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Groups with ‘direct’ terror ties planned anti-Israel protests at Columbia, per Canary Mission report

“Despite efforts to depict it as such, the encampment was not the product of naive, anti-war college kids,” the watchdog stated.

Columbia University Protests
A view of protesters demonstrating outside the campus of Columbia University in New York City, April 22, 2024. Credit: Evan Schneider/U.N. Photo.

Anti-Israel and antisemitic protests at Columbia University last academic year were planned “by groups with direct links to terror organizations and supported by those organizations,” according to a new Canary Mission report.

“Despite efforts to depict it as such, the encampment was not the product of naive, anti-war college kids,” according to the report, which runs more than 50 pages. “It was planned by groups with direct links to terror organizations and supported by those organizations.”

“We hope this report will serve as a wake-up call to university administrators, Congress and the American public regarding the ‘education’ that is happening today on college campuses across the nation,” the group said.

The report features 321 profiles of students, professors and external actors, whom Canary Mission identified as engaging in antisemitic activities on the Ivy League campus. It also includes a comprehensive analysis of the ways the school became a “gateway hub for Hamas’s activism in the United States.”

Columbia’s Students for Justice in Palestine chapter viewed its New York City campus “as the ideal place to launch its nationwide strategy in support of Hamas’s terror campaign,” per the report.

Instead of quelling the unrest, pockets of the school’s administration supported SJP, including “the Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine, as well as the university’s senate, Middle East Institute and Center for Palestine Studies, among numerous other departments,” according to the report.

“Less than six months after Columbia’s leaders had promised Congress that the university would not tolerate antisemitism and would ensure a safe learning environment, the university had lifted discipline for its most extreme offenders and its president had apologized to them,” the report states.

On the first day of the new semester at Columbia, anti-Israel protesters disrupted a class taught by an Israeli professor on Tuesday.

Alex Welz is a writer in Erie, Pa., and former National Review fellow and graduate of University of Haifa (master’s in national security) and of Mercyhurst University (bachelor’s in intelligence studies).
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