DOE Investigating Columbia University for Anti-Palestinian Harassment

Palestine Legal announced Thursday that the U.S. Department of Education has launched a federal investigation into "extreme anti-Palestinian, anti-Arab, and Islamophobic harassment" at Columbia University a week after the advocacy group filed a complaint on behalf of four students and a campus organization.

"While the Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights (OCR) looks into all complaints it receives, it only opens a formal investigation when it determines the facts warrant a deeper look," Palestine Legal pointed out on social media. "The complaint explains how Columbia has allowed and contributed to a pervasive anti-Palestinian environment on campus—including students receiving death threats, being harassed for wearing keffiyehs or hijab, doxxed, harassed by [administration], suspended, locked out of campus, and more."

"Instead of protecting Palestinian and associated students when their voices are most needed to oppose an ongoing genocide, Columbia has taken actions to reinforce this hostile climate in violation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964," added the group.

"The law is clear, if universities do not cease their racist crackdowns against Palestinians and their supporters—they will be at risk of losing federal funding."

Palestine Legal senior staff attorney Radhika Sainath stressed that "the law is clear, if universities do not cease their racist crackdowns against Palestinians and their supporters—they will be at risk of losing federal funding."

"Students have the right to speak out against the genocide of Palestinians, without fear of unequal treatment, racist attacks, or being denied access to an education by their university," the lawyer added.

Since the filing, which highlighted that Columbia University President Minouche Shafik invited "the New York Police Department (NYPD) onto campus for the first time in decades to arrest over 100 students who had been peacefully protesting Israel's genocide of Palestinians," the Ivy League leader has called officers back to the school for more arrests.

On Tuesday night, the NYPD "violently arrested and brutalized dozens of student protestors, some with guns drawn, using sledgehammers, batons, and flash-bang explosives," noted Palestine Legal, which represents Maryam Alwan, Deen Haleem, Daria Mateescu, and Layla Saliba as well as Columbia Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP).

Columbia is one of many American campuses where administrators have called the police, who have behaved aggressively toward students and faculty nonviolently demonstrating to demand that their schools and the U.S. government stop supporting the Israeli assault of Gaza, which has killed at least 34,596 Palestinians in under seven months.

The Intercept revealed last week that OCR opened an investigation into the University of Massachusetts Amherst after Palestine Legal filed a complaint "on behalf of 18 UMass students who have been the target of extreme anti-Palestinian and anti-Arab harassment and discrimination by fellow UMass students, including receiving racial slurs, death threats and in one instance, actually being assaulted."

Congresswoman Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.)—who has supported peaceful student protests and whose daughter Isra Hirsi was suspended from Columbia's Barnard College for protesting last month—highlighted the reporting on social media and some of the verbal attacks that students have endured.

OCR has opened a probe into Emory University following a complaint filed by Palestine Legal and the Council on American Islamic Relations, Georgia (CAIR-GA), according to The Guardian. The newspaper noted Thursday that complaints have also been filed about Rutgers University in New Jersey and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Emory spokesperson Laura Diamond said in a statement that the university "does not tolerate behavior or actions that threaten, harm or target individuals because of their identities or backgrounds."

CAIR-GA executive director Azka Mahmood said that she hopes the investigation into Emory helps "make sure that the systems put in place against bias are used for everyone across the board—so we can produce a comfortable, equitable place for Palestinian, Muslim, and Arab students in the future."

The probes and complaints are notably being conducted and reviewed by an administration that has condemned campus protests while arming Israeli forces engaged in what the International Court of Justice has called a plausibly genocidal campaign in Gaza.

After U.S. President Joe Biden delivered brief remarks on the demonstrations Thursday morning, Edward Ahmed Mitchell, a civil rights attorney and national deputy director at CAIR, said his "claim that 'dissent must never lead to disorder' defies American history, from the Boston Tea Party to the tactics that civil rights activists, Vietnam War protesters, and anti-apartheid activists used to confront injustice."

"And if President Biden is truly concerned about the conflict on college campuses," Mitchell added, "he should specifically condemn law enforcement and pro-Israel mobs for attacking students, and stop enabling the genocide in Gaza that has triggered the protests."