NBC and MSNBC correspondent Antonia Hylton claimed Sunday that the anti-Israel protests at Columbia University, which are so extreme that a campus rabbi told Jewish students to leave for their own safety, were actually “peaceful.”
The protests include an illegal encampment that was removed by the New York Police Department (NYPD) and has returned in defiance of university authorities and the law. According to critics, the protests also include members of anti-Israel groups that have disrupted classes and harassed Jewish students, and which have been suspended by the university. Some protests on or near campus have included explicitly pro-terror chants and antisemitic rhetoric.
The feeling of intimidation was so severe that an Orthodox rabbi who serves the campus community advised Jewish students this weekend to go home and not to return to campus until there had been major improvements in security.
Hylton claimed that the only violent confrontations and extremist rhetoric took place outside the gates of campus, among those who had been barred from entering, and those who were not actually Columbia or Barnard students.
Hylton did not seem to consider the fact that Columbia students, especially graduate students, spend some of their time off campus, and that Broadway is a major thoroughfare that cannot easily be ignored by those on campus itself.
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 recent e-book, “The Zionist Conspiracy (and how to join it),” now available on Audible. He is also the author of the 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.