(PatriotSpotlight.org) – House Speaker Mike Johnson has urged President Joe Biden to deploy the National Guard to tackle anti-Israel protests on university campuses.
His appeal emerged off the back of his visit to New York’s Columbia University, where protest tensions have escalated, prompting concern among many Jewish students given some protestors’ celebration of antisemitic terror groups such as Hamas. Throughout his visit, Johnson saw a campus tent city set up by Columbia and Barnard College students to demonstrate against the university’s financial ties to companies with links to Israel. This protest reflects a wider trend of such protests on campuses across the United States and other Western universities.
Johnson’s visit and subsequent remarks come at a time when tensions on college campuses are running high, with anti-Israel sentiment and harassment and threat events on the rise. His push for the National Guard to intervene underscores the scale of concern among GOP lawmakers relating to safety on campus.
“My intention is to call President Biden and share what we witnessed, urging him to take decisive action,” Johnson explained. He claimed that if these protests do not subside, deploying the National Guard could be necessary. “If these threats and intimidation are not stopped, there’s a point where the National Guard is appropriate. We need to bring order to campuses,” he went on. A slew of Republican senators, such as Tom Cotton and Josh Hawley, have also called on Biden to use federal authority to safeguard Jewish students. Hawley stressed the need to protect Jewish students by referring to the lessons of the Nazi Holocaust, stating, “‘Never again’ means never again.”
Despite these calls for federal action, White House spokesperson Karine Jean-Pierre has said the issue is not under the President’s control. As protests continue to grow in size and intensity, the conversation about how to manage safety concerns for Jewish and other students is possible to ramp-up over the coming weeks. These changes raise queries about how both campuses and the federal government will handle campus security while respecting the rights of students to call for political change. The U.S. the First Amendment constitutionally protects freedom of expression.
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