Columbia’s anti-Israel protesters say Trump pulling $400M in grants from university is a ‘scare tactic’

A group of anti-Israel student protesters at Columbia University on Saturday criticized the Trump administration’s decision to rescind more than $400 million in federal grants to the university over its alleged failure to address antisemitism on campus during demonstrations held in the aftermath of Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack against Israel.

The student group, Columbia University Apartheid Divest, responded on social media Saturday night for the first time since the announcement of the administration’s decision, which the group slammed as a “transparent scare tactic.”

“The Trump administration’s announcement that it plans to cancel $400 million in federal grants and contracts to Columbia is a transparent scare tactic,” the group wrote on an Instagram slideshow. “The decision has nothing to do with the fabricated charges of antisemitism they are using as a thin cover to slash funding.”

“The federal government is once again attempting to prolong the US-backed genocide and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank by redirecting outrage from the US’s role in genocide to the decolonial student protesters who it baselessly labels antiemetic,” the post continued.

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The group said the last two months of a “hack job” by President Donald Trump and his senior advisor Elon Musk to “destroy public institutions” has “made clear that the billionaires in government are systematically dismantling every institution that doesn’t privately enrich them.”

The university’s interim president, Katrina Armstrong, responded to Trump’s funding cuts on Friday by saying that the university takes the cuts “very seriously” and is prepared to work with the federal government on its “legitimate concerns.”

“When I accepted the role of Interim President in August 2024, I knew Columbia needed a reset from the previous year and the chaos of encampments and protests on our campus,” Armstrong wrote. “The University also needed to acknowledge and repair the damage to our Jewish students, who were targeted, harassed, and made to feel unsafe or unwelcome on our campus last spring.”

TRUMP CUTS MORE THAN $400 MILLION IN GRANTS TO COLUMBIA OVER ANTISEMITISM CONCERNS, POTENTIALLY MORE TO COME

The student protesters asked in their Instagram post, “President Armstrong who do you serve?”

The group said the university has spent the last 17 months “appeasing Zionists and fascists,” which it said includes consenting to cutting diversity, equity and inclusion programs, increasing surveillance and even expulsion of pro-Palestinian students, “brutally” arresting protesters “at the whim of wealthy donors’ WhatsApp chats” and firing pro-Palestinian workers.

The student protesters said the university also rejected their calls to divest from Israel.

“Columbia University has bent over backwards to satiate the Zionist death machine — brutalizing it’s [sic] own students, awarding former IOF [Israel Occupying Force] soldiers thousands of dollars after assaulting protestors, surveilling and shutting out the Harlem community — was it worth it?” the group wrote in the caption of the Instagram post.

“The institution will never keep us safe,” it continued. “These cuts won’t be hurting Armstrong’s pockets, instead our most marginalized communities will face the brunt of its impacts. It’s up to us keep us safe.”

The social media post featured several slides, including one that said “Zionists will never love you” and another that called for “organized resistance to obvious injustice.”