College protests live: New York mayor weighs in on Columbia pro-Palestine chaos and blames ‘organizing effort’

New York mayor Eric Adams has claimed that there is a “concerted organising effort” amid the various New York campus protests that is seeking to caus unrest in the city.

Speaking at a press conference on Tuesday, Mr Adams seemed suspicious of tents used in protest encampments.

“[There] is a number of people, who are really trying to use [the protests] to cause violence in our city, and we’re gonna seek them out and we’re gonna identify them,” he said.

He added: “Why is everybody’s tent the same? Was there a fire sale on those tents? There some organizing going on there’s a well concerted organizing effort and what’s the goal of that organizing?

“That’s what we need to be asking ourselves.”

Students at Emerson College in Boston have set up tents as part of the protest encampment to stand in solidarity with Palestine and call on the university to divest financial ties to the Gaza war.

Across the United States, college and university students are holding protest encampments in solidarity with Palestine amid the Gaza war. Many have called on their institution’s leadership to divest from financial ties to companies that may or may not supply Israel with monetary or military needs.

Protest encampments have taken place at Columbia University, New York University, University of Michigan, University of California – Berkeley, Vanderbilt University, Yale, Rutgers, University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill, University of Pittsburgh, Emerson College, MIT, University of Maryland, Tufts, Washington University, Standford and more.

The Columbia and Barnard chapter of the American Association of University Professors will submit a censure proposal to the university’s senate, according to the Columbia Spectator, a student newspaper. The university senate, a policy-making body for the school, is made up of administrators, faculty, staff, alumni and students. They are expected to vote as soon as Wednesday on the censure submitted by the faculty members.

New York Representative Dan Goldman said it was “appropriate” to compare “antisemitism” at the pro-Palestinian protests at Columbia University to the 2017 white supremacist Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville.

Mr Goldman, who represents New York’s 10th congressional district, said that Jewish students on Columbia’s campus were facing intense antisemitic harassment on campus as students stage protest encampments urging the university to divest financial ties to the Gaza war.

Some Jewish students have come forward with allegations of harassment and a rabbi tied to the university has urged Jewish students to return home while tensions remain high on campus.

He equated that harassment to the antisemitic white supremacist rally in which a group lit torches and chanted “Jews will not replace us” and one man rammed his car into a group of counter-protestors, killing one woman.

“I think the comparison is appropriate. I’m not sure the fact that there was one vicious actor who ran over a woman and killed her means the scenarios are the same or different,” Mr Goldman said.

“The reality is there was horrible antisemitic rhetoric in Charlottesville and there is now horrible antisemitic rhetoric espoused and spoken by either students or agitators at Columbia University. Both of them are unacceptable,” Mr Goldman said.