The rowdy street protests against the Gaza war at Columbia University in upper Manhattan appear to be a turning point in how university administrations, law enforcement, funders and other authorities relate to American student protesters.
Since Thursday afternoon, the high iron gates around Columbia have been kept locked to the public. A rabbi at a student union on Sunday urged Jewish students to stay at home for safety reasons. Since then, Columbia offers its students distance learning for the rest of the semester. (Other Jewish student organizations at Columbia such as Hillel, by contrast, have urged Jewish students to come to school as usual.)
Now even individual financiers have decided to stop the transfer of funds to Columbia. Multi-billionaire Robert Kraft, owner of the football team New England Patriots and himself a former student at Columbia, https://twitter.com/StandUp2JewHate/status/1782388392438686076.
On Thursday, the university management asked the police to evict around 100 students who had set up tents on the school grounds. Among other things, the students protested against Columbia’s exchanges with Israeli universities. Since then, the tent protests have spread to other elite American universities. Also at Yale in New Haven, Connecticut and at Berkeley northeast of San Francisco in California, police have arrested students and torn down tents.
President Biden, as always point marked by Israel critic, rotted this weekend from. It was after several anti-Semitic attacks at Columbia that were documented on social media. For months, Biden has met accusations that he financed and legitimized a genocide in Gaza with stoic calm.
That approach has possibly been strategic as American university students are part of the Democrats’ given voter base. But there are also obvious political risks in letting the demonstrations paralyze communities. Trump is running for the White House with a narrative that Biden has lost his grip on law and order in the United States.
A dream scenario for Trump would be if the Democratic party convention in Chicago in mid-August were to be marked by Gaza demonstrations. Trump campaign adviser Jason Miller relished that thought in the https://twitter.com/JasonMillerinDC/status/1782766195566837925
The scenario of rebellion outside the convention in Chicago is hardly far-fetched.
Protesters at Columbia considers himself precisely the heir to the 1968 student revolts at the university. In the same year, riots broke out outside the Democratic convention, which was also held that summer in Chicago, and it could appear as if the party had lost control of its own cadre. The television images are believed to have helped Republican Richard Nixon to the White House that fall.
What could go wrong, asked Democratic strategist David Axelrod in the New York Times the other day. “We have a big anti-war movement, lots of tumult, a convention in Chicago”.
