WASHINGTON: US President Joe Biden insisted Thursday that “order must prevail” on college campuses after weeks of turmoil, clashes with police and mass arrests involving student protests against the Zionist war in Gaza. Biden, who until now had remained tight-lipped on the student unrest, spoke just hours after hundreds of police moved in to forcibly clear a sprawling encampment at the University of California, Los Angeles, tearing down barriers and detaining dozens of protestors.

For weeks, authorities on campuses from New York to California have tried to thread the needle between the right to protest and complaints of violence and hate speech, resulting in hundreds of arrests and chaos as university terms end.

“We are not an authoritarian nation where we silence people or squash dissent,” Biden, who has faced criticism from all sides of the political spectrum over the demonstrations, said in a televised statement from the White House. “But neither are we a lawless country. We’re a civil society, and order must prevail,” he added.

Earlier, UCLA students clad in white helmets linked arms and formed a line facing off against officers, who were detaining protesters and leading them away. Police used flashbangs to disperse the crowds gathered outside the encampment who chanted “Let them go!” as helicopters hovered overhead.

Officers blocked stairs accessing the site, with students dressed in yellow jackets and serving as medics telling AFP they were being largely prevented from reaching the area. In another part of the encampment, students carrying umbrellas, helmets and plastic shields squared off against police in mostly tense silence, with sporadic chants of “Free Palestine!” and “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!”

The large police presence, including LAPD and California Highway Patrol officers, came after law enforcement were criticized for being slow to act during violent clashes late Tuesday when counter-protesters attacked an encampment of pro-Palestinian students. UCLA said classes would be remote on Thursday and Friday due to the “emergency on campus”, and warned students to avoid the protest area.

Demonstrators have gathered on at least 40 US university campuses since last month, often erecting tent camps to protest the soaring death toll in the Gaza Strip. Officers detained several people at Fordham University in New York and cleared a protest set up inside a school building, officials said. At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, protesters dug in, blocking an avenue near the center of the campus in Cambridge during the height of Wednesday afternoon’s rush hour commute.

The University of Texas at Dallas saw police remove an encampment and arrest at least 17 people for “criminal trespass,” the school said. Police said about 300 arrests were made at Columbia and another New York university. New York Mayor Eric Adams blamed “outside agitators” for ratcheting up tensions. Columbia students have denied outsiders were involved.

Like university leaders, Biden’s administration has also tried to walk the fine line between free speech and complaints of intimidation. Republicans have accused him of being soft on what they say is “anti-Semitic” sentiment among the protesters, while he faces widespread opposition in his own party for his strong support for the Zionist entity’s war on Gaza.

“There should be no place on any campus, no place in America for anti-Semitism, or threats of violence against Jewish students,” Biden said Thursday. “There is no place for hate speech or violence of any kind, whether it’s anti-Semitism, Islamophobia or discrimination against Arab Americans or Palestinian Americans,” he said. “It’s simply wrong.”

Biden’s Republican election rival Donald Trump, meanwhile, has repeatedly praised the police response and called for a full crackdown, denouncing “radical left lunatics” in comments from the New York courthouse where he is on trial over a hush money scheme. “To every college president, I say remove the encampments immediately, vanquish the radicals and take back our campuses for all of the normal students,” he told a rally in Wisconsin on Wednesday. – AFP