A reporter from Bloomberg News was arrested when pro-Hamas rioters took over Columbia University’s Butler Library earlier in the month.
The reporter, Jason Kao, had graduated from Columbia in 2022. He was charged with criminal trespass and was given a desk appearance ticket.
Eighty-one activists were arrested in total.
“During the unrest, rioters injured two, passed out pamphlets endorsing Hamas’s violence, vandalized and damaged the library, and renamed the building after Basel al-Araj, a Palestinian terrorist killed in a 2017 shootout with the Israel Defense Forces,” according to the Washington Free Beacon:
“Kao’s personal website is exclusively devoted to negative coverage of Israel’s war in Gaza,” the outlet continued.
“Kao was employed by Bloomberg News as of May 1, based on a social media post from a colleague,” but Bloomberg told the Free Beacon that they no longer employ Kao.
Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD), the leftist group on campus, released a video stating: “BREAKING: THE BASEL AL-ARAJ POPULAR UNIVERSITY HAS JUST LAUNCHED, RECLAIMING BUTLER LIBRARY FOR THE PEOPLE … Over 100 people have just flooded Columbia University for Palestine.”
CUAD also listed their demands, which included “[F]ull financial divestment from zionist occupation, apartheid and genocide. Academic boycott of all complicit institutions, including the cancellation of the Tel Aviv Global Center. Cops and ICE off our campus. … Amnesty for all students, staff, faculty and workers targeted by Columbia University’s discipline.”
The group also partnered with the school’s Bengali Student Association in a post to Instagram stating that they want to destroy Western Civilization.
“We are Westerners fighting for the total eradication of Western civilization. We stand in full solidarity with every movement for liberation in the Global South. Our Intifada is an internationalist one—we are fighting for nothing less than the liberation of all people. We reject every genocidal, eugenicist regime that seeks to undermine the personhood of the colonized. As the fascism ingrained in the American consciousness becomes ever more explicit and irrefutable, we seek community and instruction from militants in the Global South, who have been on the frontlines in the fight against tyranny and domination which undergird the imperialist world order,” the statement said.
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