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.
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.
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“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 1,200 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.