Protesting Columbia University students booed the Speaker of the US House of Representatives

“A growing number of students chanted in support of the terrorists. They persecuted the Jewish students, mocking and insulting them. They were shouting racist slurs,” Johnson said, as protesters chanted in unison: “We can’t hear you”. “Enjoy your freedom of speech,” the Republican leader of the House of Representatives retorted.

Before appearing alongside Republican officials, he also met briefly with the rector of Columbia University, Nemat Shafiková, but he called on her to resign, saying that, in his opinion, she could not handle the situation and was too weak. At the same time, the protesters also demand Shafik’s resignation, but for the opposite reason – they blame her for approving the police intervention against the demonstrators last week, when more than a hundred students were arrested.

Go back to Poland, they are yelling at the Jewish students. Biden condemned anti-Semitic riots in schools

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However, after the intervention of the police, pro-Palestinian protesters rebuilt the tent city on the university campus, and the school management is now negotiating with the protesters, although Shafik previously threatened students who refused to vacate the camp with conditional expulsion.

“I’m telling the students in the protest camp to go back to their classrooms and stop this nonsense,” Johnson said now, adding that the National Guard could be called in against the students. However, New York Governor Kathy Hochul has no plans to do such a thing.

Tensions at the school escalated into riots after Shafik spoke on the subject of anti-Semitism in Congress last Wednesday. Among other things, she promised lawmakers to punish teachers and students who use phrases like “from the river to the sea,” which the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas uses as a call to destroy Israel.

In response, a “Gaza Solidarity Camp” tent city sprung up on campus. The protesting pro-Palestinian students demanded, among other things, that the school cut ties with companies that “profit from Israeli apartheid” or called for an end to the exchange program for students from Israel.

Footage is circulating on social networks of protesters blocking the passage of Jewish students, other chanters calling on them to return “to Poland” or threatening to repeat the terrorist attacks of October 7 last year. Several Jewish students said they did not feel safe on the school’s campus and the school allowed them distance learning. Organizers from among the pro-Palestinian demonstrators, including some Jewish students, deny that these are anti-Semitic protests, saying that isolated incidents are the excesses of a few individuals.

Incidents related to the war between Israel and Palestinian terrorists in the Gaza Strip have occurred at other American universities in recent days. Police officers intervened against protesters at, among others, the University of Texas, the University of Southern California, the Ohio State University, and protest camps sprang up on the campuses of many other schools, including Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.