New York police arrested dozens of protesters and students at Columbia University, as campus administration cracks down on pro-Palestinian protests in the aftermath of testimony by university officials before Congress.
Police cleared an encampment of demonstrators on Columbia’s Morningside campus on Thursday, after University President Nemat Shafik sicced law enforcement on the protest. After the demonstrators were forcefully removed from the area, university staff were seen dismantling tents and throwing away food and other provisions brought into the encampment.
“Out of an abundance of concern for the safety of Columbia’s campus, I authorized the New York Police Department to begin clearing the encampment from the South Lawn of Morningside campus that had been set up by students in the early hours of Wednesday morning,” Shafik wrote in a statement on Thursday. “The current encampment violates all of the new policies [on campus protests], severely disrupts campus life, and creates a harassing and intimidating environment for many of our students,” she added.
On Wednesday, Shafik testified for nearly four hours before the House Committee on Education and the Workforce. In the aftermath of Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on Israel — and throughout the subsequent war — Congress has leveled intense scrutiny on university administrators’ handling of pro-Palestinan protest movement, and often conflated solidarity with Palestinians as support for Hamas.
During her testimony, Shafik promised lawmakers that her administration was cracking down on unauthorized protests, and disciplining instances of antisemitism on campus. That promise has seemingly escalated to criminalizing the presence of peaceful protesters in order to appease lawmakers in Washington D.C.
At least three students participating in the encampment were suspended Wednesday at Shafik’s direction, more suspensions are expected following Thursday’s arrests. Among those disciplined was Isra Hirsi, daughter of Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) and a student at Columbia’s Barnard College.
Rep. Omar expressed her support for the protesters in a post on X, formerly Twitter. “Columbia has always had an incredible history of students fighting for a more just world and it’s good to see that tradition continue. As NYPD surrounds young activists, I hope their concerns are heard by school administrators and they not be criminalized,” the congresswoman wrote.
More than 34,000 Palestinians have been killed in the ongoing conflict in Gaza, with the vast majority of deaths believed to be civilian, non-combatant casualties. The death toll, which is likely an undercount given the scale of the devastation, is expected to increase as the region teeters on the brink of widespread famine amid heavy restrictions on the entry of humanitarian aid. Protests calling for more forceful action by the U.S. government to curb Israeli military action have erupted throughout the country, including on college campuses. In January, multiple individuals were accused of perpetrating a chemical attack at a Columbia University using “skunk spray” against pro-Palestinian protesters.
After being forcefully evicted or arrested by police on Thursday, protesters continued to demonstrate around Columbia’s campus, and while Shafik’s decision to call in law enforcement may help appease lawmakers on Capitol Hill, it may have irrevocably harmed her relationship with large swaths of Columbia’s students and faculty.
“Columbia can either be a world-class place of research and learning, or we can be an institution that resorts to law-and-order responses to protest even when there’s no threat to safety or operations, but we can’t be both,” Joseph Howley, a classics professor, told the Columbia Spectator. “I wish the last few months had left me with greater confidence that the University’s response today was about how the students were protesting rather than what they were protesting.”
War Is Peace: Trump’s Regime-Change Reversal
As American and Israeli rockets fly into Tehran, with the stated goal of regime change, anyone who bought into the self-evidently absurd idea of “Donald the Dove” ending America’s forever wars ought to be suffering from a bloody form of buyer’s remorse.
It was always bullshit. But that’s what the Trump team was selling hard. Take human ghoul Stephen Miller’s tweet days before the election: “Kamala = WWIII. Trump = Peace.”
The Trump team reads George Orwell’s 1984 like an owner’s manual and so of course “war is peace.” Their undermining of NATO and the dismantling of American alliances in favor of a “might makes right” foreign policy executed by a sycophantic kakistocracy is a guarantee of more war amid autocratic power grabs worldwide, with a side order of corrupt crony capitalism to profit from the chaos.
If you voted for Trump and believed him, this is on you. And that includes self-styled Palestinian peace activists who thought that Biden and Harris were the worst of all possible worlds and stayed home. We will no doubt see protests for the innocent lives lost in these strikes — but I’d have a lot more time for those folks if they were also seen protesting the estimated 20,000 to 30,000 Iranian lives snuffed out by murderous mullahs in the last few months alone.
The Islamic Republic of Iran has been despotic and dangerous from its inception. The Iranian people have been oppressed and denied basic freedoms for decades. But this is an extreme example of a war of choice. The American military strikes against Iran’s nuclear weapons facility last year were justified because Iran cannot be trusted with a nuclear weapon. That is true. But the much trumpeted total obliteration of those facilities is apparently not true — or so goes the justification for this war. And don’t forget that it was Trump who pulled the U.S. out of an Obama-era deal to stop Iran from developing weapons — arguing absurdly that the imperfect anti-nuke deal needed to be blown up to stop Iran from developing a bomb. Iran’s subsequent progress toward a bomb then created the rationale toward these strikes. This is a self-inflicted state of emergency. Peace is war and war is peace.
Pity the willful dupes in Congress who deluded themselves into thinking that Trump deserved the Nobel Peace Prize. They’ll probably rationalize that he would’ve been peaceful if he got the honor. Now it will be read as a cautionary tale for not sucking up. The chairman of the Board of Peace is now bored of peace. While Rand Paul remains admirably consistent, it’s Lindsey Graham who is pirouetting around the Senate floor while the Gimp Speaker Mike Johnson is unable to speak for the basic constitutional principles of separation of powers let alone authorization to go to war.
If you’re feeling shell-shocked trying to keep up with Operation Epstein Distraction, get ready for the inevitable next crisis — regime change without a plan for replacement. This is what the Trump administration did in Venezuela — kidnapping the socialist dictator Maduro but keeping his regime in place in exchange for crude oil access. The opposition is still in exile and its leader María Corina Machado gave her Nobel Peace Prize to Trump in exchange for exactly nothing.
One of the clear lessons of history is that if you don’t win the peace, you don’t win the war. The Saudis and their Sunni allies will back the U.S. and Iran because they hate the Shia Iranians (who, incidentally, are not Arabs), but beyond removing the Iranian regime, the plans for replacement and stabilization seem TBD — and with Trump’s inability to stay focused on anything beyond his immediate self-interest, solid plans are unlikely to emerge. Maybe a leader will come from the underground opposition; maybe it will be the Shah’s son, who has been living in the U.S. waiting for a restoration like many members of the diaspora. The upside is that Iran has a distinguished history and an accomplished Persian culture: The Islamists don’t represent the entirety of the people of Iran and never have.
But the path ahead will be messy at best. It will require concerted effort and civil commitment, not just an open call for private investment from Mar-a-Lago members. If the United States is now kidnapping and killing dictators without direct provocation, it establishes a dangerous precedent which will come back to bite us after demolishing our moral authority in the world.
It is the unexpected effects, the cascades of consequence where we cannot always plan ahead, that cause most responsible statesmen to try to keep the peace. But Trump has the carelessness of a rich-boy bully who can always buy or bluster his way out of trouble. He’s a con man who has found his ultimate mark in his followers, who fool themselves into thinking that a reflexive liar is the one man with the courage to tell the truth.
Perhaps the most prominent example is the vice president himself — a bright guy who not that long ago compared Trump to Hitler and a deadly narcotic but then convinced himself that careerism demanded an abrupt conversion. After all, he endorsed Trump less than two years ago with this very serious column headlined “Trump’s Best Foreign Policy? Not Starting Any Wars,” explaining, “He has my support in 2024 because I know he won’t recklessly send Americans to fight overseas.”