A video has surfaced of one of the leaders of the anti-Israeli protests at Columbia University stating repeatedly and emphatically that Zionists “don’t deserve to live” and should be killed.
“The existence of them and the projects they have built i.e. Israel, it’s all antithetical to peace. So yes I feel very comfortable — very comfortable — calling for those people to die,” Khymani James said in the January video.
“Be glad, be grateful that I’m not just going out and murdering Zionists,” he added.
A university spokesman told CNN Friday that James had been banned from campus. The substance of the move was not immediately clear, nor was it clear whether James would remain a student at the institution.
Earlier on Friday James issued an apology for the video while justifying himself, saying he “misspoke,” adding that he regretted his comments which were “wrong,” and that “every member of our community deserves to feel safe without qualification.” He explained that he had been feeling “unusually upset” when he made the statements “after an online mob targeted my because I’m visibly queer and Black.”
ABC News said that hours earlier during a TV interview, James refused to apologize for the video in question.
Columbia has been the epicenter of college encampment protests against Israel and its war in Gaza that have swept through the US, with many Jewish students saying they have been made to feel unsafe due to antisemitic undertones at the demonstrations.
He went on: “Zionists along with all white supremacists need to not exist because they actively kill and harm vulnerable people. They stop the world from progressing.
“And so be glad, be grateful that I’m not just going out and murdering Zionists,” he said. “I’ve never murdered anyone in my life and I hope to keep it that way. I genuinely hope to keep it that way.
‘A focal point of hate’: Pro-Israel activists at Columbia decry campus hostility
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