After video surfaced on social media, the student, Khymani James, said on Friday that his comments were wrong.
Columbia University announced on Friday that it had barred from its campus a leader in the pro-Palestinian student protest encampment who declared on video in January that “Zionists don’t deserve to live.”
Video of the incendiary comments resurfaced online Thursday evening, forcing the school to again confront an issue at the core of the conflict rippling across campuses nationwide: the tension between pro-Palestinian activism and antisemitism.
The student, Khymani James, made the comments during and after a disciplinary hearing with Columbia administrators that he recorded and then posted on Instagram.
The hearing, conducted by an administrator of the university’s Center for Student Success and Intervention, was focused on an earlier comment he shared on social media, in which he discussed fighting a Zionist. “I don’t fight to injure or for there to be a winner or a loser, I fight to kill,” he wrote.
A Columbia administrator asked, “Do you see why that is problematic in any way?”
Mr. James replied, “No.”
He also compared Zionists to white supremacists and Nazis. “These are all the same people,” he said. “The existence of them and the projects they have built, i.e. Israel, it’s all antithetical to peace. It’s all antithetical to peace. And so, yes, I feel very comfortable, very comfortable, calling for those people to die.”
