White House urges ‘peaceful’ campus protests after hundreds arrested

The White House insisted on Sunday that pro-Palestinian protests that have rocked US universities in recent weeks must remain peaceful, after police arrested around 275 people on four separate campuses over the weekend.

“We certainly respect the right of peaceful protests,” National Security Council spokesman John Kirby told ABC’s “This Week.” But, he added: “We condemn the anti-Semitism language that we’ve heard of late and certainly condemn all the hate speech and the threats of violence out there.”

The demonstrations began at

Columbia University in New York, but they have since spread rapidly across the country.

While peace has prevailed on many campuses, the number of protesters detained — at times by police in riot gear using chemical irritants and tasers — is rising fast. They include 100 at Northeastern University in Boston, 80 at Washington University in St. Louis, 72 at Arizona State University, and 23 at Indiana University. Among those arrested at Washington University was Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein, who faulted police for aggressive tactics she said provoked the sort of trouble they are meant to quell.

“This is about freedom speech ... on a very critical issue,” she told CNN shortly before her arrest on Saturday.

“And there they are, sending in the police and creating a riot.” College administrators have struggled to find the best response, caught between the need to respect free-speech rights and the imperative of containing inflammatory and sometimes violently anti-Semitic calls by protesters.

At the University of Southern California, school officials late on Saturday closed the main campus to the public after pro-Palestinian groups again set up an encampment that had been cleared earlier, the school announced on X.