The protests at Penn are one of many high-profile encampments on college campuses across the country defending Hamas militants.
Student activists siding with terrorist organization Hamas have been encamped on the campus of the University of Pennsylvania for a week. The group is composed of students from Penn, Drexel, and Temple Universities.
Jewish students at Penn and on campuses across the country have felt threatened, intimidated, and barred from campus by the pro-Hamas agitators. As university encampments across the country began popping up, Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, who is Jewish, said it’s “absolutely unacceptable” that university officials anywhere in the United States could not guarantee the safety of Jewish students.
Senate candidate Dave McCormick told local media it’s time for the university to utilize “the campus police and shut down the tent city.” Two thousand students, faculty, and alumni have signed a petition urging the university president to shut down the protest encampment, saying the demonstrators are glorifying a terrorist organization.
The Israel-Hamas war and the college protests that resulted are creating a schism among prominent elected officials within the Democrat Party. Pennsylvania Democrat Congresswoman Summer Lee is standing in solidarity with the campus protesters while first term Senator John Fetterman has become one of the most outspoken advocates for Israel and critics of what some believe is rising antisemitism in the United States.
While Penn deals with their tent city protest, Columbia and UCLA are among the high-profile protests garnering media attention and police confrontation. At Columbia, one of the student revolutionaries whose group literally commandeered a university building held a press conference decrying the fact that the university was not feeding the protesters.
In the larger southeast Pennsylvania area, protests have spread to Swarthmore College, Haverford, Bryn Mawr, and Villanova.
While confrontations with police and efforts to forcibly shut down the encamped protests have been seen across the country, protest activities have been peaceful at the University of Pittsburgh as protestors maintained communications with Pittsburgh police and adhered to a “set of agreed-upon conditions.”
In the wake of the protests nationwide, Senator Tom Cotton blasted President Biden for “putting more pressure on Israel” in their war against terrorists than he is “on the pro-Hamas chapters on America’s campuses.”
