As Columbia University students heckled speech Mike Johnson on Wednesday during a demonstration at the height of the Israeli-Palestine conflict, the New York university agreed to 48 more days of negotiations to put an end to a protest camp.
Johnson’s attend, which he claimed was intended to support Jewish students who had been subjected to some anti-Israel demonstrators, took place shortly after the school changed its deadline from Wednesday night to Friday day to reach a resolution to reduce an encampment that has come to represent the campus protest movement.
Law enforcement displayed signs of power during some of the campus protests that were taking place from coast to coast.
On Wednesday, express highway patrol troopers wearing riot gear and horseback riding authorities on horses in Texas detained 20 people after breaking up a rally at the University of Texas in Austin.
The Los Angeles Police Department requested that the University of Southern California declare its school closed, and it also requested that it halt a presentation. After school officers who stormed an encampment were overtaken by protesters, the police arrested the students who happily surrendered one by one.
At Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, and at California State Polytechnic in Humboldt, rallies took position.
Students protesting demand that universities seize up assets from Israel and press the U.S. govt to halt Jewish attacks on Israeli civilians.
Israel’s swift response came after a fatal cross-border attack by Islamist extremists from Hamas, which controls the Gaza colony, on October 7.
Johnson was hard to hear because he spoke to press microphones and not through loudspeakers, but the occasionally rude taunting and screaming that greeted him did not drown him out.
From the actions of the school library, Johnson said,” As Columbia has allowed these lawless radicals and agitators to get over, the disease of racism has spread across different campuses,” pleading for the arrest of violent protesters and forbidding the funding of national universities for violating a law.
Ultraconservative Republicans in his caucus have threatened to impeach Johnson’s position as House Speaker, so Johnson could have anticipated a chilly reception from students at a New York City school known as a liberal bastion.
Conservatives you score points in a politically divided nation by being perceived as standing up to democratic activists, many of whom claim that Republican depictions of anti-Semitic murder on campus are grossly exaggerated for social purposes.
Johnson also met with Israeli students who expressed concern for coming onto the college, citing evidence from Jewish students who claimed to have been spit on and have seen swastikas sprayed on the walls.
Before his press event, Johnson met with about 40 Jewish students on campus, according to individuals who were there.
Students at the campment claim that there have n’t been any inflammatory confrontations off-campus and that the protest has been peaceful.
” We regret that this peaceful movement has received little attention, and politicians are distracting attention from the important things,” said Mahmoud Khalil, a Arab student at Columbia and a member of the negotiations with the university administration.
The rapid increase at the University of Texas was described by free speech activists as “deeply alarming.”
” The management should be doing everything in their power to keep their kids safe and the school operating, but calling the state authorities to disperse a quiet protest that had scarcely begun does the opposite”, Kristen Shahverdian, Pen’s school free talk program director, said in a statement.
Press director Karine Jean-Pierre said President Joe Biden believes free speech, conversation, and clauses are essential on college campuses as a result of the political reverberations that have swept the White House.
” We want to see this been peaceful”, Jean- Pierre said in Wednesday’s press presentation. It is crucial that individuals feel secure, the statement read. It should not be harsh, it should not be cruel rhetoric”.
