A retired teacher saw inspiration in Columbia’s protests. Eric Adams called her an outside agitator

NEW YORK — Before police officers poured into Columbia University Tuesday night and arrested more than a hundred people as they cleared an occupied school building and tent camp, New York Mayor Eric Adams received a piece of information that he said changed his thinking about campus demonstrations during the war. in Gaza.

“Outside agitators” working to “radicalize our children” drove students to more extreme tactics, the mayor claimed. And one of them, Adams said repeatedly in media appearances Wednesday morning, was a woman whose husband had been “convicted of terrorism.”

But the woman the mayor is referring to was not on Columbia’s campus this week, is not among the protesters arrested and has not been charged with any crime.

Nahla Al-Arian, 63, told The Associated Press on Wednesday that Adams misrepresented both her role in the protests and facts about her husband, Sami Al-Arian, a former computer engineering professor and prominent Palestinian activist.

He was arrested in 2003 on charges of supporting the Palestinian Islamic Jihad group in the 1980s and 1990s, but a jury declined to convict him of any charges. The complicated case remained in legal limbo for years, even after he took a plea deal to a lesser charge that his family said he agreed to in order to get out of prison and end their suffering. He was deported to Turkey in 2015, ending a case seen by some as an example of government overreach.

Nahla Al-Arian, a retired elementary school teacher, said she went to Columbia, but not to teach anyone about civil disobedience.

“The whole thing is distracting because they are very afraid that the young Americans are becoming aware for the first time of what is happening in Palestine,” said Nahla Al-Arian. “They are the ones who influenced me. They are the ones who have given me hope that the Palestinian people can finally get justice.”

She said she has lost dozens of relatives to Israeli airstrikes in recent months and wanted to see the encampment up close. That’s why she stopped by on April 25 when she visited New York City on an unrelated trip with her two daughters. She said she briefly sat on the lawn but did not speak directly to protesters, who she described as “busy and beautiful.”

“I sat there and was happy to see those students fighting for justice for the oppressed people in Palestine,” she remembers. “Then I was tired, so I left.”

It was a photo of her kneeling alone next to a tent, taken by her daughter and shared on X by her husband, that quickly fueled accusations of a terrorism link to the protest.

The claim was parroted by right-wing social media accounts, including Libs of TikTok. A post that racked up more than 1 million views on The post cited City Hall sources and has since been deleted. But the claim spread widely, fueling a narrative — hotly contested by student organizers — that Columbia’s pro-Palestinian movement was co-opted by outside forces.

In an appearance Wednesday on “CBS Mornings,” Adams, a Democrat, said the NYPD’s intelligence division had identified people among the protesters “who were professionals, well trained.” One of them was married to someone who had been arrested for terrorism.” Pressed for details, he declined to name the woman but suggested reporters could find out by checking social media.

Speaking on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” Adams also said his suspicions about outside influences on the students were confirmed after police identified a woman in the protest “organization” whose “husband was arrested for and convicted of terrorism at the federal level ‘. At a press conference later in the day, Adams suggested that Columbia students had been taught by outsiders how to barricade themselves to ward off police attempts to remove them, saying, “These are all skills that are taught and learned.”

Police declined to provide details about which groups may have been involved, or to say how many of the 109 people arrested in Columbia on Tuesday night had no ties to the university. Even before the students entered Hamilton Hall, police officials previously claimed, without providing evidence, that an outside group helped finance and organize the encampment.

Law enforcement officials have long tried to discredit protests by invoking the specter of “outside agitators,” dating back to the civil rights movement. Police officials in New York made similar claims during the demonstrations that broke out in the city following the death of George Floyd in New York. 2020, where peaceful marches led by community activists are sometimes labeled as the work of violent external extremists.

Columbia students have been open about including members from outside the community in their movement. But organizers claim their actions were led by students, some of whom said they had closely studied the tactics of those who took over several university buildings in 1968 to protest the Vietnam War and racism.

In a statement, the group behind the encampment, Columbia University Apartheid Divest, defended its right “to engage people from outside the Ivy League or the Ivory Tower in this global movement.”

“’Outside agitator’ is a far-right smear used to discredit coalition building and anti-racism,” the statement continued.

Laila Al-Arian, a journalist who joined her mother at the encampment on April 25, said the mayor’s comments brought back painful memories of her father’s years of legal battles, including the long time she spent in solitary confinement . Adams, she said, “appealed to people’s most basic racist instincts” to treat Muslims as dangerous outsiders.

“My mother wanted to experience this beautiful act of solidarity up close,” she added. “For people to use my father to smear these students who may not have even been alive when all of this happened is shameful in many ways.”