Trump: Police raid on Columbia protesters a ‘beautiful thing to watch’

Republican US presidential candidate Donald Trump yesterday said it “was a beautiful thing to watch” New York police officers raiding a Columbia University building which had been taken over by pro-Palestinian students, and called on officials to crack down on campus protests across the United States, Reuters reports.

“New York was under siege last night,” Trump told supporters at a campaign rally in Wisconsin, praising the police officers for arresting about 300 unarmed protesters at Columbia and City College of New York who he referred to as “raging lunatics and Hamas sympathisers.”

Students are demanding an immediate ceasefire in the war on Gaza and that their universities divest from companies with military ties to Israel.

“I say remove the encampments immediately, vanquish the radicals and take back our campuses for all of the normal students who want a safe place from which to learn,” Trump said.

The police response at Columbia has triggered condemnations from some Columbia faculty.

Last week, the Columbia University Senate approved a resolution saying the school’s administration had undermined academic freedom and disregarded the rights of students and faculty by calling in the police and shutting down protests.

Last week, Trump described the pro-Palestinian protests as driven by “tremendous hate”.

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