Columbia University suspends students over pro-Palestinian event with ‘known’ terrorism supporters

NEW YORK — Columbia University is suspending multiple pro-Palestinian students for an unsanctioned campus event with “known” supporters of terrorism, as the university tries to respond to campus tensions during the Israel-Hamas war, President Minouche Shafik announced Friday.

At least four students currently face disciplinary action in connection with the panel, “Resistance 101,” on March 24, according to student newspaper Columbia Spectator. Another two students who were initially suspended had the discipline reversed, it said.

“An event took place at a campus residential facility that the University had already barred, twice, from occurring,” Shafik said in a statement.

“It featured speakers who are known to support terrorism and promote violence,” she continued. “I want to state for the record that this event is an abhorrent breach of our values.”

According to social media posts, the webinar, which students could view remotely or with a group on campus, featured Khaled Barakat, a Palestinian activist, among other speakers. In the clip, Barakat tells students that his “friends and brothers” in Hamas and Islamic Jihad are looking to “students organizing outside Palestine” as they try to “stop the Israeli aggression and defeat Israel.”

“I did not become a university president to punish students,” Shafik said. “At the same time, actions like this on our campus must have consequences.”

“That I would ever have to declare the following is in itself surprising, but I want to make clear that it is absolutely unacceptable for any member of this community to promote the use of terror or violence,” the statement read.

Chief Operating Officer Cas Holloway — a former deputy mayor for operations during the Bloomberg administration tapped by Columbia in January — announced last week that the university had notified law enforcement of the event, and engaged an “outside firm led by experienced former law enforcement investigators” to conduct an investigation. A Columbia spokesman declined to name the firm.

“Khaled Baraket and his ‘friends at Hamas and Islamic Jihad’ are playing our classmates,” read a statement from the student group Students Supporting Israel, “using their sympathy for what is to them an abstract cause to recruit and garner material support for actual terrorists.”

Columbia is still in the process of interviewing students and faculty, and gathering facts, Shafik said.

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