By Jim Geraghty
Thursday, May 08, 2025
You would think everyone involved with Columbia
University would want to be on their best behavior for a little while, avoid
any violent clashes, and restore public confidence in the institution and the
good judgment of the students who attend the school. After all, the Trump
administration is full of people who have nothing but contempt for the place,
the federal government already threatened to pull $400 million in research
grants and other federally administered dispensations, and the U.S. Department of Justice is investigating antisemitic
agitation on campus. For everybody involved, from top administrators to
students to staff, this is just about the worst possible time to look like a
pep rally for Hamas.
Well, you’d be wrong, because yesterday afternoon, about
a hundred protesters — the usual anti-“Zionist” (wink, wink) idiots — decided to take over part of the
library and trashed the place. (You can quibble with the quality of
history education at Columbia, but at least some students demonstrate some
familiarity with the Vandals.)
At roughly 3:15 p.m. Wednesday afternoon, about 100
protesters took over the Lawrence A. Wien Reading Room in Butler Library,
hanging a banner declaring the space — where moments earlier, every student had
been quietly minding their own business and studying — a “Liberated Zone.”
Apparently, everyone in the library was being liberated from peace, quiet, and
getting anything done. Hey, schmucks, finals at Columbia begin Friday. Your fellow students
actually need to study.
The activists declared their demands and agenda in a Substack post:
Over 100 people have just flooded
Butler Library and renamed it the Basel Al-Araj Popular University. The flood
shows that as long as Columbia funds and profits from imperialist violence, the
people will continue to disrupt Columbia’s profits and legitimacy. Repression
breeds resistance — if Columbia escalates repression, the people will continue
to escalate disruptions on this campus.
In their report on the Columbia protests, Time magazine describes Basel al-Araj as “a
Palestinian activist and writer who died in 2017.” Well, that’s one way
to describe him. Israelis might describe him differently:
The raid involved the IDF and the
Border Police’s counterterrorism unit, who surrounded an apartment building
where the suspect, 31-year-old Basel Al-Araj, was staying.
Video footage released by the IDF
shows security forces entering an apartment and finding the suspect hiding in a
small hallway storage space above a doorway.
Police spokesmen charged that
when Araj saw them, he opened fire with a Carlo submachine gun. Security forces
fired back, killing Araj, a pharmacist from the village of al-Walaja near
Bethlehem.
Palestinian reports said that
Araj, who is a well known activist against Israel’s military rule, and the
security forces clashed in a two-hour gun battle.
According to the reports, Araj
ran out of ammunition and the security forces subsequently shot him dead.
An M16 rifle was also found in
his home, according to the police spokesmen.
The spokesmen also said Araj “was
the head of a terrorist cell that planned to carry out [attacks] against
Israeli targets” and that he had purchased the weapons.
So, he’s the kind of “activist and writer” who buys
weapons and plans terrorist attacks and died firing a rifle at the IDF.
(They’ve really cut back on the research staff over at Time, huh?)
Al-Araj did do some writing, though, and one of his
eight rules of guerrilla warfare was that there was no distinction between
soldiers and civilians or combatants and non-combatants: “Today’s wars are no
longer just wars and clashes between armies but rather are struggles between
societies. Let us be like a solid structure and play a game of biting fingers
with the enemy, our society against their society.” Swell guy, huh?
University authorities initially responded with a firmly worded statement and a polite
request to disperse:
Unfortunately, the University is
dealing with a disruption in reading room 301 of Butler Library. Columbia’s
Public Safety Team is responding and working to mitigate the situation.
Individuals have been asked for identification, which will be recorded, and
asked to disperse. They have been told that failure to comply will result in
violations of our rules and policies and possible arrest. No individuals who
have been protesting in the reading room, have chosen, at this point, to
identify themselves and depart.
Now, I know this is going to shock you, but the
protesters did not disperse.
Columbia University’s acting president, Claire Shipman — yes, that Shipman, the longtime television journalist
— issued a new statement, hours later:
The individuals who disrupted
activities in Butler Reading Room 301 still refuse to identify themselves and
leave the building. Due to the number of individuals participating in the
disruption inside and outside of the building, a large group of people attempting
to force their way into Butler Library creating a safety hazard, and what we
believe to be the significant presence of individuals not affiliated with the
University, Columbia has taken the necessary step of requesting the presence of
NYPD to assist in securing the building and the safety of our community.
Sadly, during the course of this
disruption, two of our Columbia Public Safety Officers sustained injuries
during a crowd surge when individuals attempted to force their way into the
building and into Room 301. These actions are outrageous.
The punks occupying the library had four hours to make a
ruckus before the NYPD showed up.
New York City Mayor Eric Adams — brought to you by Turkish Airlines — appeared on the city’s NBC affiliate and stated, “This
behavior is unacceptable. We are in communication with the staff there, and the
NYPD is on its way. And I want to say to parents, if your children are on the
Columbia campus and participate in this, I think you should reach out to them.
This is not what you do on a college campus, particularly going inside a
library and protesting in this manner.”
NBC News reported that the NYPD arrested “at least 78
people.”
In
a five-minute video released late last night, Shipman said:
These actions not only
represented a violation of university policies, but they also posed a serious
risk to our students and campus safety. We had no choice but to ask for the
assistance of the NYPD, and I am grateful for their help and professionalism,
as well as that of our public safety team. Let me be clear: what happened
today, what I witnessed, was utterly unacceptable.
Shipman said she went to the library and arrived to find
one public-safety officer wheeled out on a gurney and another getting bandaged.
She said that after the protesters had been arrested, she
walked through the reading room:
I saw it defaced and damaged in
disturbing ways and with disturbing slogans. Violence and vandalism, hijacking
a library — none of that has any place on our campus. These aren’t Columbia’s
values. Let me be clear: Columbia unequivocally rejects antisemitism and all
other forms of harassment and discrimination. And we certainly reject a group
of students — and we don’t yet know whether there were outsiders involved —
closing down a library in the middle of the week before finals and forcing 900
students out of their study spaces, many leaving belongings behind.
Credit where it’s due, Columbia called the cops much more
quickly than before, and Shipman is saying all the right things now.
But to hear the account from the student journalists at the Columbia Spectator, the
big controversy is how campus security responded:
After the sit-in began, Public
Safety officers stood at the doors of Butler, preventing students outside from
entering the building and telling students already in the library to leave. A
crowd of students formed outside the entrance to Butler, as Public Safety
officers prevented people from entering the library, regardless of if they had
left behind personal belongings.
At around 5:03 p.m., the crowd
rushed past the first set of doors, and several protesters entered the
vestibule of Butler, pushing past Public Safety officers standing in the
doorway. At least four Public Safety officers stood in the doorway between the vestibule
and the library pushing protesters out of Butler.
“You have to stop pushing,” a
Public Safety officer told the crowd.
“Stand back,” another Public
Safety officer said. “Everybody back up.”
The officer repeatedly shouted,
“Back up.”
Several members of the crowd told
the Public Safety officers, “We cannot back up.”
One protester and one journalist
were pushed to the ground.
“You’re hurting this guy right
now,” one individual shouted.
Hey, Columbia J-school students, if you think the biggest
story here is how campus security reacted to an unruly mob taking over the
library, I think you’re missing the forest for the trees. Anyone want to spare
any anger or disapproval for the library’s would-be “occupying force”
spray-painting the shelves, or nah?
Back in March, our Noah Rothman wrote:
It was the universities, of which
Columbia is just one example, that incubated an aggressively insular culture
utterly apart from and hostile to the nation in which those institutions were
situated and upon which they depended for funding and relevance. In much the
same way that America’s corporate culture did not object to its
liberation from the costly extortion racket into which diversity, equity, and
inclusion programs evolved, Columbia folded so quickly not because it was
muscled into it. The college’s administration merely lacked the courage to
slough off the shackles against which they were already struggling.
While many of those who occupied the library were
arrested last night, we know from experience that an arrest does not
necessarily mean serious legal consequences. Back in May 2024, pro-Palestinian
demonstrators took over Hamilton Hall on the campus of Columbia University and
dozens were arrested. But a month later, Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg dropped charges in 31 of the 46 cases:
Apart from trespassing, a
misdemeanor, proving any other criminal charges would be “extremely difficult,”
[Bragg spokesman Doug] Cohen said.
For similar reasons, prosecutors
also dismissed charges against nine of the 22 students and staff members at
City College who were arrested inside a campus building and charged with
burglary during a protest that took place on the same night as the arrests at
Hamilton Hall.
Hey, a busy man like Alvin Bragg must prioritize. It’s
not like those protesters committed a serious crime in New York City,
like falsifying business records back in 2016 to conceal payments to a porn
star. It was just burglary, destruction of private property, and assaulting
janitors.
At
9:44 p.m. last night, Secretary of State Marco Rubio posted on X, “We are
reviewing the visa status of the trespassers and vandals who took over Columbia
University’s library. Pro-Hamas thugs are no longer welcome in our great
nation.”
ADDENDUM: Credit where it’s due, Mother Jones publishes a terrific, detailed exposé on
the health and job performance of 87-year-old Eleanor Holmes Norton, the
District of Columbia’s nonvoting delegate to the House of Representatives:
I’m a longtime District resident
who used to report on the city government. I pay attention to DC politics. Even
so, I hadn’t fully appreciated just how much Norton had declined until 2021
when she spoke at my son’s high school graduation. She had trouble pronouncing
the school’s name and told incoherent tales of working in the federal
bureaucracy. The charter school administration clearly had expected better. And
why wouldn’t they? Until very recently, local media have all but ignored
Norton’s decline. After the speech, I discovered that her growing frailty and
emerging cognitive issues were something of an open secret among local
politicos and journalists, but no one wanted to broach the subject publicly.
One explained that her status as a civil rights legend made her untouchable. .
. .
What’s notable about Norton’s
recent tenure though, aren’t the car crashes or the weird zebra press releases,
but just how absent she has been from public life. Last year, she raised more
than $200,000 for a virtually nonexistent reelection campaign. She skipped the
DC Pride parade, a command performance for local officials, and her usual
meeting with the Ward 8 Democrats. She barely put up any campaign signs.
During the recent election,
Norton’s opponents say she refused to participate in any debates. One of her
few media appearances made it clear why. In May 2024, Team Rayceen, the
production company of local LGBTQ personality Rayceen Pendarvis, featured Norton
in a series of online candidate interviews. Norton got the softball questions
in advance. Even so, she appeared to read the answers from a script.
When the history of the politics of this era is written,
a huge factor will be Baby Boomers (or those born just before that era) who
refused to hang it up when they were well past their prime: Dianne Feinstein,
Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Nancy Pelosi, Kay Granger, Maxine Waters, Mitch McConnell,
Joe Biden . . .
No comments:
Post a Comment