- विज्ञापन -
New York : Hundreds of students have been arrested on US campuses as protests against Washington’s support for Israel are surging sea to sea.
By Wednesday, the protests that started last week at the Ivy League Columbia University campus in New York City where more than 100 students were arrested and their tent encampment cleared had skipped across the nation with more of them detained by police, a rare occurrence in the US where police seldom enter campuses to quell protests.
The students are demanding that the US end its support for Israel, which has been embroiled in a war with Hamas in Gaza leading to the deaths of over 30,000 people, most of them women and children.
They also want the universities to cut ties with Israel and divest the investments of their endowments in arms manufacturers.
Students have been arrested at, among others, the University of Texas-Austin, New York University, Yale, Ohio State University, and the University of Southern California.
And, protest tent encampments have cropped up in dozens of universities including Harvard, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and University of California-Berkley, copying the Columbia model.
The protest tents were back at Columbia when Mike Johnson, the speaker of the House of Representatives, came there on Wednesday to denounce the protests and demand the resignation of its president, Nemat Minouche Shafik, asserting that she lost control of the university and lawlessness prevailed.
Johnson, a Republican warned universities that they could lose federal funding if they did not control the students, threatened that the National Guard could be deployed to quell the protests, and called on President Joe Biden to intervene.
Students chanting, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” — which has been interpreted as a call to annihilate Israel — tried to drown him out as he spoke to reporters.
The surge in protests has pitted the principle of freedom of expression against university norms and the protection of the rights and safety of students.
