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The president has largely left it to aides to respond to anti-Israel protests at colleges across the country, but he is planning a speech next week at an event sponsored by the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.
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 CNNCNN anchor Kaitlan Collins caught Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH) flat-footed Wednesday night with a misdirection in her line of questioning on the current pro-Palestine protests roiling college campuses across the country.
In a segment to kick off The Source, Collins quizzed the pro-Trump senator on his views regarding the relative value of free speech versus the safety and well-being of students whose lives have been disrupted by the protests on campus—to which Vance replied that police should only become involved if protesters are breaking the law.
"My view on this is that Israel's our ally, that we should support them, but you can't police people for being anti-Israel or pro-Israel," he said. "You can police people for violating the law, and we have seen some of that with some of these protests."
Read more at The Daily Beast.
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 David Swanson/ReutersPolice officers were called to quell violent scenes that broke out on the UCLA campus late Tuesday as opposing groups of protesters brawled inside the pro-Palestine encampment.
The Los Angeles Police Department confirmed early Wednesday that its officers were helping to "restore order and maintain public safety." It said it was acting at the request of UCLA "due to multiple acts of violence within the large encampment on their campus."
The trouble started shortly before 11 p.m. Tuesday when a group of counter-protesters surrounded the encampment, according to KABC, hours after the university declared the encampment "unlawful" and urged students to leave or face sanctions. Barricades around the encampment were torn down by counter-protesters, and people were seen throwing fireworks and using sticks as weapons during the ensuing clashes.
Read more at The Daily Beast.
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Tuesday's raid on Columbia University came 56 years to the day that police raided Hamilton Hall, arresting 700 students protesting racism and the Vietnam War. Democracy Now! co-host Juan González, who was a student leader at the historic 1968 protest, says the violent crackdown on Columbia University and other campuses across the United States has refocused national attention on "an unjust war," carried out by Israel with U.S. backing. "No commencement in America will occur in the next month where the war in Gaza is not a burning issue," he says. He adds that the more diverse makeup of the protests today — led primarily by Palestinian, Muslim and Arab students — may have made school officials and police "much more willing to crack down" than when it was a mostly white protest movement.
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