Columbia Students arrested after storming library: some are repeaters including student who demanded humanitarian aid

Pro-Hamassholes

Well, folks, the Ivy League’s gone full circus again. At least six Columbia students nabbed for storming a university library on Wednesday are old hands at this game, including one genius who demanded “humanitarian aid” from the school, according to a Washington Free Beacon dig. These repeat offenders were already slapped on the wrist for prior campus raids or last spring’s tent-city shenanigans.

Out of 81 total arrests, 44 are Columbia kids, 13 hail from Barnard College (Columbia’s sister school), and one Barnard staffer, Eva-Quenby Johnson, got cuffed too. Oh, and two students from Union Theological Seminary, another Columbia affiliate, joined the party.

This masked crew didn’t just waltz in. They roughed up two security guards, handed out pamphlets cheering Hamas’s violence, trashed the library, and rechristened it after Basel al-Araj, a Palestinian terrorist who met his maker in a 2017 shootout with Israeli forces. Classy.

Columbia’s security team locked the exits, told the radicals to flash their IDs and skedaddle or face cuffs. After a few hours of defiance, the university called their bluff, and NYPD rolled in, zip-tying the troublemakers and herding them onto a bus.

Let’s meet some of these all-stars.

Ramona Sarsgaard

Yep, Maggie Gyllenhaal’s kid, Ramona Sarsgaard, was among the anti-Israel crowd hauled off by NYPD. Maggie, a Columbia grad herself, once gushed about her daughter’s eco-warrior cred. “She, like many, many children, isn’t able to push out of her mind the dire situation that we’re in,” Gyllenhaal told People in 2019, when Ramona was 13. “They’re really concerned and upset, demanding that the grownups pay attention. My daughter did that to me and it took me a minute.”

Guess saving the planet didn’t stop Ramona from rocking a tan leather getup at Paris Fashion Week in January. Priorities, right? She’s also got Hollywood royalty in her corner—her uncle Jake Gyllenhaal, inspired by Ramona and her sister, co-wrote a 2023 book about aunts and uncles. Cute.
Serial Building Stormers

At least four of the arrested students are no strangers to campus chaos. Columbia’s Symmes Cannon and Hannah Puelle got pinched and suspended for storming Barnard’s Millstein Library in March, clashing with cops when they refused to bounce. No word on whether their suspensions stuck. Another student, Gabrielle Wimer, was back in class by mid-April after a similar stunt, per the Free Beacon.

Then there’s Marianne Almero, a fresh Columbia grad, and Barnard’s Samarra Sankar, both nabbed for raiding Hamilton Hall last spring. Almero’s resume includes interning at the Urban Indigenous Collective, where she pushed “social justice advocacy to decolonize education institutions, climate justice, incarceration and police systems, and health accessibility.” The Manhattan DA dropped most charges, and Columbia disciplined the culprits—nearly a year later. Swift justice, huh?

Two more Columbia students, Johannah King-Slutzky and Anjali Vishwanath, got detained and suspended for last year’s encampment. King-Slutzky, a doctoral student, became a meme for demanding “humanitarian aid” and “a glass of water” for the radicals occupying Hamilton. She didn’t join that takeover but was arrested at the encampment earlier and still taught a “Contemporary Western Civilization” course last fall. Gotta love Ivy League standards. Vishwanath, from Columbia’s School of Social Work, called it “an honor to be arrested and suspended for Palestine.” This year, she’s part of Columbia’s Action Lab for Social Justice, which aims to “uproot systems of oppression.” Subtle.

Sueda Polat

Sueda Polat, a Columbia grad student in human rights, played negotiator for last spring’s encampment, repping Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD), the campus’s most rabidly anti-Semitic group. She teamed up with Mahmoud Khalil, a protest leader currently in ICE custody, to bully Columbia into ditching Israel by “any available means necessary.” Polat also rubbed elbows with CUAD’s Khymani James, who’s openly fantasized about “murdering Zionists.” Charming company.

Dalia Darazim

Dalia Darazim, a sophomore studying Middle Eastern studies, took to the Columbia Spectator in January 2024 to blast her school and classmates for not going hard enough against Israel post-Oct. 7. “I realized that for my peers in the human rights major, Palestine was not a part of their self-proclaimed efforts for social justice,” she wrote. “I realized that not only was the Palestinian cause not included in anyone’s agenda, but Palestinians themselves had no place on Columbia’s campus.”

Darazim, who joined last spring’s encampment, doubled down in a June 10 Spectator op-ed, accusing reporters asking about Jews feeling unsafe of enabling genocide. “Time after time, I took a deep breath, and delivered a thoughtful, diplomatic answer in response to this genocide-enabling question—a question that deliberately denies Palestinians the right to narrative by centering college campuses and their students over the ongoing slaughter in Gaza,” she wrote. “No American college student’s feelings should be centered over Palestinian lives.” Diplomacy at its finest.

Sumera Subzwari

Sumera Subzwari, a grad student at Columbia’s Teachers College, calls herself a “disabled mushroom forager.” In an April 2024 piece, she explained her fungi obsession: “I fell in love with mushrooms because they align so clearly with disability justice. Disabled folks exist outside of what society considers ‘normal,’ and mushrooms are just the same—thriving through nonconformity.” Deep. She also snagged a Vegan Women Summit scholarship in 2023. Mushroom foraging and vegan cred? She’s living the dream.

None of these geniuses responded to requests for comment, and Columbia’s staying mum. Shocker.

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Palestinian activist who led Columbia U. protests arrested by ICE

Probably not Ilhan Omar behind him

Shalom Mahmoud.

In a move that ought to raise eyebrows among those still clinging to the notion of institutional integrity, a prominent Palestinian activist, Mahmoud Khalil, who spearheaded Columbia University's 2024 student encampment protests, found himself apprehended and arrested on Saturday night in New York City.

Federal immigration authorities, with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer in a library, claimed they were acting on a State Department order to revoke his green card, or so his attorney, Amy Greer, relayed to The Associated Press. One can almost hear the bureaucratic machinery grinding away, indifferent to the human cost.

Khalil was ensconced in his university-owned apartment, just blocks from Columbia’s Manhattan campus, when several Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents stormed the building and hauled him into custody. Greer recounted to the AP that one agent, in a phone call dripping with officiousness, informed her they were executing a State Department directive to nix Khalil’s student visa. When she pointed out that Khalil, a December graduate, held permanent residency via a green card, the agent nonchalantly declared they were revoking that too. A tidy little escalation, wouldn’t you say?

This arrest dovetails neatly with President Trump’s bombastic pledge to deport foreign students and jail “agitators” tangled up in protests against Israel’s war in Gaza. The administration has trained its gimlet eye on Columbia, announcing on Friday a $400 million slash in grants and contracts—a punitive measure ostensibly tied to the Ivy League’s supposed failure to stamp out antisemitism on campus. One might wonder if this is less about principle and more about settling scores.

Greer noted that the authorities saw fit to leave Khalil’s wife—eight months pregnant, no less—in the dark about why her husband was being carted off. “We have not been able to get any more details about why he is being detained,” she told The AP. “This is a clear escalation. The administration is following through on its threats.” Khalil, meanwhile, has been shuttled to an immigration detention facility in Elizabeth, New Jersey, where he presumably sits, a pawn in a larger game.

A Columbia spokesperson, with the practiced neutrality of a tightrope walker, insisted that law enforcement must brandish a warrant before setting foot on university property. Yet they declined to confirm whether such a warrant was produced for Khalil’s arrest. The university’s website offered this gem: “There have been reports of ICE around campus. Columbia has and will continue to follow the law. Consistent with our longstanding practice and the practice of cities and institutions throughout the country, law enforcement must have a judicial warrant to enter non-public University areas, including University buildings. Columbia is committed to complying with all legal obligations and supporting our student body and campus community.” A masterpiece of saying much while revealing little.

Khalil, it should be said, had emerged as a poster boy for the pro-Palestinian cause at Columbia. When students pitched their tents last spring, he was tapped as a negotiator, parleying frequently with university administrators. Come September, with classes back in swing, he told The AP with defiance: “As long as Columbia continues to invest and to benefit from Israeli apartheid, the students will continue to resist.” A sentiment that, whatever one makes of it, has now landed him in the crosshairs of a system that seems less interested in dialogue than in deportation.

Here we see the collision of ideology and power, played out on the stage of a prestigious university that once prided itself on free thought. The question lingers: is this justice, or merely the heavy hand of retribution dressed up as policy? History, as ever, will be the judge.

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U. of MN Pres. admits he agreed to anti-Israel/anti-Semitic terms to end protest but didn't understand the language

University of Minnesota interim president Jeff Ettinger informed the state senate Tuesday that he sold is soul by signing an agreement to appease anti-Semitic student activists. He cowardly caved to them in order to end their illegal occupation [aka trespassing] of the campus and he supposedly did not understand the Arabic word they use that justifies violence, even killing, of Israelis who tend to be Jewish.

Ettinger and the potential terrorists reached an agreement last month to end a “Gaza Solidarity Encampment, which is a collection of smelly tents used by the anti-Semites for several weeks. They refused to leave unless the administration agreed to boycott and divest from Israel [except for the cool stuff Israel invented like: USB Flash Drives, Waze, Pill Cam, ReWalk, ICQ, cherry tomatoes, Mobileye, SolarEdge, OrCam,  Orbotech, and Netafim, to name just a few].

The university issued a statement in which school officials used the term “thawabet,” a main component of the ideology of the anti-Israel/anti-Semitic movement. Thawabet asserts its intention to eliminate Israel and establish a Palestinian state in its place, like Islam strides to do all around the globe.

“That was a mistake by our administration,” Ettinger told Sen. Ron Latz (D), who had asked him about the university's decision on Tuesday. “The way things transpired that day, we ended up doing the final versions of that document at five in the morning. Those had been the topics — I mean they were kind of characterized by the students as their ‘demands’ — we looked at them as topics. But clearly, I didn’t even know what that word meant, so clearly to repeat that word then in a communication back was a mistake by the administration.”

Shades of Hogan's Heroes Nazi Sergeant Schultz: "I see nothing! I hear nothing! I know nothing!" Ettinger knew nothing, he claims, and never actually questioned the activists. Why do the research when the [final] solution fits your agenda.

In 2010, a founder of the terrorist group Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), Bilal al-Hassan, explained thawabet in an interview with the anti-Zionist website Electronic Intifada.

Al-Hassan explained that the concept historically represents opposition to United Nations Resolution 181, a decision rendered by the nascent body in 1947 which partitioned British Mandatory Palestine into Jewish and Arab states and led to the establishment of Israel the following year. 

Thawabet, he said, was central to the founding charter of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), a terrorist organization which evolved to be recognized as the official representative and governing authority of Arabs living in Gaza and the West Bank. For al-Hassan, “liberating” Palestinians meant reversing the 1947 settlement and expelling Jews from the area. You remember those guys at the 1972 Munich Olympics, right? 

In 1996, the PLO — led at the time by terrorist scumbag Yasser Arafat — voted overwhelmingly to remove the call for mass terror and elimination of Israel from its charter to signal that it was negotiating a settlement to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in good faith. He was looking to change his image at that time after his jihadis known as Black September captured and unmercifully murdered 11 Israeli athletes and coaches.

After that time, Arafat had met in person with two Israeli prime ministers, Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres, as part of the Oslo Accords, a peace process that was fervently supported by former US President Bill "I did not have sex with that woman" Clinton. Arafat lobbied for the move, saying, as reported by The New York Times in 1996, that failing to do so would harm efforts to establish a Palestinian state.

This, al-Hassan told Electronic Intifada, was an ideological and tactical failure because Jews still existed.

“The PLO was destroyed with the alteration of the charter,” he said. “The reason that the thawabet now play an important role in our struggle is that it is now an expression of a politico-historical position against the path of the negotiated settlement — that we usually refer to as the Oslo process — and against the Palestinian Authority’s engagement with this process, its departure from thawabet, and its retreat in the face of the ongoing Zionist colonization of our country. It goes without saying that goals of the struggle such as the return of the refugees and the liberation of the land and people are central pillars of thawabet.”

Their struggle?

Why the University of Minnesota incorporated thawabet, a call for violence and rejection of peace between Israel and the Arabs into an official statement is unclear. And why was it acceptable to apologize to pro-Hamasshole protesters, granting them amnesty and a promise to meet with top school officials to discuss the possibility of divesting from Israel [except for the cool stuff].

Despite the fact during Tuesday's hearing the students made it painfully clear that they supported terrorism during the May encampment, Ettinger said of thawabet, “I didn’t know what that word meant.” 

Except that he did--the school has a history of allowing anti-Zionist/anti-Semitic views. After all, they appointed anti-Zionist/anti-Semitic "scholar" Raz Segal to have the post of director of the school’s Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies — a decision that Ettinger walked back after community organizations noted that Segal justified Hamas’ Oct. 7 atrocities less than a week after they were committed.

Ettinger, who is a useful idiot, was subjected to a faculty no-confidence vote revoking Segal’s appointment, will soon leave office. The University of Minnesota’s incoming president, Rebecca Cunningham, will be inaugurated in July.

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