NEW YORK (AP) — Before police officers entered Columbia University Tuesday night, arresting more than 100 people as they cleared an occupied school building and an encampment, New York Mayor Eric Adams said it received intelligence that changed its stance on demonstrations on university campuses against the war in the Gaza Strip.
“Outside agitators” working to “radicalize our children” were driving students toward more extreme tactics, the mayor claimed. And one of them, Adams said several times in media interviews Wednesday, was a woman whose husband was “convicted of terrorism.”
However, the woman the mayor referred to was not on Columbia’s campus this week, is not among the protesters who were detained, and has not been charged with a crime.
Nahla Al-Arian, 63, told The Associated Press on Wednesday that Adams had misreported her role in the protests and the facts about her husband, Sami Al-Arian, a former computer engineering professor and notable Palestinian activist.
Sami Al-Arian was arrested in 2003 on charges that he supported the Palestinian group Islamic Jihad in the 1980s and 1990s, but a jury refused to find him guilty of the charges against him. The complicated case remained in legal limbo for years, even after he accepted a plea deal on a lesser charge that his family said he accepted to get out of jail and end his suffering. He was deported to Turkey in 2015, ending a case that some saw as an example of government overreach.
Nahla Al-Arian, a retired elementary school teacher, said she came to Columbia, but not to teach anyone about civil disobedience.
“This whole thing is a distraction because they are very scared that young Americans are aware for the first time of what is happening in Palestine,” said Nahla Al-Arian. “They are the ones who influenced me. They are the ones who gave me hope that finally the Palestinian people can get some justice.”
He noted that he has lost dozens of family members to Israeli bombing in recent months and wanted to see the camp up close, so he stopped at the campus briefly on April 25 while visiting New York City on a non-governmental trip. related to his two daughters. She said she sat in the garden briefly, but that she did not speak directly to any protesters, whom she described as “busy and beautiful.”
“I sat back and was happy to see those students fighting for justice for the oppressed people in Palestine,” he said. “But I was tired, so I left.”
A photograph of her kneeling alone next to a tent, taken by her daughter and posted on social media site X by her husband, quickly fueled accusations of a terrorist link to the protest.
The statement was repeated by right-wing accounts on social media. A post that garnered more than a million views on The publication mentioned City Hall sources and has since been deleted. But the claim spread widely, fueling a narrative—which has been vigorously disputed by student organizers—that Columbia’s pro-Palestinian movement has been co-opted by outside forces.
In an appearance Wednesday on CBS Mornings, Adams said the NYPD’s intelligence division had identified people among the protesters “who were professional, well-trained. One of them was married to someone who was detained by terrorism”. Asked about the details, he declined to give the woman’s name, but suggested journalists could find out by checking social media.
Speaking to MSNBC’s Morning Joe, Adams also said his suspicions about outside influences on the students had been confirmed after police identified a woman in the protest “organization” whose “husband was arrested and convicted.” for terrorism at the federal level. At a press conference later that day, Adams suggested that people outside the organization had taught Columbia students how to set up barricades to repel police attempts to evict them, saying, “These are all skills that taught and learned.”
Police declined to provide details about which groups may have been involved or to say how many of the 109 people arrested at Columbia on Tuesday night were not connected to the university. Even before the students entered Hamilton Hall, police had claimed, without offering evidence, that an outside group was helping to finance and organize the camp.
Police forces have long attempted to discredit protests by referring to “outside agitators,” a term that dates back to the civil rights movement. New York police officers made similar claims during protests that broke out across the city following the death of George Floyd in 2020, at times pointing out that peaceful marches led by neighborhood activists were the work of outside violent extremists.
Columbia students have been clear about the fact that they count outside community members among their movement. But organizers say their actions have been led by students, some of whom said they closely studied the tactics used by those who stormed several university buildings in 1968 to protest the Vietnam War and racism.
In a statement, the group behind the protest camp, Columbia University Apartheid Divest, defended its right to “include people from outside the Ivy League or the ivory tower in this global movement.”
“An ‘outside agitator’ is a slur used by the far right to discredit coalition building and the fight against racism,” the statement said.
Laila Al-Arian, a journalist who accompanied her mother on the April 25 visit to the camp, said the mayor’s remarks dredged up painful memories of her father’s legal fight, which included a long period in solitary confinement. Adams, he noted, “was appealing to people’s most basic racist instincts” to treat Muslims as dangerous outsiders.
“My mother wanted to see this beautiful act of solidarity up close,” he added. “The fact that people are using my father to discredit these students, who may not have even been alive when all this was happening, is shameful in many ways.”
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2024-05-03 16:46:58
