MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough raged Monday at university leaders over the anti-Israel protests erupting across U.S. campuses.
Hundreds of protesters have been arrested on college campuses throughout the past few weeks as encampments have blocked students and faculty from attending classes, sparking clashes with law enforcement. Pro-Palestinian protesters at these encampments have called on a range of universities to “disclose” and “divest” from Israel.
Scarborough condemned the administrative leaders at universities and colleges for failing to stop the protests from shutting students out of class.
“I gotta say, it makes as much sense in 2024 having 18 or 19-year-old people running college campuses as it did in 1968. Which is to say, it doesn’t make any sense at all and you do wonder where the adults are,” Scarborough said. “The adults that are supposed to be running the university, the amount of money that they are paid to educate students and they can’t allow students to go to class because of the small subset of those students and outside agitators want to shut down the campus. Where are the adults? It’s staggering. And not to just to me, I know I’m a conservative, not just to me, but to 90 percent of Americans. They want to know where the adults are at Columbia. They want to know where the adults are at Penn. They want to know where the adults are at Harvard.
“They want to know where the adults are at all of these college campuses where they’re letting their students and outside agitators run across the campus, shut down debate, scream whenever anyone tries to talk reason to them, shout genocidal chants, hold up signs pointing to Jews saying Hamas’ next victims, holding up signs talking about the final solution. Chanting constantly ‘from the river to the sea,’ do you know what ‘the river to the sea’ is? If you don’t, that’s alright, most of the students who are chanting it don’t understand that they’re chanting genocidal comments. They want to wipe out all Jews and they want to destroy the state of Israel and they want kill Jews and push them—see, they are Hamas on college campuses when they chant that,” he continued.
Scarborough compared the protests to the anti-Vietnam War protests on college campuses in 1968, where students and outside agitators similarly occupied campuses and dozens of buildings. He said these same protesters are currently running these campuses and encouraging the same activity. (RELATED: ‘You’re Fake News!’: Heckler Wrecks ‘Morning Joe’ Live Shot, Needles Scarborough In Studio)
He further said these protests could help former President Donald Trump get elected in 2024 in the same way the anti-Vietnam protests helped get former President Richard Nixon into the Oval Office.
“They helped elect Nixon, I guess they want to elect Donald Trump in ’24. Good on you guys! Good on you,” Scarborough added.
George Packer, who joined “Morning Joe” as a guest Monday, argued in a piece for The Atlantic that elite universities are “caught in a trap” as they have “trained” students to believe that white Jews are not marginalized and that Israel is “illegitimate” for being a “settler-colonialist state.”
The demonstrations began at Columbia University where 113 people were arrested Apr. 18 for refusing to disperse their pro-Palestine encampment set up the prior day, according to ABC News 7. Over 40 individuals were arrested at Yale University during an Apr. 21 protest after the pro-Palestinian group “Occupy Beinecke” similarly refused to break up their 24-tent encampment on the university’s campus.
State troopers surrounded anti-Israel protesters at the University of Texas at Austin Wednesday and arrested at least 50 protesters who clashed with law enforcement. Officers with the Atlanta Police Department and Emory Police Department were met with violence when they arrived to disperse a protest at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, Thursday, where several students and at least one faculty member were arrested.