There was a protest at Ohio State University about the war between Israel and Hamas, which led to chaos between students and cops. Police officers and protesters got into fights on campus overnight, and many people were arrested because of it.
Benjamin Johnson, a spokesman for the university, said that people who didn’t leave when asked were jailed and charged with trespassing. This led to the arrest of 36 people, sixteen of whom were students and twenty of whom were not.
As the number of deaths in the Israel-Hamas war keeps going up, there have been protests all over the country. People on the streets are asking universities to stop giving money to Israel and companies that are helping to start the war. Students who are Jewish have said that the protests make them afraid to come on campus at all, which is why the cops are there.
Many protests happen all over the country, so this isn’t the first one we’ve seen. A protest at Atlanta’s Emory University led to police involvement. Some officers carried semiautomatic weapons and stun guns, and they used a chemical irritant to keep the crowd under control. Greg Fenves, president of Emory, said that the fight between police and protesters was “shocking” and that he is “horrified that members of our community had to experience and witness such interactions.”
He said that the chaos on campus was probably started by protesters from outside the area who came out and set up tents to take over the area and hold a protest.
Greg Lukianoff, president of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, spoke out about the protests. He said, “You don’t have a generalized First Amendment right to, you know, turn the public area of a campus into a camping ground.”
He said, “But we’ve seen at places like Emory and places like UT Austin, police taking things much, much too far.”
