The White House has condemned anti-Semitic remarks from a Columbia University student protest organizer who said, “Zionists don’t deserve to live in this world.”
Andrew Bates, the White House deputy press secretary, said in a statement on April 26 that spreading this kind of “dangerous” rhetoric should “serve as a wakeup call.”
“It is hideous to advocate for the murder of Jews,” Mr. Bates said. “President Biden has been clear that violent rhetoric, hate speech, and Antisemitic remarks have no place in America whatsoever, and he will always stand against them.”
The statement came after a now-viral video resurfaced of student leader Khymani James, 20, who now leads Columbia University’s anti-Israel Gaza Solidarity Encampment, suggesting that people should be “grateful” he wasn’t “just going out and murdering Zionists.”
“Zionists, they don’t deserve to live comfortably … [they] don’t deserve to live,” Mr. James said in a live-streamed video montage compiled by The Daily Wire, comparing “Zionists” to people such as Nazis, fascists, and racists.
“I feel very comfortable—very comfortable—calling for those people to die,” he said.
He added: “People who hold those types of ideologies—the world is better without them. That is what my comment is indicative of, and I will stand with that.”
Mr. James, who stated in the video that he goes by “he/she/they” pronouns, expressed “regret” for some of the rhetoric in his video in a statement on April 26, claiming he advocated for the death of Zionists because he was “targeted by online trolls and harassed by people who use racist and homophobic slurs.”
“What I said was wrong,” Mr. James wrote. “Every member of our community deserves to feel safe without qualification. I also want people to have more context for my words, which I regret. Far right agitators went through months of my social media feed until they found a clip that they edited without context.”
On April 26, Columbia University responded to questions about Mr. James’s “extremely alarming” video in a statement, saying, “When there are violations of student conduct policies, they are reviewed and disciplinary measures are applied.”
“Calls of violence and statements targeted at individuals based on their religious, ethnic, or national identity are unacceptable and violate university policy,” the university said.
Students at Columbia University are protesting Israel’s retaliatory strikes against Hamas and its military bases in Gaza after the terrorist group invaded the country on Oct. 7 and massacred around 1,200 people—mostly civilians—and abducting around 250 others to hold as hostage for leverage in negotiations knowing that the Israeli state would have to respond to the attack.
The protests at Columbia University, reminiscent of the demonstrations against the Vietnam War at Columbia more than 50 years ago, come as unrest on campuses over the ongoing conflict has overtaken many higher education institutions across the country, including Yale University and the University of Southern California.
