New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft said Thursday that the campus protests launched nationwide in response to Israel\u2019s campaign in Gaza are another parallel of the lead-up to the Holocaust.<\/p>\n
In an interview Thursday on CNBC\u2019s \u201cSquawk Box,\u201d Kraft, a longtime supporter of Columbia University, said that when he created the Foundation to Combat Antisemitism, in part as a response to the \u201cUnite the Right\u201d protest in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017, he saw rising signs of extreme hatred.<\/p>\n
In the current college protests, he said, he\u2019s seeing further echoes of the forces that helped give rise to the Nazis.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cIt starts like it did in the \u201930s in Germany,\u201d Kraft said. \u201cFive years ago, I saw signs of hate developing here. I don\u2019t want the 1940s to replicate here and unfortunately, I\u2019m seeing signs of that and good people have to stand up and be counted. And, you know, that\u2019s where the leadership is.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s shocking to me that young Jewish students at Columbia, in New York City, are scared,\u201d he added. \u201cThey\u2019re going home.\u201d<\/p>\n
Chabad at Columbia, the local chapter of the global Hasidic-Orthodox Jewish group, said Sunday that Jewish students have had offensive rhetoric hurled at them, including being told to \u201cgo back to Poland\u201d and \u201cstop killing children.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
Even amid reports of harassment of Jewish individuals during the campus protests, other Jewish students are taking part in them. Additionally, Muslim students have also faced threats on campus since the outbreak of the Middle East conflict this fall. \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n In November, the U.S. Education Department\u2019s Office for Civil Rights opened investigations into alleged antisemitic and Islamophobic incidents at multiple U.S. colleges and universities, as well\u00a0as a local school district.\u00a0<\/p>\n Even as Kraft, who graduated from Columbia in 1963, compared today\u2019s protests unfavorably to the antiwar ones he experienced as a student in the 1960s \u2014\u00a0hailing that era as an \u201copen forum\u201d where \u201cfree speech prevailed and people express[ed] their opinion\u201d \u2014 he praised the decision to send in the New York Police Department to arrest protesters.<\/p>\n \u201cI think Mayor [Eric] Adams and Governor [Kathy] Hochul and the New York Police Department did a great job when they were called in,\u201d Kraft said. \u201cBut this is about enforcing the rules that we have on campus and \u2026 holding people accountable.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Kraft also published an op-ed Thursday on the front page of the New York Post with the headline, \u201cStand up to Jew hatred: Campus leaders must show courage and stop radical professors from poisoning young minds.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThe Columbia I loved is no longer a place I know,\u201d Kraft wrote.<\/p>\n He went on to call out faculty members who he said are \u201cmore focused on politics than they are on education.\u201d Many faculty members where protests have erupted have expressed solidarity with the protesters when it comes to crackdowns on the demonstrations.\u00a0<\/p>\n Earlier this week, Kraft announced he would suspend his financial support of Columbia in response to its handling of the protests, though he later clarified in a separate interview that he would still back the Kraft Center for Jewish Student Life on campus, claiming it has been a \u201chaven of safety.\u201d<\/p>\n The nationwide crackdown on campus protests continued Wednesday as 108 people were arrested in protests around Boston\u2019s Emerson College last evening, while police arrested 93 people on the University of Southern California campus in Los Angeles after warning protesters to disperse.<\/p>\n Meanwhile, House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., called on Columbia University President Minouche Shafik to resign after meeting with her, while also threatening federal funding for schools.<\/p>\n Columbia\u2019s board of trustees said Wednesday it \u201cstrongly supports President Shafik as she steers the university through this extraordinarily challenging time.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p>\n New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft said Thursday that the campus protests launched nationwide in response to Israel\u2019s campaign in Gaza are another parallel of the lead-up to the Holocaust. In an interview Thursday on CNBC\u2019s \u201cSquawk Box,\u201d Kraft, a longtime supporter of Columbia University, said that when he created the Foundation to Combat Antisemitism, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":3648,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3647","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-business"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3647","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3647"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3647\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3648"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3647"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3647"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3647"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}