College Democrats of America released a statement Tuesday that praised the multiple antisemitic uprisings on college campuses across the country, likening them to the civil rights movement while blasting as "morally reprehensible" the punishment doled out to protesters who have committed crimes or refused official orders to disperse.
The group, the official college outreach arm of the Democratic National Committee, lauded the "heroic actions on the part of students around the country to protest and sit in for an end to the war in Palestine" and for having "the moral clarity to see this war for what it is: destructive, genocidal and unjust."
They also took aim at President Joe Biden, saying "we reserve the right to criticize our own party when it fails to represent youth voices."
"The White House has taken the mistaken route of a bear-hug strategy for [Benjamin] Netanyahu and a cold-shoulder strategy for its own base and all Americans who want to see an end to this war," College Democrats said in their statement, approved 8-2 by its executive board, according to The New York Times.
Biden has endorsed a temporary cease-fire, called for a two-state solution, and last month, chose not to veto a U.N. Security Council resolution calling for a cease-fire, angering Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister. But that's not good enough for CDA.
"We're realizing that our duty as College Democrats is to be representatives of college students to the party, rather than vice versa," Sunjay Muralitharan, the vice president of CDA and a student at the University of California, San Diego, told the Times.
The group also issued "the strongest condemnation" against universities that moved against the protesters through arrests, suspensions, and evictions. The "overwhelming majority of protests are peaceful," the group wrote.
Protesters at Columbia broke into a building overnight and are unlawfully holed up inside. A custodian claimed he was held hostage temporarily amid the takeover. Protesters at Cal Poly Humboldt (takeover of two buildings) and Portland State (library takeover) did likewise. Protesters at myriad campuses across the country have physically prevented Jewish students from crossing parts of campus.
The Times reported that the statement was written mostly by the group's Muslim Caucus. However, one CDA board member who voted against the statement identified three problems to the Times:
- It didn't condemn Hamas.
- The protests are largely antisemitic and therefore inappropriate to link them to the civil rights movement.
- It ignored Jewish members of its own group.
"By releasing the statement, you're effectively saying to the Jewish students within the College Democrats of America that we frankly do not care what you say, and we're just going to do whatever we please to complete a narrative," Joshua Martin, the organization's political affairs director and a student at the University of Houston, told the Times.
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