CNN’s Dana Bash Shocked By Protests: ‘It IS Anti-Semitism’ And It’s ‘Dangerous!’

CNN anchor Dana Bash was shocked by anti-Israel protests at Columbia University, saying the protesters’ language isn’t just “almost anti-Semitism, it IS anti-Semitism” and it is “dangerous.”

Protests at Columbia over the Israel-Palestine War have escalated to a point that Rabbi Elie Buechler, director of OU-LJIC at Columbia, issued a warning to Jewish students to leave campus because “Columbia University’s Public Safety and the NYPD cannot guarantee Jewish students’ safety in the face of extreme antisemitism and anarchy.”

The protests drew a scathing denunciation from the White House.

On Monday morning’s edition of CNN This Morning, Bash joined host Kasie Hunt and her panel to discuss the protests, and was unsparing in calling out the anti-Semitism:

FRANKLIN FOER: The protest has been very disruptive to life on campus. Good reasons, for the university president to come in and to try to deal with the chaos that the university continue to function, so that there’s not a heckler’s veto that’s happening where the loudest it most radical voices have control over the discourse.

But what we’ve seen is that by going in and cracking down, it’s just further inflamed the situation. It’s becoming about more than just Palestine.

And when what’s happened is, protesters say that they’re just criticizing Israel. And I believe that in a lot of their minds, that’s their intent.

But there’s a whole vocabulary that they have for talking about what’s happening on campus that veers almost directly into anti-Semitism, where they accuse Jewish donors, they accuse a Jewish, Jewish forces in the world for ordering the crackdown. It’s not the university president acting on her own. There’s a cabal–

KASIE HUNT: Those are straight up anti-Semitic tropes right there that you outline.

DANA BASH: Yeah. And and it’s, and I’ll even go further, it’s not almost anti-Semitism. It is anti-Semitism. And this is something that is on display right now.

But the, sort of roots of this kind of devolving, from A to B go back millennia. And this is something, the roots of anti-Semitism, that pop up in societies that frankly, tend to be, a canary in the coal mine for a society and democracy in this case, that is in a lot of trouble.

It is. I like to look at this and replace Jews with any other minority group here. And what would the entire country be doing? They would be outraged. Rightly so.

It is not just Palestinian rights. I, got the, the the letter that we reported on that the rabbi at Columbia sent saying that Jewish students, you’re not safe here. From a parent of a Columbia University student. I got it yesterday morning.

And this person’s daughter has heard things like, you’re a Nazi. Things like, you know, go, go kill yourself and other and even worse things.

That’s not protest, that’s harassment. And it is on the brink of violence. And the fact that these Jewish students feel so unsafe and it is, so systemic when it comes from, ultimately going back from classes that don’t necessarily get policed, that is dangerous!

Watch above via CNN This Morning.