On Monday’s “CNN NewsNight,” Rep. Jared Moskowitz (D-FL) stated that Columbia University has “completely lost control of the situation” and is “just letting it ride,” and that Jewish families he’s talked to have said that “if this was a minority group, a protected minority group, which Jews are not, they don’t think that this would have gotten past lunchtime on the first day.”
Moskowitz said, “I was at the university today, and it’s clear to me that while they are establishing a perimeter outside the university, once inside the university, there is almost no security. They have completely lost control of the situation and are just letting it ride, which now you’ve confirmed by this new policy that they’re just going to try to run the clock out by going fully virtual [until] the end of the year, I can tell you, between the students wearing masks and them going full virtual, bringing back the policies of COVID is not going to slow the spread of antisemitism.”
He added, “Tonight at Passover, this was the conversation around the table, families are together, extended families are together. And what’s going on at Columbia and what they’re watching happen now at NYU as it spreads just around the city, this is the conversation, and Jewish parents are asking this question, because I talked to them, whose students go to Columbia, the question they’re asking is, they feel that if this was a minority group, a protected minority group, which Jews are not, they don’t think that this would have gotten past lunchtime on the first day. But for Jews, because we don’t fit in this box, even though there [are] only 15 million of us in the country, at the end of the day, we’re looked at…differently, and that’s why universities have struggled with this, because yes, while there is protected speech, free speech, hate speech is not protected. And we are well into the realm of hate speech.”
Moskowitz continued, “We were mad years ago when we saw Charlottesville and Jews will not replace us and Donald Trump saying good people on both sides or Mexicans are rapists. But somehow, we don’t have the same anger [at] go back to Poland? My grandfather’s entire family was killed in Poland. He was the sole survivor. All Zionists should be killed, bomb Tel Aviv, I know the people saying this aren’t white Aryan males with Tiki torches, but they have the same message.”
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