Republican Sens. Tom Cotton And Josh Hawley called on President Joe Biden to send the National Guard to Columbia University as pro-Palestinian demonstrations saw more than 100 people arrested on campus last week.
The senators called for federal action as Monday marks the start of the Jewish holiday of Passover. This weekend there was a prominent rabbi at school urged Jewish students to leave the Upper Manhattan campus amid heated protests, and Columbia University announced Monday it would hold classes remotely.
Cotton (R-Ark.) blamed Democrats for the protests in a message on social media On Monday morning, he wrote that “the radical anti-Israel protesters have always been part of the base of the Democratic Party.”
“The rising pogroms in Columbia must stop TODAY, before our Jewish brothers attend the Passover Seder tonight,” Cotton wrote on X. “If Eric Adams won’t send in the NYPD and Kathy Hochul won’t send in the National Guard, Joe Biden has an obligation to take charge and break up these gangs.”
Cotton’s calls to send the National Guard to college campuses are reminiscent of the Republican era in Arkansas wrote an op-ed in The New York Times nearly four years ago, he urged the use of military force against thousands of people across the country protesting police brutality following the killing of George Floyd. The 2020 op-ed drew immediate backlash from readers and staff at the paper and led to the resignation of James Bennet, the editor of the Times editorial page, and a lengthy note at the top of the piece saying it was “not up to our standards complied and not published.”
Under the Insurrection Act, a president can federalize the National Guard if a state requests it, to enforce a federal law or to protect civil rights.
Hawley (R-Mo.), in his own post, brought up President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s 1957 order for the National Guard to protect the “Little Rock Nine” in Arkansas after the Supreme Court’s decision to end school segregation to desegregate.
“Eisenhower sent the 101st to Little Rock. It is time for Biden to call the National Guard to our universities to protect Jewish Americans,” Hawley said said on X Monday.
Jonathan Greenblatt, director and CEO of the Anti-Defamation League also suggested that the National Guard should be deployed to campus and that action should be taken by local and federal officials “before it is too late.”
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Democratic representatives. Jared Moscowwitz from Florida, Josh Gottheimer of New Jersey and Then Goudman of New York walked across the campus of Columbia University and held a news conference Monday urging Columbia President Minouche Shafik to protect his students. Republican representatives of New York. Mike Lawler And Anthony D’Esposito also spoke off campus calling on Shafik to resign.
In a statement Sunday related to the upcoming holiday, Biden said that “we must speak out against the alarming surge in anti-Semitism — in our schools, in our communities and online.”
“Silence is complicity,” Biden’s statement read. “Even in recent days we have seen intimidation and calls for violence against Jews. This blatant anti-Semitism is reprehensible and dangerous – and has absolutely no place on college campuses, or anywhere else in our country.”
