones to be defended more viciously.
More specifically, the Hong Kong protests were about the possiblity of HKers being sent to the mainland. Here and now we have multiple actual renditions of US residents to El Salvador and elsewhere (including one of the protesters!)…
The Hong Kong dudes threw tear gas back. If American protesters do that they get shot and killed. Even sitting down peacefully with a flag gets American protesters painted as violent terrorists.