Anti-Israel agitators at Columbia University filed a civil rights complaint with the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) on Thursday demanding an investigation of “discriminatory treatment of Palestinian students and their allies” after NYPD officers arrested over a hundred demonstrators this week.
The group said the students had been “peacefully protesting Israel’s genocide.”
“Columbia’s vicious crackdown on student protests calling for Palestinian freedom amidst an ongoing genocide should alarm us all. Students have always been at the forefront of the most pressing social issues of the day,” Palestine Legal attorney Sabiya Ahamed said in a statement. “We urge federal civil rights officials to do what Columbia has disgracefully failed to: ensure the rights of Palestinian and allied students are protected at a moment when their voices are most essential.”
The complaint alleges “discrimination, intimidation, harassment, stereotyping, disparate treatment, and racial profiling” against “Palestinian students, Arabs, Muslims, students perceived to be Palestinian, and students associated with or advocating for Palestinians” over the course of six months.
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Anti-Israel agitators rally outside Columbia University on April 23, 2024, in New York City. (Jeenah Moon/Getty Images)
Palestine Legal – a nonprofit legal group defending people who advocate for the “Palestine solidarity movement”— filed the complaint on behalf of four students and the student activist group Columbia Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP).
“Columbia has actively contributed to pervasive racism and discrimination against Palestinian students on campus, causing both mental and physical harm,” the legal group said. “For example, students have been arrested, assaulted, suspended, locked out of campus and their classes, forced to seek medical attention, and forced to drop classes and delay their own graduation.”
The complaint comes as students at a growing number of U.S. colleges and universities are forming anti-Israel protest encampments with a unified demand that their schools stop doing business with Israel. Negotiations between Columbia administrators and demonstrators to clear the “Gaza Solidarity Encampment” are ongoing as of Friday morning.
Since the attacks after October 7, the legal group claimed it “has received reports of over 1,800 incidents, over five times the number we received in all of 2022, reflecting an exponential rise in anti-Palestinian repression across the U.S.”
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Pro-Israel counter-protesters watch as hundreds of anti-Israel agitators stage a demonstration outside of NYU’s Stern School of Business in New York, on Monday, April 22, 2024. (Julia Bonavita/Fox News Digital)
Inspired by ongoing protests and the arrests last week of more than 100 students at Columbia University in New York City, seen at the epicenter of the ongoing demonstrations, students from Massachusetts to California, and Tennessee to Texas, are now gathering by the hundreds and are pledging to stay put on campus until their demand is met.
The so-called protests have devolved into unrest across university campuses as anti-Israel agitators have been heard chanting, “We are Hamas,” the Islamic militant terrorist group that attacks innocent Israelis on October 7, and the school’s president moved all classes to virtual learning on Monday amid safety concerns.
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University of Michigan students were also given pamphlets by demonstrators titled “10 anarchist theses on Palestine solidarity in the United States,” which included a page that stated, “Freedom for Palestine means Death to America.”
The Israel-Hamas war also surpassed the six-month milestone earlier this month, which has resulted in tens of thousands of civilian Palestinian deaths. Yale, MIT, UC Berkeley, the University of Southern California, Princeton, Harvard, Stanford, Northwestern University, Vanderbilt University, the University of Michigan, the University of North Carolina and the University of Virginia are some of the campuses where major demonstrations broke out this week.
Columbia University, where students have set up what is being referred to as a Gaza Solidarity Encampment, is shown in New York on April 24, 2024. (Getty Images)
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Fox News’ Lawrence Richard and Michael Ruiz contributed to this report.
