Despite ‘Ban,’ Anti-Israel Groups at Columbia Are Mounting Disruptive Protests, as University Fails To Crack Down

Columbia University is failing to crack down on unauthorized pro-Palestinian and pro-Hamas student protests that are disrupting its campus despite the university having suspended the chapters of two anti-Israel groups behind these protests, Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace, and barred them from holding on-campus activities.In November, Columbia suspended its chapters of SJP and JVP, cutting off the two groups’ school funding and forbidding them from sponsoring on-campus events, such as protests and “die-ins,” through the fall term. Per the ban, the groups are not permitted to resume on-campus activities without permission. While the fall term ended in December, it appears that the groups have yet to be reinstated. Despite the groups’ lack of reinstatement, disorderly anti-Israel, pro-Palestinian, and pro-Hamas demonstrations, which appear to be organized by leaders and members of SJP and JVP, have been occuring on campus grounds and disrupting student life for weeks while Columbia administrators stay mostly silent. Neither student group responded to the Sun’s requests for comment.The failure of the Columbia administration to enforce its own rulings was marked in December in a dispatch in the Sun by Daniella Kahane. Since then the situation has grown only worse. “The university is engaging in selective enforcement,” an assistant professor at Columbia Business School, Shai Davidai, who has been documenting the anti-Israel sentiment surging on campus, tells the Sun. “They’re saying there are two rules in the university. There’s one rule for everyone, and there’s another rule for the SJP and JVP.”An “emergency protest” against Israel took over Columbia’s Morningside Heights campus on Wednesday. The class walk-out was organized by SJP and JVP, alongside the student groups, Student Workers of Columbia, Barnard-Columbia Abolition Collective, the Palestinian Student Union, and the coalition Columbia University Apartheid Divest.The groups promoted the event via Instagram the day before, with one widely-reshared post asking students to “WALK OUT IF YOU HAVE CLASS — NO BUSINESS AS USUAL DURING A GENOCIDE.” One of the protest organizers shouted through a megaphone while standing on Columbia’s walled-in central quad, the closest thing the urbanized university has to a classic college campus, as a crowd of students cheered him on.Another organizer led a chant in Arabic of “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be Arab,” a slogan widely considered to be a call for the destruction of the State of Israel. Yet another demonstrator shouted, “from New York to Gaza, globalize the intifada,” a slogan that can be interpreted as an exhortation to bring to America the kind of terror attacks that have marked prior intifadas against Israel.“I’m genuinely concerned as these protests are getting more and more violent in rhetoric and demeanor toward Jews on campus,” a graduate student, Alon Levin, tells the Sun. “They’re targeting Jewish faculty members and administrators who speak out against their actions and singling them out by name, and visibly Jewish students who were observing on the sidelines were being pointed out and photographed.”During a protest last Friday, individuals who have not been publicly identified sprayed some of the Columbia and Barnard anti-Israel student protesters with a foul-smelling so-called “skunk spray.” The affected students complained of “burning eyes, nausea, headaches, abdominal and chest pain and vomiting,” according to the Intercept.Following the “skunk” incident, the university issued a statement by its interim provost, Dennis Mitchell, decrying the use of the “foul-smelling substance that required students to seek medical treatment” as “what appear to have been serious crimes, possibly hate crimes.” Columbia’s statement went on to say that “the alleged perpetrators identified to the University were immediately banned from campus” while New York’s police department proceeds with a criminal investigation. The “skunk” incident has raised yet-unanswered questions. Were full-time enrolled students fully banned from campus without a judicial proceeding? Is the alleged use of skunk spray, a widely-marketed, nontoxic crowd control tool that’s considered a benign alternative to pepper spray, a “serious crime?” Could the users of the alleged spray have been trying to protect students from the anti-Israel protesters?Last Friday’s protests by SJP and JVP, in any event, were “unsanctioned,” a university spokeswoman, Samantha Slater, tells the Sun. “We are asking community members to abide by the University’s event policies and procedures that are in place in order to ensure, to the best of our ability, that we are able to deploy resources for the safety of everyone in our community.” These appeals to obey the rules have been ignored by SJP and JVP with impunity. “All of this is being reported to the administration, but for all intents and purposes, nothing is being done — and that’s possibly the ugliest part about it,” Mr. Levin says. “It’s clear that they’re emboldened by the administration’s lack of punitive action, which fuels their increasingly hostile rhetoric and actions; they know that they can get away with essentially anything at this point.”Students seeking to combat antisemitism on campus, meanwhile, have faced roadblocks. On Tuesday, Columbia Law School’s student senate vetoed an application for a new group called “Law Students Against Antisemitism,” which would include both Jewish and non-Jewish students. Student organizations must go successfully through an approval process to operate on campus.“Students that are trying to organize to battle antisemitism are not allowed to organize,” Mr. Davidai says, while “students that are not allowed to act on campus and are suspended are given free rein.” Columbia Law School has not yet commented publicly on the rejection of Law Students Against Antisemitism, and its press office did not immediately reply to the Sun’s request for comment.Columbia’s suspension of SJP and JVP in November was the result of university policies related to holding campus events being “repeatedly violated,” a Columbia vice president and chairman of the school’s special committee on campus safety, Gerald Rosberg, said in a November 9 statement. He referenced an “unauthorized” student walkout that called for a ceasefire in Gaza and included “threatening rhetoric and intimidation.”Two days after the disastrous congressional testimony of three elite university presidents in December, Columbia, whose president was not at the hearing, appeared to clamp down on student unrest over the war. The university released a statement asserting that “calls for genocide against the Jewish community or any other group are abhorrent, inconsistent with our values and against our rules.”Yet just a few days after that December statement, a separate graduate student group, Columbia Social Workers 4 Palestine, violated university guidance and held a discussion in the lobby of the School of Social Work on the “Significance of the October 7th Palestinian Counteroffensive.” The school’s dean, Melissa Begg, asserted that it was not sponsoring the event and sought to distance the school from “language that promotes violence in any manner.” Yet fliers circulating on social media included the school name, and the “counteroffensive” took place on campus with students disguising themselves with umbrellas. “School and University administrators informed the students of the possibility of disciplinary action and urged them to disperse, which they did,” the School of Social Work said in a statement. “The matter is under review under University procedures.” No disciplinary measures against the group have been announced. JVP also hosted an eight-day menorah lighting event on Columbia’s main campus during Hanukkah, which was advertised on social media as being sponsored by JVP and SJP, despite the existing bans. “The university supports students who wish to commemorate religious holidays,” Ms. Slater, the Columbia spokeswoman, told Jewish Insider, but “we have communicated with JVP that this is an unsanctioned event by an unsanctioned student group.”Columbia took no action against the two banned groups for holding the “unsanctioned” event. The university has yet to explicitly state that SJP and JVP have violated the terms of their suspension or publicly punish the groups for such violations. Brandeis University is the only private university in America to have permanently banned its SJP student group. The historically Jewish university said that student conduct calling for the elimination of Israel was not protected speech on campus. In October, the chancellor of the State University System of Florida, which has more than 400,000 students at multiple campuses, directed all public universities in Florida to “deactivate” its SJP chapters. Mr. Davidai argues that Columbia student organizers who continue to break the rules should be completely banned from being on campus. “They should do this for any organization that creates an unauthorized event because if not,” he says, “then why do we have the rules to begin with?”

Despite ‘Ban,’ Anti-Israel Groups at Columbia Are Mounting Disruptive Protests, as University Fails To Crack Down

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