It’s catching on on American university campuses. Server USA Today pointed out to the actions of the New York police, who arrested Columbia University professor Gregory Pflugfelder. She detained him at his home. Supposedly just because he was trying to document the work of the NYPD. “He didn’t know it, but a cultural monster was about to show up at his door,” the server said.
A few days ago, 64-year-old Professor Pflugfelder walked outside his house and couldn’t help but wonder. The house is located off campus across the street from the university. The professor allegedly wanted to record an iPhone video of hundreds of police officers responding to university student protests against Israel’s war in Gaza. And fifteen minutes later, the NYPD arrested him. The New York Police Department listed the professor among 112 people arrested at the university. However, USA Today noted that Pflugfelder was not on campus. “I certainly wasn’t a danger to anybody,” the professor told USA Today. “I was literally standing in the street and I wasn’t blocking anybody.” Yet he ended up in a holding cell. Like many others.
Demonstrators protesting on American university campuses wave Palestinian flags and demand that the universities end their cooperation with Israel, or with Israeli actors. Because, from their point of view, the Israelis are doing terrible things in the Gaza Strip when they respond to the terrorist attack by the Palestinian movement Hamas on the territory of Israel on October 7.
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Columbia University referred questions about the professor’s arrest to the NYPD. Neither the NYPD nor the office of New York City Mayor Eric Adams responded to email requests from USA Today. Mayor Adams said police acted professionally in mass arrests on college campuses, which included police using a SWAT vehicle to enter Hamilton Hall, an occupied Columbia University building.
The professor did not participate in the student protests, but he also said he did not hide his sympathy for those who criticize Israel for waging war with terrorists from the Palestinian Hamas movement. He supported the right of students to demonstrate. He wrote a letter to Columbia University President Minouche Shafiq asking the NYPD to respond to the encampment on campus. “I urge you not to make the historic mistake you made worse by repeating it,” he wrote on April 23.
A week later, on Tuesday, he described the situation to USA Today; he felt history was about to be rewritten and wanted to document it. He walked out of his apartment building to record a video on his iPhone. And ended up in handcuffs. However, the mayor is convinced that the police acted correctly. “The NYPD ensured that the operation was organized, calm and there were no injuries or violent confrontations,” Adams told reporters Wednesday, a day after the arrests.
But Jennvine Wong, supervising attorney at the nonprofit Legal Aid Society’s Police Accountability Project, said Pflugfelder’s arrest raises questions about whether the NYPD may have unnecessarily escalated further tensions. “Generally speaking, there is still a First Amendment right (to freedom of speech) to take a record in public as long as it does not interfere with the police.”
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“There are professional outside actors involved in these protests,” said Edward A. Caban, New York City’s police commissioner. “They are neither connected with the relevant institutions nor with the campuses, and they are working to escalate the situation.” To his words warned the New York Times server. By reviewing police records and interviews with dozens of people involved in the Columbia University protest, the New York Times found that a small handful of the nearly three dozen arrested, who lacked ties to the university, were involved in other protests around the country. But the same investigation revealed that this cannot be said about most of the protesters and that they joined the protests freely. City officials said 29% of those arrested this week in Columbia had no connection to the university. A spokeswoman for Mayor Eric Adams said in a statement that the number of arrests “speaks for itself.”
Server British newspaper The Guardian however, he offered a slightly different perspective on the whole matter. “New York City Mayor Eric Adams remains under pressure to reveal how many of the 282 people arrested at campus protests in Manhattan on Tuesday night were non-students after he repeatedly claimed that ‘outside agitators’ were responsible for the escalation that sparked overwhelming enforcement intervention.” Adams also claimed in several interviews that outside influences included an individual whose “husband was arrested and convicted of terrorism at the federal level.” He claimed to MSNBC that the woman, along with other “outside influences,” could be taking advantage of the students involved in the protest.
“Once we were able to identify some other people, I knew there was no way we were going to allow these kids to be exploited the way they were exploited,” Adams told the news outlet Wednesday. Although authorities have not specifically named the woman, media reports suggest she is Nahla Al-Arian, the wife of Sami Al-Arian, a former computer engineering professor and prominent Palestinian activist from the 1990s.
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war in Israel
Reports from the battlefield are difficult to verify in real time, regardless of whether they come from any side of the conflict. Both warring parties, for understandable reasons, may release completely or partially false (misleading) information.
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Tags: Arrests campuses escalation Suspicion
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