One of the organizers of the encampment with whom Shafik has been negotiating said he thinks Zionists should die.
Columbia University president Minouche Shafik gave the students in the “Gaza Solidarity Encampment” a midnight deadline Tuesday night to clear out of the main campus lawn. Then she extended that deadline to 8:00 a.m. Wednesday morning. Then again to early Friday morning. That final deadline has now come and gone — and the protesters are still camped out on the university quad.
The most recent communication from Shafik, a Thursday night email to the Columbia community, informed students, faculty, and staff that negotiations between the university administration and the encampment ringleaders “have shown progress and are continuing as planned.”
NEW: Email from @Columbia president Minouche Shafik. “We have our demands; they have theirs,” she writes. pic.twitter.com/dwPuOCv3r0
— Zach Kessel (@zach_kessel) April 26, 2024
“For several days, a small group of faculty, administrators, and University Senators have been in dialogue with student organizers to discuss the basis for dismantling the encampment, dispersing, and following University policies going forward,” Shafik wrote. “We have our demands; they have theirs. A formal process is underway and continues.”
Shafik added that the “rumor that the NYPD has been invited to campus this evening . . . is false.”
One of the organizers of the encampment with whom Shafik has been negotiating is a student named Khymani James, who in his X bio describes himself as an “anti-capitalist” and “anti-imperialist” educator as well as student who devotes himself to “supporting and teaching liberation everywhere.”
James first gained attention Sunday night — though not by name — as a call-and-response leader who began a human chain to surround a small group of Jewish students who had entered the encampment.
Sent to me from Columbia: A massive crowd of protesters surrounded and tried to drive away the Jewish students who recorded the video in a cult-like call and response. It’s both a kind of physical intimidation and chillingly bizarre. pic.twitter.com/HuFSozBG18
— Zach Kessel (@zach_kessel) April 22, 2024
“We have Zionists who have entered the camp,” James said to the students in the encampment. “We are going to create a human chain where I am standing so that they do not pass this point and infringe upon our privacy and try to destruct our community. Please join me in this chain.”
His identity came to light after a Daily Wire report that included a video of a meeting with university conduct officials over a late 2023 Instagram story in which he wrote, “Zionists in my dm wanting to meet up and fight lol. I don’t fight to injure or for there to be a “winner”/”loser.”
“I fight to k***,” James wrote. “See yall in New York January 2024.”
In another post, the Daily Wire reported, James wrote, “Yeah I CARRY that tool,” “Get a taste,” and “I’m moving like I’m in an OPEN CARRY STATE.”
James live-streamed a January meeting with university officials to discuss the post. He said he did not see why his post was “problematic in any way” and continued to argue that Zionists deserve to die.
“There should not be Zionists anywhere,” James told staff. “People who hold those types of ideologies, the world is better without them. That is what my comment is indicative of, and I will stand with that.”
He stayed on the air after the meeting ended and picked up where he left off.
“Zionists don’t deserve to live comfortably, let alone Zionists don’t deserve to live,” he said. “The same way we are very comfortable accepting Nazis don’t deserve to live, fascists don’t deserve to live, racists don’t deserve to live, Zionists, they shouldn’t live in this world.”
James continued, arguing that viewers should “be grateful” that he is “not just going out and murdering Zionists,” saying, “I’ve never hurt anyone in my life, and I hope to keep it that way.”
CNN reported Friday that it had interviewed James, who “repeatedly declined to apologize for the video,” Thursday night, but the network did not mention the interview until after James issued a statement on X.
James is not the only person in the encampment to endorse the murder of “Zionists.” Mohamed Abdou, a visiting professor in modern Arab studies at Columbia’s Middle East Institute, has praised Hamas over the months since the October 7 attack.
During her hearing in front of the House Education and Workforce Committee last week, Shafik told Representative Elise Stefanik (R., N.Y.) that Abdou had been “terminated” and would “never work at Columbia again.”
Despite her assertions that Abdou was no longer employed by the university, he has been sighted in and around the Columbia encampment. He was also recorded on video saying Shafik “lied on the stand,” telling the person taping that he “wasn’t fired.”
In a statement shared with National Review, Stefanik cited this apparent lie as another in a list of reasons for Shafik to step down from her post.
“Columbia President Shafik lied to Congress multiple times about radical pro-terror professor Mohamed Abdou’s employment status. Despite her testimony otherwise, Abdou has been rallying at Columbia’s antisemitic encampment promoting Jewish hate,” Stefanik said in the statement. “This directly contradicts Shafik’s testimony, which is yet another reason why Shafik must immediately resign.”
Abdou was one of a handful of professors discussed at length in the hearing, a group that also included Joseph Massad, a professor in the university’s Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies department who glorified Hamas’s October 7 attack.
Only one day after Hamas attacked Israel, Massad wrote an article on the Electronic Intifada website describing the massacres as “stunning,” “awesome,” remarkable,” and said the violence resulted in “jubilation and awe.” He wrote that Israelis “may have finally realized that living on land stolen from another people will never make them safe.”
Representative Tim Walberg (R., Mich.) asked Shafik during the hearing whether the university had disciplined Massad. He noted that the professor has called Israelis “cruel and bloodthirsty colonizers” and that a 2005 internal Columbia investigation corroborated allegations from students that Massad demanded that Jewish students who questioned his views leave his classroom.
Shafik answered that Massad had been removed from his post as chair of the university’s Arts and Sciences Academic Review Committee, but after a quick Google search, Stefanik found that he was still listed as such on the committee’s website.
Massad wrote in a statement published on the Electronic Intifada website that Shafik’s claims of his removal were false:
I remain the chair of the Academic Review committee, a one-year position, for the next few weeks, which is the normal end of my chairmanship. Indeed, I just had a meeting with the committee staff yesterday [16 April] and informed them that I will miss the next and final meeting on 8 May, due to my travel schedule. No one has contacted me at all from the university with regards to my current chairmanship. I will also remain a member of the Academic Review Committee next year, which is a three-year appointment.
Massad also wrote that Shafik’s assertion that he is “under investigation” was untrue, saying he has “not been informed or contacted by anyone from the university to inform [him] of this alleged investigation.”
Addressing Shafik’s statement to Congress that Massad had been “spoken to,” the professor said she had “misconstrued what happened” by “implying that [he] was reprimanded”:
“In fact, my chair, Professor Gil Hochberg, who incidentally is Jewish and Israeli, informed me that in light of the pro-Israel campaign targeting me and distorting my article, she had told the executive vice president of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, Amy Hungerford, that she had read my article and found it descriptive and did not contain praise for the 7 October attack,” he said.
Hochberg, the department chair who did not find any issue with Massad’s article, has previously spoken on panels in support of the anti-Israel BDS (boycott, divestment, and sanctions) movement and focuses on “the intersections among psychoanalysis, postcolonial theory, nationalism, gender and sexuality” in her academic work.
Walberg, who asked the question to which Shafik answered that Massad had been removed from his committee chairmanship, told NR in a statement that “there are multiple discrepancies between what President Shafik said under oath and what others, including Professor Massad, are saying.”
“Both stories cannot be true,” Walberg said. “If Professor Massad’s department chair showed ‘solidarity’ following his comments, it undermines President Shafik’s testimony and raises even more concerns about the antisemitic atmosphere amongst faculty. We must figure out who is telling the truth.”
While Shafik’s statements to Congress and her communications with the university community since have been inconsistent, she has also neglected to reference the first report from the university’s antisemitism task force dealing with protest policy, a report she “welcome[d]” at the time.
As National Review reported in March, the committee urged Columbia leadership to address protest-policy violations “in real time” and to do “more to stop unauthorized protests as they occur.” The authors of the report also argued that “a more proactive effort is needed to identify” masked protesters — nearly all at the anti-Israel rallies on the university’s campus — “during demonstrations.”
After the release of the report, Shafik issued a statement saying she was “grateful to the co-chairs and task force members” and taking the committee’s “suggestions about reporting, enforcement, anti-discrimination, and other issues” seriously. However, she has not mentioned those suggestions — which build on the university’s interim policies — since the “Gaza Solidarity Encampment” began.