Republican senators. Tom cotton and jose hawley called on President Joe Biden to send the National Guard to Columbia University as pro-Palestinian protests in which more than 100 people were arrested last week roiled the campus.
The senators issued the call for federal action as Monday marks the beginning of the Jewish holiday of Passover. Over the weekend, a prominent rabbi at the school urged Jewish students to leave the Upper Manhattan campus amid heated protests, and Columbia University announced Monday that it would hold classes remotely.
Cotton (R-Ark.) blamed Democrats for the protests in a social media post on Monday morning, writing that “radical anti-Israel protesters have always been part of the base of the Democratic Party.”
“The incipient pogroms in Columbia must stop TODAY, before our Jewish brothers sit down for the Passover Seder tonight,” Cotton wrote in X. “If Eric Adams doesn’t send in the NYPD and Kathy Hochul doesn’t send in the National Guard, Joe Biden has a duty to step up and break up these mobs.”
Cotton’s calls to send the National Guard to the college campus are reminiscent of when Arkansas Republican wrote an op-ed in The New York Times Nearly four years ago he pushed for the use of military force against thousands of people protesting police brutality across the country following the murder of George Floyd. The 2020 op-ed sparked an immediate backlash from the newspaper’s readers and employees, prompting the resignation of James Bennet, the Times’ editorial page editor, and a lengthy editor’s note above the article that said it “did not meet our expectations.” standards and should have not been published.”
Under the Insurrection Act, a president can federalize the National Guard if a state requests it, to enforce a federal law or protect civil rights.
Hawley (R-Mo.), in his own capacity, cited President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s 1957 order for the National Guard to protect the “Little Rock Nine” in Arkansas after the Supreme Court’s decision to eliminate segregation in schools.
“Eisenhower sent the 101st to Little Rock. It is time for Biden to call in the National Guard at our universities to protect American Jews,” Hawley. said Monday X.
Jonathan Greenblatt, director and CEO of the Anti-Defamation League also suggested that the National Guard should be deployed to the campus and said local and federal officials should take action “before it’s too late.”
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Democratic representatives. Jared Moskowitz from Florida, Josh Gottheimer of New Jersey and Daniel Goldman from New York walked across the Columbia University campus and held a news conference Monday urging Columbia President Minouche Shafik to protect his students. Republican representatives from New York. Mike Lawler and Antonio D’Esposito He also spoke off campus calling for Shafik’s resignation.
In a Sunday statement related to the upcoming holiday, Biden said “we must speak out against the alarming rise of anti-Semitism, in our schools, communities and online.”
“Silence is complicity,” Biden’s statement said. “Even in recent days we have seen harassment and calls for violence against Jews. “This blatant anti-Semitism is reprehensible and dangerous, and has absolutely no place on college campuses or anywhere in our country.”
