NY Councilwoman Vernikov Raises Concerns about the ‘Festering’ Issue of Antisemitism in Colleges, Urges Action

New York City Councilwoman Inna Vernikov, speaking out on Newsmax after a pro-Palestinian protest forced a group of Jewish students to barricade themselves inside a college library this week, said Friday that antisemitism has been “festering in American academia for a long time,” and must be stopped.

“Our communities, the Jewish communities have been traumatized and stressed out and in a lot of fear from the war in the Middle East and what we saw Hamas do to innocent Jewish civilians,” Vernikov said on “Wake Up America.” “Women, children, Holocaust survivors, [Hamas] took over 200 hostages, and for us to watch that happen from here is so incredibly terrifying.”

Wednesday, pro-Palestinian protesters at The Cooper Union, a small engineering and architecture school in New York City’s Greenwich Village, entered the college’s hallways and ended up pounding on barricaded doors at the school’s library for 40 minutes while Jewish students hid inside, according to video from the incident.

Thursday, Vernikov, a Republican, along with others, held a press conference outside the school, where they demanded that its president, Laura Sparks, resign if she could not do her “duty and keep Jewish students safe on your campus, while you escape through the back door with campus security.”

But, she told Newsmax that what’s happening on the nation’s college campuses is not new as “the Marxist ideology that always comes with anti-Israel and anti-American sentiment” has been growing.

“We’ve been warning about this for a long time and this is the result we’re seeing right now,” Vernikov said. “This is the result we’re seeing right now, and it was absolutely horrifying to see students locked in the library scared for their lives. Two nights ago, I spoke to foreign students, three of them were the students that were locked in the library and they were absolutely terrified.”

The school, she added, “should have prevented this and they didn’t.”

The councilwoman also noted that she was at a college protest in Brooklyn last week that was happening “at exactly the same time that Jewish women were being raped and murdered; the innocent babies were found burned to death.”

And, Vernikov said she wants to know what the protests were about.

“If you want to talk about an alleged occupation, first of all, the occupation is taking place by Hamas,” she said. “It’s not by Israel … but to do that, at a time when Jewish women, elderly, men, and Holocaust survivors are being raped, murdered, and slaughtered, that just means you’re staunchly pro-Hamas. What is it that you’re supporting when you’re protesting during this time?”

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