How a six-second video turned a campus protest into a national firestorm

In the six second video clip, pro-Palestinian protesters are heard chanting and banging on the closed doors of the library of the Cooper Union, a top art, architecture and engineering school in New York City. Inside, a group of Jewish students watch nervously.

Then the fragment ends. It’s the briefest snapshot of a frightening moment at a school of fewer than a thousand students in Manhattan’s East Village.

But within hours, images of the October 25 meeting spread worldwide on social media. The pro-Palestinian demonstrators had dispersed just a few minutes later and no one was injured or arrested, but the story seemed to grow more dire as it traveled. Posts that went viral falsely claimed that the library had been barricaded to protect the students inside from an angry mob, and that police were afraid to intervene.

The Cooper Union protest quickly became a symbol for some of the rising anti-Semitism on American college campuses during the Israel-Hamas war. The Cooper Union, usually low-profile, was mentioned repeatedly during a Republican presidential debate.

Now, amid questions from Congress about how campuses accommodate anti-Semitism, Cooper Union is one of more than a dozen colleges under federal investigation following complaints of discrimination.

And while the campus speech is under an intense public microscope, the library episode and its aftermath demonstrate how a brief moment, free of context or nuance, can be repurposed by partisans in the service of broader political rhetoric during a war in which information is an important part of the war. weapon.

“Off-campus groups are highly motivated to weaponize these protests,” said Angus Johnston, a historian of student activism at Hostos Community College in the Bronx. But the use of campus activism is now dangerous. “What could have been an incident twenty or thirty years ago that no one would find out about unless they were actually there, has now become an incident that can be spread worldwide and be a life-changing experience.”

The Cooper Union has a proud tradition of activism. Abraham Lincoln gained momentum in his presidential campaign with an anti-slavery speech there in 1860. In 2013, students occupied the university president’s office for 65 days to protest a plan to charge tuition at the school, which had always been free.

But like many other colleges across the country, the school struggled to respond to the war between Israel and Hamas in a way that satisfied a deeply divided student population.

After the October 7 attacks, Cooper Union President Laura Sparks published a message expressing outrage over the “violent and deadly terrorist attacks on the Israeli people by Hamas.” But as the death toll in Gaza continued to rise, some students felt the school was not doing enough to acknowledge the Palestinian civilian deaths or the broader context of the war.

Among them was Mathieu Magloire-Wilson, a 21-year-old art student who had just spent five months as an exchange student in Jerusalem.

A New Jersey graphic artist and president of the school’s Black Student Union, he began printing and distributing small booklets of articles about conditions in the Palestinian territories.

Soon, students on both sides of the conflict were putting up posters and images of Palestinian or Israeli flags around campus. Many were taken down.

On October 25, the day of the library meeting, the climate on campus was tense.

At 1 p.m. that day, about 70 students left the classroom as part of a national strike of pro-Palestinian students, form a semicircle outside the building and sing. About 20 pro-Israel counter-protesters stood in line between the pro-Palestinian demonstrators and the school.

Three hours later, about 20 of the pro-Palestinian protesters went inside — past guards telling them to stop, video shows — to make demands, including that the college call for a ceasefire and end its exchange program with Israel. directly to the chairman of the board on the seventh floor. Ms. Sparks locked her door but told police she did not feel threatened and allowed the protest to continue, police said.

As the protest continued upstairs, some pro-Israel demonstrators entered the library, according to a university official who reviewed security footage.

After almost an hour, the pro-Palestinian demonstrators descended and reached the library on the ground floor. A guard closed the large gray doors and stood outside.

In interviews, protesters said they didn’t know who was inside when they came to the door, and that they were just angry because they were being kept out. They banged on the doors in time to their repetitive chant: “Free, free Palestine.”

“This was in no way an attack on Jewish people, Judaism, Jewish students or teachers,” Mr. Magloire-Wilson said in an interview. The protesters, he said, see themselves as standing up for the Palestinian people.

But in the library the view was different. Students were visibly worried by the banging on the doors. That’s when the six-second video was recorded.

Several pro-Palestinian protesters and at least one Jewish student said in interviews that they thought the doors were locked. But the school later said security footage showed this was not the case.

After two minutes, the demonstrators moved to a glass wall along the side of the library. For about seven minutes, they held up posters, banged cardboard tubes and sang, the school said.

Two students in the library sat down at a table inches from the glass, video shows. “Hey, let’s take a picture,” another student can be heard saying.

There is nervous laughter, but also concern.

“This is not peaceful,” says a young woman. People ask if the police were there.

After the protesters left, the library doors remained closed for 20 minutes — not to protect anyone, the school said, but to minimize disruption to the people who study and work there. The police had been there the whole time and said there was no reason to intervene. “At no point did they shout that they wanted to kill people,” said Carlos Nieves, deputy police commissioner. said later.

Within minutes, however, the commotion on campus had taken on a life of its own, leaving students embroiled in a fierce national debate about freedom of speech and anti-Semitism on campus.

Jake Novak, a pro-Israel media personality with thousands of followers, posted the video that would go viral on the social platform X.

“NOW BREAKING: My sources tell me that several Jewish students @cooperunion are currently locked in the school library, while a pro Hamas rally outside the Cooper Union building learned that the Jews were scared and in the library, then moved the protest to brought in and barricaded all exits,” He wroteafter the event was already over.

He tagged major media outlets to get their attention.

Each post seemed to add more false details: that the Jewish students, for example, had escaped through a secret tunnel or were hiding in an attic.

Mr Magloire-Wilson had his photo and name published in a social media post accusing him of “orchestrating the mafia attack” on the Jewish students. His social media accounts were soon filled with racist insults and threats. Someone sent him a photo of a noose. He said he was afraid someone would harm him and worried about his future.

“The unfortunate thing about this is that it’s happening on such a massive scale, this system of doxxing and forcing young students and people into this terrible position,” he said.

The day after the protest, supporters of the Jewish students held a press conference calling on Ms. Sparks to resign.

The student who shot the six-second video, Taylor Roslyn Lent, was interviewed Fox news. She said that while she was not normally threatened by pro-Palestinian protests, she had felt threatened “when chants calling for the murder of Jews came from my fellow students.”

(During the protest outside the school, students chanted several slogans, including the controversial phrase: “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” but denied that they were inciting violence.)

Ziporah Reich, litigation director for the Lawfare Project, a pro bono legal organization, declined requests for interviews with Ms. Lent and the other Jewish students she represented in a potential civil lawsuit against the school. She said her clients were the clear victims and disputed the details provided by the school and police.

Amy Binder, a sociologist at Johns Hopkins, who to research student activism, said student disputes have become fodder for a growing number of organizations, most of them right-wing, that denounce political behavior they do not support on campuses.

“It’s incredibly divisive,” she says.

At Cooper Union, the episode has further damaged trust among students on campus. A spokeswoman, Kim Newman, said an internal review of the events is underway. “There is no tolerance here for discrimination, harassment or intimidation of any kind,” she said.

Ed Shanahan reporting contributed.