Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was confronted by pro-Palestine protestors on her way to teach a class at Columbia University.
Clinton has been repeatedly confronted by activists since the onset of the Israel-Hamas war in early October.
“Hillary, Hillary you can’t hide, you are supporting genocide,” the protestors screamed in a video on X as the former Democratic presidential nominee walked through the university’s International Affairs Building. The participants held signs that read “Columbia has blood on its hands,” “Columbia funds apartheid,” and “Viva Palestine.” They wore black masks and sat on the floor as Clinton exited the building. BREAKING: Pro-Palestine students at Columbia University disrupt a class taught by Hillary Clinton called “Inside the Situation Room.”
Students have also been walking out of her lecture in protest of her support for Israel. pic.twitter.com/fyAEspHd4j
— BreakThrough News (@BTnewsroom) November 29, 2023
“At today’s sit in for Palestine, Hillary Clinton was shamed out of the SIPA building,” wrote a graduate student at Columbia on X. “She teaches a class at Columbia University and has refused to let students ask her questions about Palestine.”
Columbia announced in January that Clinton would join its faculty as a professor of practice and a presidential fellow at Columbia World Projects.
“I have had the great pleasure of knowing Hillary personally for three decades, since her early days as First Lady of the United States,” said President Lee C. Bollinger in a statement. “Her public service has expanded since then, most notably in her remarkably successful tenure as Senator for the State of New York, in her impressive role as Secretary of State, and in her two historic and record-breaking presidential campaigns. Given her extraordinary talents and capacities together with her singular life experiences, Hillary Clinton is unique, and, most importantly, exceptional in what she can bring to the University’s missions of research and teaching, along with public service and engagement for the public good.”
Clinton said she was “honored” to join the university, noting its “commitment to educating the next generation of U.S. and global policy leaders, translating insights into impact, and helping to address some of the world’s most pressing challenges.”
“I look forward to contributing to these efforts,” she said.
Columbia students have been vocally critical of Clinton and the school’s administration in recent weeks.
In early November, students walked out in the middle of her two-hour class to demonstrate their frustration “for how they perceive it allowed its students who signed an anti-Israel statement to be publicly named and pictured,” per The New York Post, which added that “students were protesting against the school’s lack of action to prevent the doxxing of students, whose faces appeared on trucks that drove near the Morningside Heights campus.”
The truck showed pictures of students who were involved with a pro-Palestine letter under the banner “Columbia’s Leading Anti-Semites.”
An estimated 300 students taking classes in the International Affairs Building walked out of their classes to sit in the building’s lobby. Clinton never addressed the walk-out and reportedly left through a side door.
