Columbia banned student protest leader who said ‘Zionists don’t deserve to live,’ university says

Columbia University has banned the leader of the student protest, who said “Zionists don’t deserve to live,” from campus, a university spokesperson confirmed to The Hill on Friday.

Khymani James, the organizer of the pro-Palestinian protests at the school, also said in a recently resurfaced video earlier this year that people should “be grateful that I’m not just going out and murdering Zionists.” That comment came around the same time he met with school officials over a social media post he wrote about fighting a Zionist.

“I don’t fight to hurt or to have a winner or loser, I fight to kill,” he wrote at the time.

James apologized for the heated language on Friday, saying in a post on social media platform X that his comments were “wrong.”

The White House sharply criticized James’ January comments on Friday, saying in a statement shared with The Hill that they were “dangerous” and “appalling.”

“These dangerous and appalling statements are stomach-churning and should serve as a wake-up call. It is horrible to advocate the murder of Jews,” White House Deputy Press Secretary Andrew Bates said in the statement.

“President Biden has made clear that violent rhetoric, hate speech and anti-Semitic comments have no place in America and he will always oppose them,” he added.

Colombia’s decision to ban the student comes as unrest on campuses due to the war between Israel and Hamas and the humanitarian crisis in Gaza has hit many schools across the country. The pro-Palestinian protesters who make themselves heard, many of whom are arrested for their cause, likely see their demonstrations as part of a tradition of anti-war activism, a relic of the past.

The White House also condemned calls for “violence and physical intimidation against Jewish students” last week, as student protests centered on the dire humanitarian situation in Gaza and Palestinian human rights erupted on college campuses across the US.

“While every American has the right to peaceful protest, calls for violence and physical intimidation against Jewish students and the Jewish community are blatantly anti-Semitic, unscrupulous, and dangerous – they have absolutely no place on any college campus, or in any place in the United States of America,” Bates said Sunday in a statement.

Following the protests, Columbia University adopted a hybrid schedule for the rest of the semester, moving many classes online. The school’s students also filed a federal civil rights lawsuit against the university for discrimination, as many of the protesters are from Palestine.