The "sheer size" of the number of New York City Police Department officers that arrived at Columbia University to clear away a tent encampment and protesters occupying the school's Hamilton Hall intimidated the demonstrators and solved the "immediate problem," former NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly told Newsmax on Wednesday.
"I thought it was professionally done," Kelly told Newsmax's "National Report," about Tuesday's police response. "It was done in a very deliberate fashion… the immediate problem, I think it has been solved, but these young people [who were arrested] are already all out and got some sort of appearance ticket or summons for what they've done."
He added that their court appearances are still a month or more away, "so a lot can happen during that period of time" but "as far as the police activity, I thought it was well done. There was apparently no or very little confrontation."
Kelly said he also agrees with Mayor Eric Adams that many of the protesters were not students, but outside agitators.
"I believe this is part of a national effort," he said, noting one organization that has been around since the mid-1990s whose "major function seems to be harassing Jewish students on college campuses."
Kelly added that a few years ago, he interviewed several Jewish students at Columbia who said that they were being harassed and that the administration "was well aware" of the problem but "turned a blind eye to it."
"This is not a new problem," said Kelly. "This has been going on for a while, and probably maybe even a decade before I even looked at it and perhaps longer."
But he said he thinks the school's hesitation on stopping hate speech on campus is "the same" approach that Europe took over the years.
"If you look at the history of antisemitism, it goes back thousands of years, pogroms where Jews have been excluded from Portugal, from France, from Spain," said Kelly. "It's something that's really difficult to understand or explain, but antisemitism is a reality," he added. "I never thought I'd see an open manifestation of what we see now in the in United States, you see some of this in Europe, but it's so hard to explain."
And Columbia University, said Kelly, "knew about it for quite a while."
"I understand there's a new president," he added. "She's only been there for, I think, less than a year, but even so, the previous president knew all about it."
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Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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