Mike Johnson calls for Columbia president’s resignation as he heads to college campus protests: Live

House Speaker Mike Johnson is set to visit Columbia University today amid ongoing student protests aimed at Israel’s ongoing war in Gaza.

He condemned the protests on Twitter today, calling them “disgusting” and “unacceptable.”

During a radio interview on Wednesday, House Speaker Mike Johnson said he warned National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan that he would “intervene” if the White House issued sanctions to an Israeli battalion.

Netzah Yehuda, the battalion, has been accused of abuses that predate the 7 October Hamas attack on Israel. Those abuses include the death of 78-year-old Palestinian-American Omar Assad, who reportedly died of a heart attack after the battalion arrested him.

He was handcuffed, gagged, and forced to lie on his stomach for between 20 minutes to an hour before he died from a stress-induced heart attack, according to a New York Times report.

Despite the fact that even an IDF internal investigation found that the soldiers displayed a “moral failure” and “poor decision-making,” Mr Johnson said he would oppose the sanctions.

“And I’ll tell you what I did, Hugh, and I don’t, I guess I’m breaking news here,” Mr Johnson said. “No one knows this. But I called the White House immediately and talked with Jake Sullivan, and [Secretary of State] Tony Blinken was overseas at the moment.”

He said he made Mr Sullivan “send me an email where he committed to me in writing that it would not affect any of the funding that we were working on to assist Israel in this critical time, and that they would be very judicious in that”.

Mr Johnson will visit Columbia University today, where he is expected to call for the resignation of the university’s president, Minouche Shafik, amid ongoing protests against Israel’s war in Gaza.

The Deputy Commissioner for Public Information in New York City released a statement announcing that 208 people were arrested and given summons for disorderly conduct in connection to ongoing campus protests against Israel’s war in Gaza.

“On Wednesday, April 24, 2024, at approximately 1730 hours, police responded to a scheduled demonstration at the Grand Army Plaza, within the confines of the 78 Precinct. There were approximately 208 individuals taken into custody at the Grand Army Plaza in the confines of the 78 Precinct and 1 individual taken into custody at Columbia University within the confines of the 26 Precinct,” the DCPI said in a statement. “208 individuals were released with summonses for Disorderly Conduct.”

Dr Chenjerai Kumanyika, an assistant professor of journalism at NYU, went to support students protesting Israel’s war in Gaza on Tuesday, where he saw police officers break up a Seder and violently arrest students.

“In the spirit of solidarity between Jews and Muslims, they held a Seder at the protest. And there, what the university did was break that up, and somehow call that fighting antisemitism,” Mr Kumanyika told NBC News.

He also said he saw police officers zip tie students and haul them off to police stations.

“All of this is being done under the justification that it is somehow protecting the NYU community. But I think what’s actually going on is that this university wants to avoid the call for divestment, the call for transparency about its investments in Israel. Just the idea that this is about safety is kind of ridiculous, given what I experienced last night,” he said.

Students at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles is joining with other university students across the US to protest Israel’s ongoing war in Gaza.

A statement shared on Instagram from the Divest from Death Coalition, which includes students, faculty and Los Angeles residents, said “our choice of ‘occupation’ draws attention to the complicity of USC in the Israeli occupation, USC’s displacement of the South Central community, and USC being an occupying force on the unneeded land of the Tongva people”.

The group said it was joining the nationwide call by students for universities to make their finances public and to, “divest from Israeli violence” and “defend Palestinians”.

On Tuesday, the UN released a report saying inspectors found “mass graves” in Gaza, some of which were allegedly filled with the elderly, the wounded, and women. Some of the Palestinians buried in the mass graves appeared to have had their hands tied before they were killed.

Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez called out the press for giving ample air time to cover ongoing campus protests — a topic that is quickly spiraling into a culture war flash point — rather than zeroing in on the discovery of the mass graves.

House Speaker Mike Johnson has called for Columbia University President Minouche Shafik to resign, accusing her of being “weak” and “inept” in her handling of the ongoing protests at the university.

Mr Johnson appeared on the Hugh Hewitt radio show on Wednesday, saying that during a visit to the campus later today he planned to join “with some of my colleagues from the House Republicans from New York to call on the president of the university to resign.”

“This President Shafik has shown to be a very weak, inept leader. They cannot even guarantee the safety of Jewish students? They are expected to run for their lives and stay home from class? It’s maddening,” Mr Johnson said, per Fox News. “What we are seeing on these college campuses across the country is disgusting and unacceptable and every leader in this country, every political official, every citizen of good conscience has to speak out and say that ‘this is not who we are in America.’ And we got to have accountability and that is what my colleagues and I will be working on.”

Earlier this year Mr Johnson pushed to have the faces of Capitol rioters caught on video blurred when the footage is released to the public “in order to protect the innocent,” and he previously insinuated that some of the rioters were just visitors taking a walk in the Capitol.

“I made a commitment immediately after I got the gavel that we would start releasing that,” Mr Johnson said in April, referencing the Capitol riot footage. “Originally we were trying to blur some of the faces to protect the innocent, you know, people who were there and just happened to be walking through the building.”

New York Mayor Eric Adams insinuated that the protest happening at colleges and universities in New York City may be connected by an outside influence.

“People who peacefully protest for an issue, they’re not throwing bottles and chairs,” Mr Adams said. “There are people who come, they have nothing to do with an issue and they want to aggravate.”

There is no factual evidence to support the idea that an outside influence is infiltrating college or university pro-Palestinian protests in order to make them more aggressive.

But Mr Adams offered some possible evidence to his theory: “Why is everybody’s tent the same?” he said. “Was there a fire sale on these things?”

He wasn’t the only one to make that observation; far-right Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene and Ian Michael Cheong, a Malaysian man who blogs about conservative politics in the US, both hinted at some kind of conspiracy concerning the tents.

Students at Brown University have begun a protest encampment on their campus in solidarity with Palestinians as well as other college and university students.

In a social media post, the students have asked Brown University to divest its endowment from companies “profiting from the genocide in Gaza and the broader Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory.”

They’ve also asked the university to drop charges against the 41 students arrested in December for a sit-in and end the university’s use of the criminal justice system to penalize student protests.

At least 100 people were arrested during a pro-Palestine protest near Chuck Schumer’s home in Brooklyn last night.

On the second night of Passover, a massive group of people, organized by Jewish Voice for Peace, gathered near Prospect Park to call for a ceasefire in Gaza. The protesters, wearing shirts that read “Jews Say Cease-Fire Now” laid out a large circular banner showing foods that would appear at a Seder.

Signs reading “Stop Starving Gaza” and “Stop Funding Genocide” appeared in the large crowd.

The protest arrived just after hundreds of people were arrested at New York University and Columbia University for setting up protest encampments in protest of the school’s financial ties to the war in Gaza.

But more arrests were in store after the protest blocked traffic.

The Independent has reached out to the NYPD for comment.