Anti-Israel protesters disrupt convocation welcoming Jewish students to Columbia

Keffiyeh-wearing protesters banged pots and drums outside the convocation to create a disturbance. 

By Vered Weiss, World Israel News

As the school year begins at Columbia University, it’s clear that it’s business as usual when it comes to antisemitism.

At an event at the university welcoming Jewish students and declaring that its policies towards Israel had not changed, anti-Israel protesters demonstrated their fury.

Two groups dominated the protests: Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) and the Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD) coalition.

Keffiyeh-wearing protesters banged pots and drums outside the convocation to create a disturbance.

“Until Columbia divests, there will be no business as usual during a genocide,” Columbia Student Justice for Palestine posted on X.

CUAD accused the university of displacing residents of Harlem with its Manhattanville campus and Tel Aviv Global Center and made the analogy between the situation with the university and Gaza.

“Demand Columbia end the displacement from Harlem to Palestine!” CUAD posted.

A Palestinian Youth Movement video denied the possibility of peace with Israel and chanted slogans that praised the destruction of the Jewish State.

“We don’t want two states, we want ‘48,” a student chanted on the video, referring to the period before Israel became a country.

The student in the video was wearing the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine pin; the organization is designated as a terror group by the State Department.

In a video, pro-Hamas imam Tom Facchine, threatened Columbia professor Shai Davidai and urged students to “create a situation that gets him in trouble and take him out.”

Davidai, an Israeli and Assistant Professor in the Management Division of Columbia Business School, posted on X, ” Students for ‘Justice’ in Palestine at Columbia invited an imam who instructed them to target me and “create a situation” that gets me in trouble.”

He wrote, “Hey Columbia, Are you OK with a pro-terror student organization inviting a Hamas-supporting imam that’s telling students to ‘take out’ one of your Jewish professors?”

Davidai disseminated a video of the imam teaching students “how to deal with the Jewish faculty.”