Staff at the Cooper Union college in New York City locked a group of Jewish students in the campus library for their own safety on Wednesday after a mob of chanting pro-Palestinian students tried to gain access and pounded on the windows and the doors.
Jewish students at Cooper Union are in the library as protestors pound on the door.
— Yashar Ali 🐘 (@yashar) October 25, 2023
Listen with sound on. pic.twitter.com/pwYRo5KA9X
CBS News reported:
Students who are pro-Israel say they felt unsafe as pro-Palestinian demonstrators banged and chanted outside the library they were studying in. They tell CBS New York’s Lisa Rozner school staff locked them in the library due to safety concerns
“It was tense. People were nervous,” one student said. “They were specifically acting very aggressive in those spaces where outwardly Jewish students were sitting.”
The pro-Palestinian students gave a statement to CBS News in which they denied targeting the students and claimed not to have acted out of antisemitic motives:
“We, students of Cooper Union, planned a peaceful protest to demand our institutions acknowledgement of the Israeli apartheid. This was in response to the school’s one-sided stance and participation in the occupation of Palestine. We planned to peacefully protest outside the building before walking in and continuing our protest outside the president’s office. We concluded our protest by calling out our demands through the hallways of the entire foundation building. When we reached the library, we were told that it was closed so we continued chanting outside the glass window of the library. Many different students of all backgrounds were in the library at the time. We would like to make it clear that our protest was not targeting any individual students or faculty, but the institution itself. We would like to reiterate that we DO NOT under any circumstance condone antisemitism and many members of the protest were Jewish.”
There has been a surge in antisemitic incidents in the U.S. and other countries since the Palestinian terrorist group known as Hamas launched an attack on Israeli communities near the Gaza Strip that claimed 1,400 lives, including entire families.
In many communities, Israeli families tried to hide in “safe rooms” as terrorists pounded on the door, often shooting or throwing grenades to gain access and to murder them.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the new biography, Rhoda: ‘Comrade Kadalie, You Are Out of Order’. He is also the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
Just who do these anti-Semites think they’re fooling? I don’t believe for one minute that they were a peaceful mob…..Hitler would be so proud of them….they get nothing from me but utter contempt! If I was PAYING TUITION for a kid to go to school and they were participating in this crap, I’d yank their butt out of school so fast their head would spin, and they’d come home and go to a community college, because it would be obvious to me that they were not mature enough to go anywhere away from home to go to school without my supervision! These idiots are supposed to go to school to get an education, to learn HOW TO THINK, NOT WHAT TO THINK! Parents aren’t paying for this kind of behavior at school or anywhere else! Thank goodness my kids were NEVER this stupid!