Aviva Fried / Photo credit: KENT NISHIMURA / GETTY IMAGES NORTH AMERICA / GETTY IMAGES VIA AFP
In the United States, universities are paralyzed by pro-Palestinian demonstrations, notably in New York on the Columbia campus. Faced with this, the government decided to intervene and hundreds of arrests showed that the movement was infiltrated from the outside.
American universities are still idling, paralyzed by pro-Palestinian demonstrations. Like on the Columbia campus in New York where hundreds of students are still camped in the middle of the campus to demand a ceasefire in Gaza and an end to exchanges with Israeli universities. A mobilization which was emulated in France, notably last Friday in front of the gates of Sciences Po Paris. In the United States, the response was clear with hundreds of arrests which showed that the movement had been infiltrated.
The SJP at work
If Northeastern University in Boston called the police, it is in particular because the management believes that the student movement would have been infiltrated by professional agitators. In Arizona, at ASU University, out of 72 demonstrators arrested on Saturday, only 15 were part of the establishment. And in Los Angeles, the Black Lives Matter movement called on its activists to join students on campus. So many external elements which raise fears of manipulation of the movement, as explained by Eric Adams, Democratic mayor of New York.
“There are people who come, who have nothing to do with all this and who are looking for escalation. There is something organized about all this, there is a concentrated and well organized effort. What is the goal?”, he asks. In fact, one of the groups leading these demonstrations is the SJP. Students for Justice in Palestine, whose founder has direct ties to an organization that is under investigation by the Virginia Department of Justice for its alleged support of Hamas. The SJP openly rejoiced at the massacres of October 7.