Protests at Columbia University are being organized in part by "explicitly communist" outside forces, according to Father Roger Landry, a Catholic chaplain at the New York City Ivy League School.
"There is an instrumentalization of what’s going on in Gaza to advance an agenda, and that is to deconstruct our present world order at which the United States is considered the top of that order," Landry said in an interview on EWTN’s "The World Over with Raymond Arroyo," reports Catholic News Agency.
Landry added that he had been speaking with student protesters and "outside agitators" while walking through the protesters' encampment almost daily, and he does believe that many there were concerned for the fate of civilians in Gaza because of the ongoing war between Israel and Hamas.
However, he said that many were "definitely antisemitic by their language and actions" and were "explicitly in favor of Hamas."
Campus protests started on April 17 at Columbia University. On Wednesday, New York City Police officers cleared out the encampment and removed protesters from one of Columbia's buildings as well, arresting several hundred people.
Landry said that almost half of the 300 people arrested were not students, calling them "explicitly communist groups who have been handing out Marxist materials against Israel since Oct. 7, when Hamas launched its attacks.
The materials, Landry said, set out to justify the Hamas incursion "out of this neo-Marxist, 'oppressor versus oppressed' ideology that says whatever somebody in the category of 'oppressed' wants to do against a so-called ‘oppressor’ is justified, even killing way more than a thousand innocent people at a party."
He said he is attempting to make Catholic students aware so "at least they're inoculated to that intellectual virus" from "this divide and conquer class warfare that comes from Marx and Lenin."
"[It] is the exact antithesis of what Jesus Christ himself taught," Landry said.
Meanwhile, the priest said he's proud of Catholic students who he said have "stepped up" as peacemakers on the campus, and noted that student Mass attendance has increased.
Landry added that a Catholic student group also sent olive plants as a symbolic gesture to Jewish and Muslim leaders at Columbia to show the "solidarity and peace of Christ,” he said.
"Ware trying to bring the peace we have received from Christ that our world and our campus very much need," he said.
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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