Representative Ilhan Omar’s (D., Minn) daughter is crying foul after being arrested by police and suspended from Barnard College for helping construct an anti-Israel tent encampment on campus last week.
Isra Hirsi, 21, was one of over 100 protesters arrested by NYPD officers on Thursday afternoon for occupying Columbia’s main lawn and setting up a tent encampment in violation of university policy. NYPD officers arrived in riot gear to handcuff and remove the protesters after warning students they would be arrested if they did not vacate the area.
“I was a little bit frantic, like, where am I going to sleep? Where am I gonna go? And also all of my s–t is thrown in a random lot. It’s pretty horrible,” Hirsi told Teen Vogue in a wide-ranging interview.
“I don’t know when I can go home, and I don’t know if I ever will be able to,” she added. Hirsi, an avowed communist, accused Barnard of not providing any food for 48 hours and failing to respond to an email request for meals.
“I sent them an email like, ‘Hey, I rely on campus for my meals, I rely on my dining plan,’ and they were like, Oh, you can come pick up a prepackaged bag of food, a full 48 hours after I was suspended,” Hirsi said. “There was no food support, no nothing.”
Hirsi also slammed Barnard president Laura Rosenbury for supposedly being opposed to anti-Israel students like herself.
“I think it’s really on a school-by-school basis, and Barnard has decided to take a very egregious stand against us,” Hirsi said of her university.
Upon her arrest, Hirsi announced on X that she was suspended from Barnard College, Columbia’s prestigious sister college, for partaking in the “Gaza Solidarity Encampment,” an anti-Israel campus encampment that had been going on for a little over 24 hours at the time of her arrest, as National Review reported last week. Omar, a progressive member of the “squad,” said she was proud of her daughter and celebrated the Columbia demonstration.
Over the weekend, the protests inside and surrounding Columbia’s campus became increasingly violent towards Jewish students, while openly celebrating Hamas and the terrorist group’s mass civilian slaughter on October 7. A Jewish Columbia student who brought an Israeli flag to the protests wrote an essay in The Free Press about how he was assaulted and told to “go back to Poland” on Saturday night.
An orthodox rabbi advised Jewish students to avoid campus because of the antisemitic environment, and Columbia is now allowing students to attend classes remotely as the anti-Israel encampment persists.