What happened
President Joe Biden offered his first public remarks Thursday on the ongoing college campus protests over Israel’s war in Gaza, striking a balance between safeguarding free speech and deploring unlawful behavior. Biden’s unscheduled remarks followed days of criticism over his relative silence as hundreds of students have been arrested during increasingly fraught, and occasionally violent, confrontations with police and counterdemonstrators.
Who said what
Biden also rejected Republican calls to send in National Guard troops to quell the unrest. Some Democrats had been “frustrated” by Biden’s “reluctance to speak out” and “pressed him to publicly address the campus uprisings,” The New York Times said. Biden has “walked a careful line of denouncing antisemitism while supporting young Americans’ right to protest and trying to limit longer-term political damage,” Reuters said.
What next?
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