US President Joe Biden insisted on Thursday that “order must prevail” on college campuses after weeks of turmoil, clashes with police, and mass arrests involving student protests against Israel’s war with Hamas in Gaza.
Biden, who until now had remained tight-lipped on the student unrest, spoke just hours after hundreds of police moved in to forcibly clear a sprawling encampment at the University of California, Los Angeles, tearing down barriers and detaining dozens of protestors.
“We are not an authoritarian nation where we silence people or squash dissent,” Biden, who has faced criticism from all sides of the political spectrum over the demonstrations, said in a televised statement from the White House. “But neither are we a lawless country. We’re a civil society, and order must prevail,” he added.
Like university leaders, Biden’s administration has also tried to walk the fine line between free speech and complaints of intimidation.
Republicans have accused him of being soft on what they say is anti-Semitic sentiment among the protestors, while he faces widespread opposition in his own party for his strong support for Israel’s war on Gaza.
“There should be no place on any campus, no place in America for anti-Semitism or threats of violence against Jewish students,” Biden said Thursday.
“There is no place for hate speech or violence of any kind, whether it’s anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, or discrimination against Arab Americans or Palestinian Americans,” he said.
Meanwhile, Biden’s Republican election rival Donald Trump has repeatedly praised the police response and called for a full crackdown, denouncing “radical left lunatics” in comments from the New York courthouse, where he is on trial over a hush money scheme.
“To every college president, I say remove the encampments immediately, vanquish the radicals, and take back our campuses for all of the normal students,” he told a rally in Wisconsin on Wednesday.
Danny Kemp and Romain Fonsegrives with AFP
