Antisemitism watchdog visits NY hospital over anti-Israel medical students
Police responded to Bassett Medical Center in Cooperstown, N.Y. last week after an antisemitism watchdog group arrived with a billboard truck to expose medical students over anti-Israel comments.
Adam Guillette, president of Accuracy in Media, was on the scene to call out two Columbia University students who are participating in the Columbia-Bassett medical program. The students are both leaders within Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD), a "coalition of 100+ Columbia University student groups who see Palestine as the vanguard for collective liberation."
Each student's name and face appeared on the side of a large screen driven by a truck calling them "radical antisemites."
"As is always the case, when we send [the trucks] over, our targets freak out and go crazy," Guillette told The National Desk. "And quite consistently, law enforcement arrives and tells them they have to calm down and tell us that we're completely complying with the law and that we're free to go back to what we're doing."
Guillette was allowed to continue displaying the image as long as he did so on public property.
Video of the incident shared with TND shows multiple Bassett organizers and community members outraged over the truck. Guillette said this emotional response is due to a lack of accountability in higher education.
"These are people who've never been challenged, who've never been held accountable," Guillette said. "These radicals have never been held accountable, and when we introduce just a little bit of accountability to them, they lose their mind."
He continued, explaining similar actions at other schools have caused him to receive death threats and swatting attacks. Nonetheless, Guillette says AIM remains determined to hold students and administrators accountable.
"For us, it's a tremendous motivation to keep going because if we stopped what we were doing after we got assaulted at Harvard or after we got assaulted at Columbia, if we stop what we were doing after the swattings, these radicals would learn the lesson that their tactics work," he said.
Neither Columbia University nor the school's Irving Medical Center responded to a request for comment from TND Thursday.
