Two Columbia students who faced off with mob speak out, claim a car full of 'masked people' surveilled them
Two Columbia University students attempted to blunt the break-in of Hamilton Hall on campus at the hands of anti-Israel throngs, telling Fox News they wanted to make a quiet statement by standing up to unruliness.
Charles Beck and Rory Wilson spoke to "The Ingraham Angle" on Tuesday after Beck was filmed being assailed by masked demonstrators. Wilson joined his classmate in a "spur of the moment" decision stemming from his disdain for the chaos.
Video of the confrontation showed the two students standing on the steps of Hamilton Hall, which was besieged and ultimately occupied by protesters who at one point had a pizza hoisted up to a higher floor of the building.
Chants could be heard in the background as one female demonstrator calls for her compatriots to "circle-blockade" them and "move them out."
"I ran over and I saw that it was pretty much chaos — people were smashing in the windows," Wilson said.
"I wanted… to show that I disapproved of what was going on, that this was completely inappropriate — destroying property of our university, and that this is not at all the way that we ought to conduct ourselves in any sort of discourse."
Beck added that when the protesters advanced on him, he heeded the advice of a friend to stand down somewhat.
"Essentially, he was really just quite scared for my health and safety. You know, he'd sort of had a top-field vision of it, and he was afraid that if I'd remained there, that the crowd would have caused me serious bodily injury or even death," he said, adding the friend recommended he not "get martyred for a building."
Beck said he wasn't thinking of his own safety at the time, but instead that there needed to be students who stood up to the mob rule on campus.
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"Ideally, someone at our university could sort of say that, well, they didn't agree with what was happening, and they understood it was something fundamentally wrong," he said.
Host Laura Ingraham reported that both students had a run-in on-campus with "professional protester" Lisa Fithian, playing a clip of the pair telling her they had more of a right to lodge counter-protest than the agitators trying to take Hamilton Hall and hold "the university hostage."
Beck said Fithian, who was described by Mother Jones during the Occupy Wall Street protests as a then-50-year-old "streetwise radical who’s teaching kids who want to be bada-- to be smart," claimed she was on campus to make sure no one got hurt and that "people sort of stayed out of the way who shouldn't have been in the way."
In addition to Fithian, Wilson said there were many "shady people" seen outside campus. The duo also reportedly witnessed footage of black-clad individuals burglarizing the John Jay residence hall, which is, coincidentally, named for the first chief justice of the United States.
"There was a car that was full of masked people who seemed to be keeping an eye on us," Wilson added.