‘Hide in the Attic’: Jewish Students Locked in College Library While Pro-Palestine Protestors Banged on the Doors

Later Wednesday evening, The Cooper Union issued a response that National Review writer Jeffrey Blehar described as “wretched.” The official response from university administration read: “The library was closed for approximately 20 minutes late this afternoon while student protestors moved through our building. Some students who were previously in the library remained there during this time.”

“It must be emphasized that this crowd deliberately sought to barricade the library only after it had been told that Jews were sheltering inside,” said Blehar. “Jews. Not Israelis, but Jews, and classmates of theirs, in fact. … The message is so unsubtle it refuses alternate interpretation: If you are a Jew, you are a target — even at school.”

Novak posted a screenshot from a recent strategy document for Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), a radical campus group which Florida Governor Ron DeSantis (R) recently ordered Florida universities to disband over the organization’s support for Hamas. The SJP document describes “Bird-Dogging,” a “tactic in which participants pursue their target wherever they are in order to force the target to pay attention or respond to their issue.” Said Novak, “This is harassment & intended to facilitate assault. It’s likely what the @cooperunion Jewish students experienced in that library.”

The pro-Palestine rally was not even supposed to be on school grounds, said Vernikov. It began “outside the school on public property,” but then she said, “protestors STORMED the school building.” Vernikov also recorded that “Faculty members CANCELLED CLASS for the walk out, ENCOURAGED students to participate and even offered EXTRA CREDIT to do so.” She added, “FACULTY members themselves PARTICIPATED in the walk out/protest.”

The New York Times reported on the incident with language National Review senior editor Charlie Cooke denounced as “both-sides garbage.” The Times article began, “The tensions inflamed by the Israel-Hamas war that have roiled university campuses in the United States spilled into the Cooper Union in New York on Wednesday, with pro-Palestinian protesters pounding on one side of locked library doors and Jewish students on the other.”

“Just look at that passive language! ‘Tensions inflamed.’ ‘Roiled.’ ‘Spilled into.’ ‘On one side’/‘On the other,’” exclaimed Cooke. “Ask yourself, honestly: If the students who had been locked in the library were black, and those banging on the door were white, would the story have been treated in this way?”

“If you just read the report in the Times, you would naturally assume that there was a locked door separating the pro-Palestinian ‘protesters’ and the Jewish students, with both groups pounding on it,” agreed McCarthy. “But that’s not what happened. The mob pounded on the door. The Jewish students … were huddled and undoubtedly frightened that the mob was going to break through.”

“When institutions such as Cooper Union tacitly yield to tactics like these without imposing severe and permanent consequences, they mainstream it,” said Blehar. “I fear something terrible will happen next.”