https://www.nationalreview.com/news/anti-israel-protesters-at-barnard-college-seize-academic-building-after-two-students-were-expelled/
Anti-Israel protesters at Barnard College seized an academic building Wednesday evening to protest the recent expulsions of two students who disrupted a Columbia University class about modern Israel’s history last month.
Video footage shows more than 50 protesters staging a sit-in outside the college dean’s office, where they beat drums and shouted through megaphones. The masked demonstrators chanted, “Every fascist state must fall.”
Columbia University’s chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine are demanding that Barnard leadership immediately reverse the two expulsions, provide amnesty to all students disciplined for anti-Israel protests, give the group a public meeting with Dean Leslie Grinage and President Laura Rosenbury, and abolish the college’s disciplinary process.
Grinage agreed to meet with up to three protesters, according to a professor who tried to appease the crowd in the dean’s place. Before capitulating, Grinage apparently asked the mob permission to use the bathroom. The students then shamed her as she walked by the scene, according to a video.
Notably, Columbia suspended SJP in November 2023 after its members held unauthorized campus protests that made others feel threatened. The suspension was upheld by the New York state supreme court last fall, yet the group remains operational in practice.
The anti-Israel activists reportedly occupied Barnard’s Milbank Hall for several hours and assaulted security guards. The rowdy demonstration forced classes in that building to be cancelled, Jewish students posted on social media.
Columbia’s SJP cried victim, claiming Barnard security officers have “harassed and shoved several students” who were taking part in the unauthorized protest.