Speaker Mike Johnson on Wednesday said President Biden should take action, including potentially sending in the National Guard, to quell pro-Palestinian protests at Columbia University and on other campuses across the country that he said had grown violent and antisemitic.
“There is executive authority that would be appropriate,” Mr. Johnson said during a news conference on the steps of Columbia’s Low Library, where he was booed and heckled by some onlookers. “If these threats are not stopped, there is an appropriate time for the National Guard. We have to bring order to these campuses.”
A number of hard-right Republican lawmakers, including Senators Tom Cotton of Arkansas and Josh Hawley of Missouri, have recently called for troops to be sent in to crack down on pro-Palestinian protests on campus. Mr. Cotton did the same in 2020 when he said military force should be used to put down riots across the country amid the civil unrest that followed the death of George Floyd, a Black man who was killed by the police in Minneapolis.
The United States has a grim history of employing the military to quell campus protests. In 1970, the Ohio National Guard opened fire on antiwar protesters at Kent State University, killing four students and wounding nine others.
Organizers of many of the campus groups leading protests around the country have said they denounce violence and antisemitism. But as tensions have risen in recent days, some demonstrators have used anti-Jewish and anti-Israel slurs and other threatening language, and some have expressed sympathy for Hamas. In one instance, a masked protester shouted, “We are Hamas. We’re all Hamas.” And according to the campus Chabad at Columbia, Jewish students have been verbally harassed with calls to “go back to Europe” and “stop killing children.”
Jewish students on many campuses have reported feeling unsafe, while many pro-Palestinian protesters have said they are being lumped with threatening actors in an attempt to silence them.