There is a genocide in Gaza. Again — genocide. This is not an exaggeration. This is not a question to be resolved in a "debate" or sterile panel discussion presided over by people who benefit from neutrality. We are witnessing live, in motion, explicit destruction and deliberate exodus of a people, and rather than deal with it our institutions are choosing to arrest students who are courageous enough to bear witness and tell the truth. Columbia University — a supposed bastion of intellectualism — hosted students entering Butler Library not to vandalize, but to dissent. Not to incite violence, but to name it. And in doing so they were met not with conversation or reason, but with riot gear and handcuffs. Their "punishment?" Suspension, exclusion, humiliation — the full measure of a university that is exquisitely too cowardly to take a stand, and too anxious to be caught up in political pressure. Let’s name the source of that pressure: the Trump Administration. In the push to demonize Palestinians, glorify Israel’s military complex, and equate all forms of solidarity as antisemitism, these circumstances have nothing to do with safety. 

This is about control. This is about keeping Americans ignorant, distracted, and complicit in crimes we pretend are not ours.

These students are not radicals. They are reminders. Reminders that our silence is betrayal. Reminders that activism is not terrorism. Reminders that there is no way to bomb your way to peace or censor your way to justice. They protested because no one else would, and in doing so, they shamed a university that forgot its own legacy of protest and dissent. And what was the protest for? For chanting "Free Palestine"? For demanding divesture from corporations profiting from war crimes? For having the audacity to care about human life on the wrong side of a border? 

Politicians tell us that free speech is a pillar of democracy. Yet when students access democratic freedom to challenge genocide in the streets, they are criminalized. Why? Because it is inconvenient. Because it forces a reckoning. Because it takes away the carefully curated illusion of the United States as neutral observer in the ongoing conflict. Here is the reality: America subsidizes Israel's apartheid. Our taxes pay for the missiles that turn hospitals into debris. Our taxes bury children under concrete. And when youth - the future - publicly tell this truth, we shut them down. We accuse them, we surveil them, we arrest them. There is a reason history does not reward silencers. History rewards the courageous. The lunch counter sit-ins. The Vietnam War protests. The anti-apartheid movements. 

Columbia has seen moments like this before, and if its administrators had even an ounce of integrity, they would recognize this moment for what it is - a moral crossroads. So let them protest. Let them disrupt. Let them scream until their voices crack. Because the alternative is worse; a campus - and a nation - that no longer questions authority, no longer cries for the dead, and no longer imagines justice being possible.

If we shut down dissent, we are not protecting safety. We are protecting power. And if the cost of comfort is complicity in genocide, then these students are right to set the whole damn table on fire.

This is not just their fight. It’s all of ours.