Columbia University Horrifyingly Turns on Its Own Students Over Gaza

Columbia University brutally cracked down Thursday on ongoing student protests against Israel’s ruthless war on Gaza, sending in city police officers to arrest some demonstrators.

Students at both Columbia and Barnard College have been protesting for months, demanding the university divest from companies doing business with Israel. As part of the protest, students set up an encampment in the middle of campus on Wednesday.

In response, police on Thursday deployed a drone and brought five corrections buses, according to Talia Jane, a freelance journalist at the scene.

Videos of the encampment showed police entering campus on Thursday and beginning to arrest students. Meanwhile, university officials have reportedly barred people visibly carrying food from entering school grounds, in an attempt to prevent protesters from getting supplies.

Another video shows students flooding the streets outside of Columbia’s campus, preventing the corrections buses from leaving with the arrested protesters.

Three students have reportedly been suspended for participating in the protest, and their college IDs were reportedly deactivated. One of the three is student organizer Isra Hirsi, the daughter of Democratic Representative Illhan Omar.

The university’s dramatically heightened response comes a day after university President Minouche Shafik testified before the House Committee on Education and the Workforce on antisemitism on college campuses. Shafik insisted that “antisemitism has no place on our campus, and I am personally committed to doing everything I can to confront it directly.”

The hearing, however, seemed to be more focused on the opinions of college faculty members, with Republicans Elise Stefanik and Tim Walberg specifically asking about disciplinary measures against two professors who made comments that were perceived as antisemitic.

Omar, on the other hand, asked Shafik about protests specifically, pointing out several attacks against antiwar as well as Palestinian solidarity protests, including an alleged chemical attack against pro-Palestinian protesters in January that is still under police investigation, according to Shafik.

Columbia has also been sued by five Jewish students and two student organizations after the university suspended the student groups Jewish Voice for Peace and Students for Justice in Palestine in November.

Thursday’s police involvement at Columbia is further evidence that the response to campus protests over Gaza across the country has mostly been one of censorship and hysteria designed to suppress pro-Palestinian activism, as Osita Nwanevu wrote for The New Republic in December. The crowds at protests both on and off college campuses are diverse, with Jews, Muslims, Black, and brown demonstrators. Critics, particularly Republican lawmakers, often hide behind allegations of antisemitism as a way to launch attacks on academic freedom.

Funding for Ukraine and Israel has been hotly contested in Congress. For Marjorie Taylor Greene, it’s just fodder for trolling.

As two separate supplemental aid packages make their way through the House, Greene has proposed a series of outlandish amendments to both bills. For a measure on Ukrainian military aid, Greene submitted amendments requiring members who vote for the aid to “conscript in the Ukrainian army,” and directing President Joe Biden to withdraw from NATO.

And for Israel, Greene, far from requiring aid to be conditioned on Israeli compliance with international law, played one of her old hits: She proposed that funding in the bill be allocated to “the development of space laser technology on the southwest border,” a callback to her previous antisemitic remarks about “Jewish space lasers,” with a bit of gratuitous eliminationist rhetoric about migrants.

There are plenty of good reasons to oppose military aid to Israel, and opposition to arming Ukraine has become a signature position of the hard right. But Greene appears to have no interest in engaging with the subjects on their merits at all. Instead, the amendments are part of Greene’s campaign against House Speaker Mike Johnson, whom she has threatened to oust for bringing aid bills to the House floor.

Johnson has struggled to get his caucus behind the aid packages; it’s the reason why he divided up the countries into separate bills. Greene is one of the faces of Republican resistance to Johnson’s leadership, but hard-line GOP dissatisfaction with Johnson dates back to his first days as speaker.

Greene’s opposition to aid for Israel puts her in the minority of her party, while Ukrainian aid has divided the Republican Party, prompting senior members to declare that their colleagues are repeating Russian propaganda. Greene has come under fire recently for praising Vladimir Putin and suggesting that Ukraine is waging a “war on Christianity.” But her latest stunt, emblematic of a distinctive style of conservative politics, suggests that her positions aren’t particularly principled. She’s just happy to get off a few jokes.

A Republican representative has a new conspiracy about the January 6 insurrection, and despite the GOP’s laundry list of theories about the attack, this might be one of the strangest yet.

Representative Greg Murphy floated the idea Wednesday night that Donald Trump’s secretary of the army “slow-walked” the deployment of National Guard troops to the Capitol on January 6 “in order to allow more chaos to occur” so that he could get a job in the Biden administration.

“They were ready to act, and they were slow-walked by the Secretary of the Army, apparently with some thoughts that he was going to join the Biden administration,” Murphy told Newsmax. “I don’t have first-hand knowledge of that, but that’s one of the general working diagnoses is, as we say.”

This is an incredible theory, to say the least. If anyone is guilty of delaying a response to the riots, it’s Donald Trump. Those close to the president that day even claim that he wasn’t interested in any swift action. This is coupled with the fact that many of those arrested in connection with the riots say that they were answering a call to action from then-President Trump himself.

Republicans have repeatedly downplayed the attack, insisting that it was full of fake Trump supporters who arrived on “ghost buses,” that the government instigated the whole thing, and even that rioters were just taking a walk.

For a party with a reputation of pushing military pride and “support the troops” rhetoric, Republicans have engaged in baseless attacks against U.S. military leaders in the post-Trump era, from holding up military promotions to attacking “supposed wokeness” within the armed forces. Murphy’s new theory really goes to show that to MAGA Republicans, no American institutions are considered off-limits if you can use them to score political points.

Just days after a former federal prosecutor warned that publicizing information about potential jurors in Donald Trump’s hush-money trial could put them in danger, an outed jury member came forward to express concern about being identified.

“Juror number two,” a nurse, explained that friends and colleagues were able to identify her based on personal details revealed during the screening and selection process.  

“I definitely have concerns now … about being in public. Yesterday alone, I had friends, colleagues push things to my phone questioning my identity as a juror. I don’t believe at this point that I can be fair and unbiased and let the outside influences not affect my decision to be in the courtroom,” she said.

Judge Juan Merchan, the Manhattan Supreme Court justice presiding over the case, allowed her to be excused. Merchan then took extra measures to protect the identities of jurors, asking journalists not to report on jurors’ places of employment, a detail included on the questionnaires filled out during selection. 

“There’s a reason why this is an anonymous jury and we’re taking the measures that were taken. And it kind of defeats the purpose of that when so much information is put out there that it is very, very easy for us to identify who the jurors are,” Merchan said.

“I’m directing that the press simply apply common sense and refrain from writing about physical descriptions. It’s just not necessary. It serves no purpose,” he continued. “There’s no need for anyone to mention that one of the jurors had an Irish accent. I don’t see how that advanced any interest whatsoever.”

Fox News host Jesse Watters had revealed information about the juror, including her and her fiancée’s occupations, during a segment about the trial on Tuesday night. “I’m not so sure about juror number two,” he said.

Trump elevated Watters’s segment the following day, claiming that “Liberal Activists” were trying to sneak onto the jury and bias the outcome against him.

As critics have pointed out, enough information on the lives of the jurors has already been reported to identify many of them, potentially putting them in danger. Judges presiding over January 6–related cases have faced right-wing intimidation and harassment campaigns. Fears of similar mob-like tactics being employed against jurors, particularly in Trump’s myriad lawsuits, are well founded.

Judge Lewis Kaplan warned jurors in E. Jean Carroll’s January defamation suit against Trump to “never disclose that you were on this jury.” If juror number two’s experience is indicative, staying silent may not be enough.

Melania Trump is not happy with her husband for mentioning their son Barron’s high school graduation in court, according to a new report.

Stephanie Grisham, a former White House press secretary under Donald Trump, told The Daily Mail that she thinks Melania wasn’t happy that her husband would be bringing unwanted attention to their son.

“He talked about missing Barron’s graduation to the cameras and then again on TruthSocial because it caused a lot of coverage about that, and it’s just not something she would have liked,” Grisham said.

The former president complained at his hush-money trial earlier this week about not being able to attend his youngest child’s graduation. In fact, the judge has yet to decide whether to grant him an exception. Donald Trump is required by New York state law to attend every day of his hush-money trial over his alleged paying off of adult film actress Stormy Daniels to cover up an affair. Judge Juan Merchan said granting the exception would depend on whether the trial is running on schedule—something that hinges largely on whether Trump continues to try to delay proceedings.

Michael Cohen, Donald Trump’s former fixer and lawyer, dismissed Trump’s complaints as “comical” in an interview with the MeidasTouch, saying that he “wasn’t aware” that the former president had attended the graduations of any of his four other children. Cohen also recalled how Trump’s requirements caused Cohen to miss his own family events.

“I missed my twenty-fifth anniversary and my wife’s fiftieth birthday because I was in Otisville, in part because of things that I had done at the direction of and for the benefit of Donald Trump,” Cohen said.

“So, before I start shedding a tear for him, for Barron, and I’m sure Melania is extremely excited he’s not going to be there,” Cohen continued. “Rest assured, I’m not losing any sleep, nor am I going to shed a tear that Trump can’t go to Barron’s graduation.”

There’s no love lost between Cohen and the former president. Trump’s ex-attorney will be a key witness in Trump’s hush-money trial, as he allegedly set up the illegal payments to Daniels.

“He should be worried about the Manhattan district attorney, the district attorney of New York prosecutors, he should be worried about the documentary evidence, he should be worried about all of the witnesses that are going to be coming into that trial simply because, as others have also appropriately put it, this is a simple case,” Cohen told MSNBC in March.