Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH) said on Monday that “two forces” underly the “campus violence” amid reports of harassment against Jewish students as pro-Palestinian and anti-Israel protests sprout up at Columbia, Yale, and other universities.
The chaos on campuses is the result of a “convergence” of dual factors that “the Left has been openly cultivating for years now,” Vance told Fox News host Jesse Watters.
“On one hand you have well-educated limousine self-hating liberals who get very good educations, but really getting very good indoctrinations. They are not getting an education in anything,” he said.
“And then on the flipside, you have the importation of millions of people, some of whom aren’t properly vetted and some of whom hate this country,” Vance continued, alluding to the migrant crisis.
“Those two forces are joining in Columbia and in Yale and producing this incredible campus violence,” Vance added.
At Columbia, protesters have insisted the university meet their demands, including divestiture from companies that have ties to Israel as the country fights a war against Hamas in the Gaza Strip.
Vance pointed to some alleged incidents during the demonstrations that have given rise to concerns about the safety of Jewish students and even led to Columbia shifting to remote learning on Monday.
“Obviously we condemn anti-Semitism. But I don’t care what your underlying ideology is. If you are harassing fellow students, if you are preventing people from getting to class, if you are stabbing your fellow students in the eye with flags, you should go to prison,” he said.
Vance took aim at Democrats, including President Joe Biden, saying he does not understand why they “cannot just utter the simple basic truth that if you violate the law, if you set up a tent city, if you turn our cities or campuses into garbage dumps for your next political protest, you need to be forced to comply with the law.”
Although police arrested more than 100 students at Columbia for refusing to leave an encampment on campus and participants have been subject to suspension, the protest activity persisted for several days.
Democrats have “boxed themselves into a hole” because of their need for moderate Jewish and Arab voters in places across the country, Vance said. “Those groups of people very often do not see eye to eye on this Israel question — on the Gaza question, and the Democrats have to lay in the bed that they’ve made for themselves.”
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Vance also made reference to equivocating comments from Biden on Monday in which the president said that he condemns the “anti-Semitic protests” as well as people who “don’t understand” what Palestinians are going through.
“The fact that Joe Biden cannot straightforwardly condemn terrorism and attacks on the craziness that’s going on in our campuses is evidence that the guy has two masters and he needs to pick one and if he doesn’t the American people need to give them the boot,” Vance said.
“Can you imagine, Jesse, if Donald Trump was president right now, can you imagine how swiftly we would respond to this lawlessness and chaos? We just need to get back to common sense,” Vance said. “I’m not asking for anything — of course people have the right to peacefully protest — I’m not asking for anything other than simple law in order and obeying the law. If you can ask that of college kids, what can you ask?”