(C) Common Dreams
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A Bystander to ’60s Protests, Biden Now Becomes a Target [1]

['Peter Baker']

Date: 2024-04-30

When students took over Hamilton Hall at Columbia University in April 1968, a young Joe Biden was studying law 250 miles away, just weeks from graduation. Protests and chanting and tie-dye shirts were not his style. “I was in law school,” he later recalled. “I wore sport coats.”

Now, 56 years to the day after the police stormed Hamilton Hall to evict demonstrators in one of the most iconic moments of the 1960s protest movement, Mr. Biden has no more affinity for their modern-day successors rousted by officers from the same university building they had seized to voice outrage over Israel’s war in Gaza.

Having traded up from sports coats in the Syracuse University law school library to suit coats in the Oval Office, however, Mr. Biden cannot simply shrug off the uproar on American college campuses as he once could. This time he is not just a disdainful bystander but one of the targets of the discontent, challenging him to navigate the treacherous waters of campus politics better than Lyndon B. Johnson did in 1968.

Mr. Biden has sought to walk a careful line in recent days as protests have mushroomed across the country and in some cases led to suspensions and arrests like Tuesday night’s nationally televised police raid at Columbia. While he expresses support for the free speech rights of students to oppose his support for Israel, he has condemned antisemitism directed at Jewish students. But as the political far left calls him “Genocide Joe” and Republicans blame him for the campus chaos, the president has sought to stay personally out of the fray as much as possible.

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[1] Url: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/30/us/politics/biden-columbia-protests-israel-antisemitism.html

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