White House condemns antisemitic language at anti-Israel rallies on US campuses
NSC spokesman Kirby insists Gaza war demonstrations must remain peaceful after police arrest around 275 protesters over the weekend at four separate universities
The White House insisted Sunday that anti-Israel, pro-Palestinian protests that have rocked US universities in recent weeks must remain peaceful, after police arrested around 275 people on four separate campuses over the weekend.
“We certainly respect the right of peaceful protests,” National Security Council spokesman John Kirby told ABC’s “This Week.”
But, he added, “we absolutely condemn the antisemitic language that we’ve heard of late and certainly condemn all the hate speech and the threats of violence out there.”
The wave of demonstrations began at Columbia University in New York but they have since spread rapidly across the country.
Many Jewish students say they have been made to feel unsafe due to antisemitic statements and banners at the demonstrations.
While peace has prevailed in many campuses, the number of protesters detained — at times by police in riot gear using chemical irritants and tasers — is rising fast.
They include 100 at Northeastern University in Boston, 80 at Washington University in St Louis, 72 at Arizona State University and 23 at Indiana University.
Protesters at Yale University established a new anti-Israel encampment on Sunday, the school’s independent student newspaper reported, after a previous site was taken down by police days earlier, when dozens were arrested and charged with trespassing.
Over 200 pro-Palestinian protesters gathered at Yale’s campus in New Haven, Connecticut on Sunday, forming chains reportedly to block pro-Israel demonstrators from entering the encampment.
BREAKING: Over 200 pro-Palestine protesters have erected approximately 30 tents on Yale's cross campus green and are blocking access to the green with two human chains. pic.twitter.com/AqQvIz1t7m
— Yale Daily News (@yaledailynews) April 28, 2024
Chants of “There is only one solution, intifada revolution” could also be heard on videos from the demonstration, a reference to periods of deadly Palestinian uprisings that included terrorists carrying out deadly suicide attacks against Israelis.
In California, there was a brief skirmish between pro-Israeli and pro-Palestinian demonstrators on Sunday at UCLA, where a tent encampment was set up last week.
As the size of an anti-Israel encampment at the University of California at Los Angeles expanded in recent days, counter-protesters have become increasingly vocal and visible on the campus, although both sides remained peaceful until Sunday.
The tone turned ugly at around midday when members of two groups of protesters clashed – shoving one another and shouting, and in some cases trading punches.
Posts on social media say that at least one person was injured during the clashes.
Security guards attempted to keep the two sides separated, while campus police stand by and watch the brief skirmish, according to a Reuters photographer who witnessed the scene at around noon local time.
The dueling demonstrations involved at least some people from outside the university, which issued a statement saying it had allowed two groups on campus to express their views.
College administrators across the US have struggled to find the best response, caught between the need to respect free-speech rights and the imperative of containing inflammatory and sometimes violently antisemitic calls by protesters.
With final exams coming in the next few weeks, some campuses — including the Humboldt campus of California State Polytechnic University, have closed and instructed students to complete their classes online.
The activists behind the campus protests — not all of them students — are calling for a ceasefire in the war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza, and want colleges to sever ties with Israel.
The war in Gaza erupted after Hamas’s October 7 massacre, which saw some 3,000 terrorists burst across the border into Israel by land, air and sea, killing some 1,200 people and seizing 253 hostages, mostly civilians, many amid acts of brutality and sexual assault.
Vowing to dismantle the terror group and release the hostages, Israel mounted an unprecedented assault on the Gaza Strip, effecting a humanitarian catastrophe in the embattled enclave.
The Hamas-run Gaza health ministry says more than 34,000 people in the Strip have been killed in the fighting so far, a figure that cannot be independently verified and includes some 13,000 Hamas gunmen Israel says it has killed in battle. Israel also says it killed some 1,000 terrorists inside Israel on October 7.