New York City mayor Eric Adams has blamed “outside agitators” for escalating anti-Israel protests at Columbia University as he defended his police department’s conduct in clearing protesters on Tuesday night.
The mayor spoke on Wednesday morning, hours after officers equipped in riot gear stormed the campus in a dramatic raid to oust protesters from Hamilton Hall, a building they had seized on Monday night, as well as two encampments that ignited similar protests at universities across the US.
That action, as well as a similar move to clear protesters further uptown at New York’s City College, resulted in about 300 arrests.
“Many people thought that this was just a natural evolution of a protest. It was not. These were professionals that were here and I just want to send a clear message out that there are people who are harmful and trying to radicalise our children and we cannot ignore these outside influences,” Mr Adams told MSNBC.
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In a separate interview with CBS, he called the non-students “outside agitators”.
The NYPD did not immediately release any details about such individuals, prompting some to question the mayor’s claims.
Minouche Shafik, Columbia’s president, defended the decision to call in the police, writing to the university’s staff and students that protesters had “pushed the university to the brink” and that her move came only after multiple attempts to de-escalate the situation through negotiations.
“Students and outside activists breaking Hamilton Hall doors, mistreating our public safety officers and maintenance staff, and damaging property are acts of destruction, not political speech,” she wrote on Wednesday. The university also said it was limiting access to campus, calling Hamilton Hall “an active crime scene”.
Despite efforts to lower tensions, protests continued to spread on American campuses nationwide. Police entered the University of California, Los Angeles overnight to break up clashes between duelling protests.
Protesters at Columbia had demanded that the university divest from companies that profit from Israel, and cut ties with an Israeli university. Many Jewish students complained that vigorous activism had often boiled over into blatant anti-Semitism that would not have been tolerated by the administration if directed at other minority groups.
On Wednesday morning, the neighbourhood around the university was quiet after two weeks of drumbeating protests that prompted comparisons to the anti-Vietnam War demonstrations that rocked Columbia in 1968.
The only sign of the previous night’s raid was the military vehicle used by the police to breach the second floor of Hamilton Hall. It was parked across the street from the campus.
Inside the gates, Columbia’s main lawn appeared to have been cleared of the dozens of colourful tents, draped in signs and banners, that formed the “Gaza Solidarity Encampment”.
A student who did not want to be named said he found the occupation of Hamilton Hall to be “disruptive” but the police response “disproportionately” large nonetheless. Another student said “it was about time” to clear the encampment and that Ms Shafik could have acted earlier to prevent the protests from escalating as much as they did.
In another sign that the stand-off had ended, Columbia’s student radio station, WKCR, which became a mainstay for its round-the-clock news coverage of the protest, switched back to jazz and classical music on Wednesday morning.
– Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2024
