The parade of useful idiots on New York City’s Barnard College campus seems to be expanding. On Wednesday, 50 anti-Israel protestors seized a campus building. On Thursday, at least 100 protesters gathered at the entrance to Barnard College, wearing keffiyehs and shouting “Free Palestine.”
More protests broke out on Thursday at New York City’s Barnard College after a group of more than 50 anti-Israel agitators took over a building on campus the day before.
The NYPD made several arrests after the protests reignited, with around 100 anti-Israel demonstrators gathering in front of the entrance to Barnard, once again wearing masks and keffiyehs and chanting, “Free Palestine.”
Tension rose and became more chaotic as protesters marched from Barnard to CUNY’s City College campus, to protest outside Gov. Kathy Hochul’s event at CUNY, which was canceled due to the anticipated protest.
The protesters were heard chanting criticisms of Hochul and “NYPD KKK,” and tried to breach police barricades and get close to officers’ faces.
This kind of behavior, we should note, is not a First Amendment issue. These are not “fiery but peaceful” protests. What happened on Wednesday was a riot. There were arrests. There should have been more:
Robin Levine, Barnard’s vice president for strategic communications, confirmed that a faculty member was injured during Wednesday’s protest and sent to the hospital, but did not offer further details.
“They encouraged others to enter campus without identification, showing blatant disregard for the safety of our community,” Levine said in a previous statement.
The school warned that if the students were not gone by 9:30 p.m., officials would be forced to take “additional, necessary measures to protect our campus.”
The students were not gone by 9:30 PM.
This latest outrage began as protests over the expulsion of two pro-Hamas students, who had been passing around propaganda flyers inside a classroom:
The students were protesting the expulsion of two students who stormed a Columbia University classroom in January and allegedly threw around flyers filled with hateful speech.
Columbia Students for Justice in Palestine displayed videos on X of masked students in a hallway on Wednesday, beating on drums and chanting on megaphones.
This kind of thing will continue until some more severe consequences are meted out.
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Protesting is a right, enshrined in the First Amendment. But there are limits, and these people clearly surpassed them. Even the “hate speech” literature may be protected under the First Amendment, right up to the point where it constitutes an incitement to violence. But seizing a campus building is not a protest. Breaching police barricades is not a protest. This was a riot, and should have been dealt with as a riot.
Every person who took part in this should have been arrested and prosecuted. Every student that took part in this should be expelled. Every foreign student here on a student visa should have said visa revoked and be repatriated back to where they came from. These riots will continue until the consequences become serious enough to forestall them.
It’s ironic in the extreme, isn’t it, that here in the United States the left loves to screech “Nazi!” whenever the Trump administration, for instance, repatriates illegal aliens, but when it comes to the actual, overt displays of antisemitism, it always comes from the left? And these events will only grow more virulent as long as they are tolerated.
