As pro-Palestinian scholar protesters took over a development at Columbia University in New York City early Tuesday, one individual within the crowd outdoor stood out — a gray-haired lady who delivered orders to younger other people serving to to barricade a door.
“Tie it right to the lock,” she advised two masked protesters protecting zip ties, in keeping with video posted on social media. The protesters did as they had been advised, the use of the binds on a steel desk pressed in opposition to the door of Hamilton Hall.
“Let’s give them a little cover,” the older lady advised the gang. “Cameras back. Cameras back.”
The lady was once now not a Columbia University scholar or college member. She, if truth be told, has no recognized association to the college in any respect.
She is a 63-year-old veteran activist named Lisa Fithian, whom the New York Police Department described as a “professional agitator.”
The takeover of Hamilton Hall was once a important escalation within the technique utilized by scholars challenging that Columbia divest from firms which may be benefiting from the battle in Gaza. Both New York Mayor Eric Adams and Columbia President Nemat Shafik blamed the motion on outdoor actors with out a ties to the college.
So some distance, Fithian is the one outsider town officers have recognized as taking part in a section within the seizure of the development.
New York police officers imagine Fithian might be one of the vital other people accountable for coaching the protesters within the ways they used to occupy Hamilton Hall, in keeping with two senior town officers. The officers didn’t supply additional main points, and the entire scope of Fithian’s involvement within the takeover was once now not transparent.
A police spokesperson stated she was once now not one of the vital more or less 50 other people arrested at Columbia when law enforcement officials stormed Hamilton Hall past due Tuesday.
Fithian is not any stranger to high-profile protests. For more or less 50 years, she has participated in demonstrations for a dizzying array of reasons at house and out of the country, racking up ratings of arrests.
“In my years as an anti-racist organizer, I have shut down the CIA, disrupted the World Trade Organization’s first major meeting during the Battle of Seattle, and helped launch Common Ground Relief, a grassroots organization that supported communities in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina,” she wrote in her ebook “Shut It Down: Stories From a Fierce, Loving Resistance.”
“I have camped in a ditch with Cindy Sheehan, the Gold Star mom who protested the Iraq War. I have stood my ground in Tahrir Square and set sail on the US and Women’s Boats to Gaza,” she wrote.
Fithian didn’t straight away reply to messages left on her telephone. In an interview Tuesday, she advised The New York Times that she was once “absolutely not” organizing the protests.
“It’s actually quite absurd,” she stated. “I know with these videos, it’s hard for some people to believe that. But it’s the truth.”
At a news convention Tuesday, Adams referred to as out “external actors who attempted to hijack this private protest.” Before police released a video that seemed to display Fithian outdoor Hamilton Hall and recognized her through identify, he additionally referred to an “outside agitator with a history of escalating situations and trying to create chaos.”
Shafik, Columbia’s president, stated in a letter to the police division Tuesday, “We believe that while the group who broke into the building includes students, it is led by individuals who are not affiliated with the university.”
Shafik didn’t supply a foundation for that statement.
Supporters of the student-led protest motion at Columbia have bristled on the advice that outsiders had been directing it.
A overall of 280 other people had been arrested past due Tuesday after police moved in at the protesters at Columbia and City College of New York.
It is unclear what number of weren’t scholars or college individuals. One of the ones taken into custody has an arrest historical past relationship to the G8 summit in 2005, when the individual was once accused of assaulting a police officer within the United Kingdom, stated Rebecca Weiner, the deputy police commissioner of intelligence and counterterrorism.
In a video posted on her Facebook web page in April, Fithian described herself as a “nonviolent direct action trainer.”
“There’s no room for violence in these missions, and in trying to build the world that we want,” Fithian says within the clip.
Over the years, her activism has drawn consideration from a host of media shops, together with the Times, the New York Post and The Miami Herald.
“It looks like we’ve already gotten the CIA’s attention,” Fithian was once quoted as announcing in an April 1987 Miami Herald article in regards to the march she led outdoor the company’s headquarters to protest U.S. coverage in Central America and southern Africa.
Mother Jones profiled Fithian in 2012, describing her as a “streetwise radical who’s teaching kids who want to be badass to be smart.” The tale stated unions and activist teams paid her $300 a day to behavior demonstrations and “teach their members tactics for taking over the streets.”
There is not any indication she was once getting paid to wait the Columbia protest.
In the video launched through police, Fithian glares at two scholars who’re looking to save you the protesters from barricading Hamilton Hall early Tuesday.
“We’re trying to document them being assholes,” she tells someone recording video of the come across.
