NEW YORK — Columbia
University and the New York Police Department (NYPD) are investigating reports
that pro-Palestinian student demonstrators were sprayed with a foul-smelling
chemical during an event last week, leading the university on Monday to bar the
people accused from campus.
اضافة اعلان
In a statement emailed
to all Columbia and Barnard College students and faculty members Monday night,
Dennis Mitchell, the university’s interim provost, said the individuals had
been barred while the NYPD investigated “what appears to have been serious crimes,
possibly hate crimes.”
He called the events at
the protest, on the steps of Low Library, “deeply troubling” and added that the
university condemned “in the strongest possible terms any threats or acts of
violence” directed toward its community members.
A spokesperson for the
NYPD said that there had been no arrests and that an investigation was
continuing.
The Columbia statement
did not say how many people had been barred from campus or whether they were
students. It did not specify what substance had been sprayed on the protesters,
what had led to the incident, or whether anyone had required medical care.
Since the Israel war on
Gaza began in October 2023, pro-Palestinian and pro-Israel demonstrations have
saturated Columbia and other American college campuses. While the
demonstrations have largely been peaceful, some acts have crossed the line into
harassment or violence.
Pro-Palestinian
students at Columbia have been threatened online, and their faces and names
have been displayed on a truck, funded by an outside group, that labeled them
anti-Semites.
In November, seeking to
reduce tensions on campus, the president of Columbia, Minouche Shafik,
suspended two pro-Palestinian student groups, Students for Justice in Palestine
(SJP) and Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP). The university said that the groups had
violated student event rules by repeatedly failing to ask for permission well
before protesting. The groups pushed back, calling the rules unjust, and
entered a coalition that continued organizing protests under different banners.
A Columbia University
official said that Friday’s events had been unsanctioned and had violated the
university’s policies.
According to a Barnard
student who was at the protest Friday, people from the two suspended groups
were involved in the Low Library demonstration and were protesting peacefully
when at least two men sprayed them with a foul-smelling liquid.
“Halfway through the
protest, we started smelling this horrible smell,” said Maryam Iqbal, an
18-year-old freshman at Barnard. “I can only describe it as raw sewage and dead
mouse.”
Layla Saliba, a
24-year-old Palestinian-American graduate student at Columbia’s School of
Social Work, said that two men, whom she did not recognize, looked as if they
had wanted a confrontation and called some of the protesters “terrorists.” She
added that they had seemed “especially aggressive” toward students holding up
signs saying “Jews for cease-fire” and called them “self-hating Jews.”
She said Monday that
she was continuing to vomit and still smelled the odor on her clothes and hair,
even after nearly a dozen showers.
On Sunday, Iqbal said
she had reported the incident to Columbia’s public safety department and had
shown personnel there a jacket she was wearing during the protest as evidence.
But she said that when she smelled the jacket, she had become sick to her stomach
and was treated for nausea at a hospital.
In its statement,
Columbia asked anyone who had photos, videos, or other evidence of the event to
share it with the NYPD.
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