The White House emphasized Sunday that the pro-Palestinian protests that have rocked U.S. universities in recent weeks must remain peaceful, after police arrested about 275 people on four separate campuses this weekend.
“We certainly respect the right to peaceful protests,” National Security Council spokesman John Kirby told ABC's This Week.
But, he added, “we absolutely condemn the anti-Semitist language that we have been hearing about lately and certainly condemn all the hate speech and threats of violence that are out there.”
The wave of demonstrations began at Columbia University in New York, but has since quickly spread across the country.
Although peace reigns on many campuses, the number of protesters being detained — sometimes by police in riot gear using chemical irritants and Tasers — is rising rapidly.
Among them are 100 at Northeastern University in Boston, 80 at Washington University in St. Louis, 72 at Arizona State University and 23 at Indiana University.
Among those arrested at Washington University was Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein, who accused police of aggressive tactics that she said were causing the kinds of problems they were meant to quell.
“This is about freedom of expression… about a very critical issue,” she told DailyExpertNews shortly before her arrest Saturday. “And there they are, sending in the riot police and basically causing a riot.”
College administrators have struggled to find the best answer, caught between the need to respect the right to free speech and the need to curb inflammatory and sometimes violent anti-Semitic calls from protesters.
At the University of Southern California, school officials closed the main campus to the public late Saturday after pro-Palestinian groups re-established an encampment that had previously been cleared, the school announced on X.
With final exams coming up in the coming weeks, some campuses, including California State Polytechnic University's Humboldt campus, have been closed and students have been ordered to complete their classes online.
The activists behind the campus protests — not all of them students — are calling for a ceasefire in Israel's war with Hamas, and want universities to cut ties with Israel.
Hamas operatives carried out an unprecedented attack on Israel on October 7, killing around 1,170 people, according to an AFP tally of Israeli official figures.
Palestinian officers also took about 250 people hostage. Israel estimates that 129 people remain in Gaza, 34 of whom the army says are dead.
Israel's retaliatory offensive has killed at least 34,454 people, mostly women and children, according to Israel's Health Ministry.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by DailyExpertNews staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)