(TruthAndLiberty.com) – Republican Sen. Marsha Blackburn (Tenn.) is pushing for international students who are sympathizers of Hamas to have their student visas revoked and to be deported as the protests across the country continue.
On Tuesday in an interview on The Hill on NewsNation, Blackburn pointed out that people could not just go around chanting that they are Hamas and calling for Palestine to be free from ‘River to the sea’ and still have the Universities not step up and take action. As she pointed out, the protests have also resulted in many Jewish students being pushed to the sidelines.
She continued by pointing out that in her opinion the students who were protesting and shouting “Death to Israel” and “Death to America” were Hamas sympathizers, and in the cases where these were foreign students they needed to be deported and have their visas revoked. She added that if they are U.S. students and have received federal student loans they should have their student loans revoked, as those loans are being funded by taxpayer dollars.
The comments by the Tennessee senator had come shortly after one of the Columbia University buildings was taken over by students on Tuesday morning. Demonstrators had blocked the entrances and flew a Palestinian flag from the Hamilton Hall window. This has been a change in the direction of the protest which had up to this point been fairly non-violent.
The Pro-Palestine protests have spread through campuses across the country, with over 1,000 people having been arrested for protesting. Many of the student protesters have also pushed for their schools to divest from Israel and to push for a cease-fire in the war.
The protests have largely not endorsed Hamas and have denounced antisemitism, but there have been a few incidents of contention surrounding the protests.
At Columbia, one student protest leader who had argued that Zionists did not deserve to be alive had been banned. In a resurfaced video Khymani James, a protest organizer stated that people needed to be grateful that he was not just going around “murdering Zionists.” He has now apologized for these comments.
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